● ● ●  life purpose. But Mrs. Patterson had a different task—and a different necessity.

Instead of the notebooks into which she had once copied passages from Milton and Pope and Wordsworth, she now had a scrapbook into which she pasted an astounding miscellany of items—hardly solid nourishment, but bits and scraps gathered for the most part from the newspapers of the day.

One might find a recipe for potato yeast or a cure for hydrophobia next to a minor poem by Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant, or Poe. A phrenological description of Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney shared honors with “A Mother’s Evening Thoughts” by that lady. Columns of moral maxims entitled “Gems of Truth” and “Dewdrops of Wisdom” yielded such thoughts as, “Philosophy, like medicine, has abundance of drugs, few good remedies, and scarcely any specifics.” There were clippings on “Russia, her Extent and Resources” and on a successful new “vegetable anaesthetic.” Above all, there were masses of graveyard poems, moralistic tear-jerkers on the evils of gambling and drinking, sentimental poems on home and motherhood—the sort of thing with which the midcentury newspapers were filled. There were even one or two indifferent translations of poems by Goethe and Schiller and, for good measure, “Hints to Young Men” by Henry Ward Beecher.³⁹

This was thin fare for an eager mind, not unlike the bare subsistence diet she endured in her efforts to fight the torments of dyspepsia. She extracted from this reading what nourishment she could, pondering and marking many of the “Dewdrops” and “Gems.” An intense and pure gaze, a gaze not merely of the intellect but of the whole man, can find even in a platitude values that elude the casual or scornful glance. Mrs. Patterson related these fugitive pieces to her own experience, and phrases from them turned up in her later writings loaded with new significance. But it seems clear that the secret springs nourishing her during this period lay deeper than the level of her scrapbook.

One of the aphorisms she marked referred to the Bible as “the learned man’s Masterpiece . . . the ignorant man’s Dictionary . . . the wise man’s Directory.”⁴⁰ The epithets crept into her own writing later; but, far  ● ● ●