● ● ● violently impatient with her, would go up to her, put her arms around her lovingly, and say that she was sorry.35
No reservations clouded the love of Myra’s little sister, who helped with the housework twice a week. In later years she wrote of Mrs. Patterson, “I thought her a lovely Lady almost an Angel and have always cherished her as a dear friend in memory.”36
Myra commented on the fact that her mistress spent much of her time reading, especially the Bible. Although there was a small library in Groton, she seems to have been shut off from the great books that were pouring out: Emerson’s essays, Walden, Leaves of Grass, Barchester Towers, Madame Bovary, Mill’s Essay on Liberty, Browning’s Men and Women, and a rich profusion of others which might have watered the thirsty desert of her days.37 When, in her seventies, she read a book of selections from Carlyle, she wrote opposite his name the wondering exclamation, “O immortal,” and one cannot help thinking what it would have meant to her in the Groton days to hear the thunder-tone of his Everlasting Yea . . . or the clear, peaceful fluting of an Emerson.38
In the pattern of her whole life this can be seen to have been a necessary deprivation. Denied the cultural solace which might have made the desert tolerable, she was driven to ask the one question which none of these others had asked.
When Susan B. Anthony, doughty fighter for women’s rights, retired for a brief season of rest to Seth Rogers Hydropathic Institute in 1855, she read Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, George Sand’s Consuelo, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens, and Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, making notes in her diary of passages she particularly liked, and all these books enriched and energized her ● ● ●
35 [Elmira Smith Wilson, “My recollection of Mary Baker Eddy – then Mrs. Dr. Patterson, in the late ’50s and 1860–1,” 7 November 1911, Reminiscence, pp. 6–7, MBEL.]
36 Marcia A. Wilson Swett, 29 December 1906, Reminiscence, MBEL.
37 Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” might stand as the strenuous moral comment of the age on a wilderness which T. S. Eliot’s century would see as a universal wasteland. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, vol. 5, Men and Women, ed. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 139–150.
38 [ Jeanne G. Pennington, comp., Philosophic Nuggets: Carlyle, Amiel, Ruskin, Charles Kingsley (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1899), p. 1, B00261, MBEL.]