● ● ● in men, seeing that they are [or, in their error they are] but flesh.”105 Here was the very language of Science.
On at least one occasion Miss Bagley took her to visit Whittier. The poet had been exceptionally ill the preceding winter, writing a friend afterwards that even when near death he “was favored with a vivid sense of the goodness of God, and felt no anxiety nor fear.” He was again showing signs of illness at the time Mrs. Glover visited him. Although the day seemed warm to the visitors, they found him in a closed room huddled over the fire, with a hectic flush and coughing continually.
He was much besieged by women visitors that summer—a neighbor, who was told of two ladies in the parlor waiting for him, exclaimed, “What! more of them!”—and was in little mood for company.106 When Mrs. Glover remarked that the atmosphere outside seemed better than inside, he replied irritably, “If Jesus Christ was in Amesbury he would have to have brass lined lungs to live here.”107
But as she shared with him some of her ideas, so congenial to his own half-held faith in divine healing, his face changed and, in her own words, “the sunshine of his former character beamed through the cloud.” When she rose to go he went to her with both hands extended and said, “I thank you, Mary for your call, it has done me much good.” A neighbor noted that following the visit he seemed completely recovered.108
In an 1868 poem entitled “The Meeting,” Whittier wrote:
Still struggles in the Age’s breast
With deepening agony of quest ● ● ●
105 [Eddy, Science and Health, p. 320 (bracketed text Smith’s). Cf. William Smith, A Dictionary of the Bible, Comprising Its Antiquities, Biography, Geography, and Natural History (Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton, 1867), p. 637, B00290, MBEL.]
106 Samuel T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), vol. 2, p. 535.
107 Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, n.d., A11063, MBEL.
108 [Mary Baker Eddy, manuscript, n.d., A11063, MBEL.] When a cousin of Whittier’s, Mrs. Gertrude Behr, investigated this incident years later she found a neighbor who recalled it clearly. See Robert Peel, Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), p. 53n5.