mind, to have been well educated and a fine conversationalist,
with a commanding figure, benignant countenance, and dignified
demeanor, so that one said of her, "She seems to have been born for an
empress." Like her husband she was an Episcopalian though, according
to the Memoirs, less strenuously Episcopalian than Mr. Pickard. She
had been reared in a different school. Her father,--Mr. James
Lovell--we are told, was a free-thinker, or as the Memoirs put it,
"had adopted some infidel principles," and "treated religion with
little respect in his family." The "infidels" of that day were
generally good men, only they were not orthodox. Jefferson, Madison,
Franklin and Washington were such infidels. After Channing's day, this
kind of man here in New England was absorbed by the Unitarian
movement, and, as a separate class, disappeared. Mrs. Pickard was bred
in this school and she appears never to have forgotten her home
training. "She was unostentatious and charitable," says an early
friend, "and her whole life was an exhibition of the ascendency of
_principle_ over mere taste and feeling."
Her religious attitude becomes interesting, because in an exceptional
degree, she formed her remarkable daughter,--who was an only child and
until the age of thirteen had no teacher except this forceful and
level-headed mother.
With these antecedents, Mary Lovell Pickard was born in Boston,
October 2, 1798, John Adams being then President. In 1802, Mary having
passed her third summer, Mr. Pickard's business called him to London,
where he resided with his family two years, so that the child's fifth
birthday was duly celebrated in mid-ocean on the homeward voyage. In a
letter of Mrs. Pickard, written during this London residence, she
says, "Mr. Pickard is even more anxious than I to go home. Mary is the
only contented one. She is happy all the time." There is so much that
is sad in this record that, before we have done, the reader will be
glad the little girl had at least a bright and sunny childhood to
remember. It appears she did remember it. It may not be remarkable,
but it is interesting, that the experiences of this early London
life,--between her third and fifth year,--made an indelible
impression upon her, so that twenty years later when she was again in
England, much to her own delight, she "recognized her old London home
and other objects with which she was then familiar."
A lady who was a fellow passenger of the Pickards on their homeward
voyage was struck by the gentle management of the mother and the easy
docility of the child. To say, "It will make me unhappy if you do
that," was an extreme exercise of maternal authority, to which the
child yielded unresisting obedience. This, of course, is told to the
credit of the child, but the merit, probably belongs to the mother.
Doubtless we could all have such children if we were that kind of a
parent. A little tact, unfailing gentleness, and an infinite self
control: with these, it would seem one may smile and kiss a child into
an angel.
On arriving in Boston, Mrs. Pickard took her family to her father's,
where she remained until her death, and where, we read, "with parents
and grandparents, Mary found a home whose blessings filled her heart."
Being an only child, with four elderly persons, Mary was likely to be
too much petted or too much fretted. We are glad to know that she was
not fretted or over-trained. In a letter of retrospect, she writes,
"For many years a word of blame never reached my ears." An early
friend of the family writes, "It has been said that Mary was much
indulged; and I believe it may be said so with truth. But she was not
indulged in idleness, selfishness, and rudeness; she was indulged in
healthful sports, in pleasant excursions, and in companionship with
other children."
Everything went smoothly with her until the age of ten when, rather
earlier than most children, she discovered her conscience: "At ten
years of age I waked up to a sense of the danger of the state of
indulgence in which I was living"; but let us hope the crisis was not
acute. It does not seem to have been. According to the testimony of
her first teacher, she was simply precocious morally, but not at all
morbid. Her school was at Hingham, whither she was sent at the age of
thirteen. The teacher says that with her "devotedness to the highest
objects and purposes of our existence, she was one of the most lively
and playful girls among her companions, and a great favorite with them
all."
There seems to have been really no cloud upon her existence up to this
point,--the age of thirteen. I have had a reason for dwelling upon
this charming period of her childhood, untroubled by a cloud, because
from this date until her death, the hand of God seems to have been
very heavy upon her, afflictions fell upon her like rain, and it
required a brave spirit to carry the burdens appointed for her to
bear. Happily, she had a brave spirit, did not know that her life was
hard, "gloried in tribulation," like St. Paul, and was never more
cheerful or thankful than when she was herself an invalid, with an
invalid husband to be cared for like a baby, seven children to be
clothed and fed, and not enough money at the year's end to square
accounts. Ruskin tells of a servant who had served his mother
faithfully fifty-seven years. "She had," he says, "a natural gift and
specialty for doing disagreeable things; above all, the service of the
sick-room; so that she was never quite in her glory unless some of us
were ill." It will be seen further on that these were only a part of
the accomplishments of Mrs. Ware. It is fortunate if a woman is so
made that her spirits rise as her troubles thicken, but the reader of
the story will be thankful that her life was not all a battle, that
her childhood was more than ordinarily serene and sunny, and that not
for a dozen years at least, did she have to be a heroine in order to
be happy.
Mary had been in Hingham about half a year, enjoying her school-girl
life, when her mother was taken ill, fatally ill as it proved, and the
child, then at the age of thirteen, was called home and installed in
the sick-room as nurse. This was the beginning of sorrow. The mother
lingered through the winter and died in the following May. There
remained of the family, the grandparents, one son of fine talents, but
of unfortunate habits, and her father, "broken in spirits and in
fortune, clinging to his only child with doting and dependent
affection." We can see that it could not have been a cheerful home for
a young girl of thirteen. Some thirty years later, she wrote to one of
her children, "I think I have felt the want all my life of a more
cheerful home in my early childhood, a fuller participation in the
pleasures and 'follies' of youth." I put this reflection here, because
it does not apply to the years preceding the loss of her mother while
it exactly fits the period that now follows.
The year following her mother's death, Mary attended a girls' school
in Boston. A passage from a letter written at this period will show
something of her quality. It is dated February 27, 1813, when she was
fourteen and a few months. Besides, she had been at school, six months
at a time, a total of about one year. She had been mentioning two or
three novels, and then discourses as follows: "Novels are generally
supposed to be improper books for young people, as they take up the
time which ought to be employed in more useful pursuits; which is
certainly very true; but as a recreation to the mind, such books as
these cannot possibly do any hurt, as they are good moral lessons.
Indeed, I think there is scarcely any book from which some good may
not be derived; though it cannot be expected that any young person has
judgment enough to leave all the bad and take only the good, when
there is a great proportion of the former." Perhaps I am wrong in
thinking this an exhibition of remarkable reflection and expression in
a girl well under fifteen, whether she had been at school or
otherwise. Mrs. Ware was always a wonderful letter-writer, though, if
we take her word for it, she had little of her mother's gift as a
conversationalist. It seems to have been a life-long habit to see the
old year out and the new year in, spending the quiet hours in writing
letters to her friends. In one of these anniversary letters, written
when she was fifteen, she says, "I defy anyone to tell from my
appearance that I have not everything to make me happy. I have much
and am happy. My little trials are essential to my happiness." In that
last sentence we have the entire woman. Her trials were always, as she
thought, essential to her happiness.
On this principle, her next twelve years ought to have been very
happy, since they were sufficiently full of tribulation. The two years
following her mother's death, passed in the lonely home in Boston,
were naturally depressing. Besides, she was born for religion, and the
experience through which she had passed had created a great hunger in
her soul. Trinity Church, into which she had been baptized, had not
yet passed through the hands of Phillips Brooks, and its
ministrations, admirable as they are for the ordinary child, were
inadequate for the wants of a thoughtful girl like Mary Pickard. The
final effect was, she says, to throw her more upon herself and to
compel her to seek, "by reading, meditation and prayer, to find that
knowledge and stimulus to virtue which I failed to find in the
ministrations of the Sabbath."
At this critical period, she returned to the school at Hingham, which
she had left two years before, and there, in the Third Church, then
presided over by Rev. Henry Colman, one of the fathers of the
Unitarian heresy, she found peace and satisfaction to her spirit. Ten
years later, she spent a week in Hingham, visiting friends and
reviving, as she says, the memory of the "first awakening of my mind
to high and holy thoughts and resolves." The crisis which, elsewhere,
we read of at the age of ten, was a subordinate affair. This Hingham
experience, at the age of sixteen, was really the moral event in her
history.
As hers was a type of religion,--she would have said "piety",--a blend
of reason and sentiment, peculiar to the Unitarianism of that
generation, hardly to be found in any household of faith to-day, we
must let her disclose her inner consciousness. One Saturday morning,
she writes a long letter to one of her teachers saying that she feels
it a duty and a privilege "to be a member of the Church of Christ,"
but she fears she does not understand what the relation implies, and
says, "Tell me if you should consider it a violation of the sacredness
of the institution, to think I might with impunity be a member of it.
I am well aware of the condemnation denounced on those who _partake_
unworthily." She refers to the Lord's Supper. It is to be hoped that
her teacher knew enough to give the simple explanation of that dark
saying of the apostle about eating unworthily. At all events, she
connected herself with the church, received the communion, and was
very happy. "From the moment I had decided what to do, not a feeling
arose which I could wish to suppress; conscious of pure motives, all
within was calm, and I wondered how I could for a moment hesitate.
They were feelings I never before experienced, and for once I realized
that it is only when we are at peace with ourselves that we can enjoy
true happiness.... I could not sleep, and actually laid awake all
night out of pure happiness."
After a few months, sooner than she expected, she returns to Boston
and sits under the ministrations of Dr. Channing, to her an object of
veneration. She writes that her heart is too full for utterance: "It
will not surprise you that Mr. Channing's sermons are the cause; but
no account that I could give could convey any idea of them. You have
heard some of the same class; they so entirely absorb the feelings as
to render the mind incapable of action, and consequently leave on the
memory at times no distinct impression." I should like to quote all
she says of Channing, both as a revelation of him, and of herself. She
heard him read the psalm, "What shall I render unto God for all his
mercies?" and says, "The ascription of praise which followed was more
truly sublime than anything I ever heard or read." It must have been
an event,--it certainly was for her,--to listen to one of Dr.
Channing's prayers: "It seems often to me, while in the hour of prayer
I give myself up to the thought of heaven, as though I had in reality
left the world, and was enjoying what is promised to the Christian. I
fear, however, these feelings are too often delusive; we substitute
the love of holiness for the actual possession."
There her sanity comes in to check her emotionalism. She is reflecting
upon another experience with Dr. Channing when she comes very near
making a criticism upon him. She tells us that she does not mean him;
he is excepted from these remarks, but she says, "There are few
occasions which will authorize a minister to excite the feelings of an
audience in a very great degree, and none which can make it allowable
for him to rest in mere excitement." To complete the portraiture of
her soul, I will take a passage from a letter written at the age of
twenty-five, when death has at last stripped her of all her family, "I
believe that all events that befall us are exactly such as are best
adapted to improve us; and I find in a perfect confidence in the
wisdom and love which I know directs them, a source of peace which no
other thing can give; and in the difficulty which I find in acting
upon this belief I see a weakness of nature, which those very trials
are designed to assist us in overcoming, and which trial alone can
conquer."
Mary Pickards were not common even in that generation, but this creed
was then common, and this blend of reason and religious feeling,
fearlessly called "piety," was characteristic of Channing, her
teacher, and of Henry Ware, afterward her husband. It was the real
"Channing Unitarianism." Pity there is no more of it.
Mary was sixteen years old,--to be exact, sixteen and a half; the
serene and beautiful faith of Channing had done its perfect work upon
her; and she was now ready for whatever fate, or as she would have
said, Providence, might choose to send. It sent the business failure
of Mr. Pickard, in which not only his own fortune was swept away but
also the estate of Mr. Lovell was involved. Upon the knowledge of this
disaster, Mary wrote a cheerful letter, in which she said: "I should
be sorry to think you consider me so weak as to bend under a change of
fortune to which all are liable." Certainly she will not bend, but she
is obliged to quit school and return to the shattered home.
Before the summer was over, her grandfather, Mr. Lovell, died; whether
the end was hastened by the financial embarrassments in which Mr.
Pickard had involved him, is not said. Mrs. Lovell, the grandmother,
followed her husband in two years,--for Mary, two years of assiduous
nursing and tender care. Perhaps one sentence from a letter at this
time will assist us in picturing her in this exacting service. She
says that she is leading a monotonous existence, that her animal
spirits are not sufficient for both duty and solitude, "And when
evening closes, and my beloved charge is laid peacefully to rest,
excitement ceases, and I am thrown on myself for pleasure."
With the death of the grandmother, the home was broken up, and Mary,
trying to help her father do a little business without capital, went
to New York city as his commercial agent. Her letters to her father
are "almost exclusively business letters," and he on his part gives
her "directions for the sale and purchase, not only of muslins and
moreens, but also of skins, saltpetre, and the like."
Details of this period of her career are not abundant in the Memoirs,
and the death of her father, in 1823, put an end to her business
apprenticeship.
Apparently, she was not entirely destitute. At the time of his
disaster, her father wrote, "As we calculated you would, after some
time, have enough to support yourself, without mental or bodily
exertion." That is, presumably, after the settlement of her
grandfather's estate. As her biographer says, "Every member of her own
family had gone, and she had smoothed the passage of everyone." But
she had many friends, and one is tempted to say, Pity she could not
have settled down in cozy quarters and made herself comfortable.
Indeed she did make a fair start. She joined a couple of friends,
going abroad in search of health, for a visit to England. She had
relatives on the Lovell side, in comfortable circumstances near
London, and an aunt on her father's side, in the north of England, in
straightened circumstances. She resolved to make the acquaintance of
all these relatives.
The party arrived in Liverpool in April, 1824, and for a year and a
half, during which their headquarters were in London, Paris was
visited, Southern England and Wales were explored, and finally the
Lovell relatives were visited and found to have good hearts and open
arms. For these eighteen months, Mary Pickard's friends could have
wished her no more delightful existence. She had tea with Mrs.
Barbauld, heard Irving, then the famous London preacher, and saw other
interesting persons and charming things in England. There is material
for a very interesting chapter upon this delightful experience. It was
followed by a drama of misery and horror, in which she was both
spectator and actor, when young and old died around her as if smitten
by pestilence, and her own vigorous constitution was irreparably
broken.
This episode was vastly more interesting to her than the pleasant
commonplace of travel, and much more in keeping with what seems to
have been her destiny. In the autumn of her second year abroad, she
went to discover her aunt, sister of Mr. Pickard, in Yorkshire. The
writer of the Memoirs says that this visit "forms the most remarkable
and in some respects the most interesting and important chapter of her
life." She found her aunt much better than she expected, nearly
overpowered with joy to see her, living in a little two story cottage
of four rooms, which far exceeded anything she ever saw for neatness.
The village bore the peculiarly English name of Osmotherly, and was
the most primitive place she had ever been in. The inhabitants were
all of one class and that the poorer class of laborers, ignorant as
possible, but simple and sociable. Terrible to relate, smallpox,
typhus fever, and whooping cough were at that moment epidemic in that
village.
It will be impossible to put the situation before us more briefly than
by quoting a passage from one of her letters: "My aunt's two daughters
are married and live in this village; one of them, with three
children, has a husband at the point of death with a fever; his
brother died yesterday of smallpox, and two of her children have the
whooping-cough; added to this, their whole dependence is upon their
own exertions, which are of course entirely stopped now.... You may
suppose, under such a state of things, I shall find enough to do."
The death of the husband, whom of course Miss Pickard nursed through
his illness, is reported in the next letter, which contains also this
characteristic statement, "It seems to me that posts of difficulty are
my appointed lot and my element, for I do feel lighter and happier
when I have difficulties to overcome. Could you look in upon me you
would think it impossible that I could be even tolerably comfortable,
and yet I am cheerful, and get along as easily as possible, and am in
truth happy."
Evidently, all we can do with such a person is to congratulate her
over the most terrible experiences. In a letter five days later, the
baby dies of whooping-cough, and in her arms; a fortnight later, the
mother dies of typhus fever; within another month, two boys, now
orphans, are down with the same fever at once, and one of them dies.
In the space of eight weeks, she saw five persons of one family
buried, and four of them she had nursed. By this time, the aunt was
ill, and Miss Pickard nursed her to convalescence.
This campaign had lasted three months, and she left the scene of
combat with a clear conscience. She was allowed a breathing spell of a
month in which to visit some pleasant friends and recuperate her
strength, when we find her back in Osmotherly again nursing her aunt.
It was the end of December and she was the only servant in the house.
Before this ordeal was over, she was taken ill herself, and had to be
put to bed and nursed. In crossing a room, a cramp took her; she fell
on the floor, lay all night in the cold, calling in vain for
assistance. She did not finally escape from these terrible scenes
until the end of January, five months from the time she entered them.
Miss Pickard returned to Boston after an absence of about two years
and a half, during which time, as one of her friends wrote her, "You
have passed such trying scenes, have so narrowly escaped, and done
more, much more, than almost any body ever did before." She went away
a dear school-girl friend and a valued acquaintance; she was welcomed
home as a martyr fit to be canonized, and was received as a
conquering heroine.
In a letter dated from Gretna Green, where so many run-away lovers
have been made happy, she playfully reflects upon the possibilities of
her visit, if only she had a lover, and concludes that she "must
submit to single blessedness a little longer." Our sympathies would
have been less taxed if she had submitted to single blessedness to the
end. Why could she not now be quiet, let well enough alone, and make
herself comfortable? Destiny had apparently ordered things for her
quite differently. One cannot avoid his destiny, and it was her
destiny to marry, and marriage was to bring her great happiness,
tempered by great sorrows.
The man who was to share her happiness and her sorrows was Rev. Henry
Ware, Jr., then the almost idolized minister of the Second Church, in
Boston. Mr. Ware was the son of another Henry Ware, professor of
theology at Harvard, whose election to the chair of theology in 1806
opened the great Unitarian controversy. Two sons of Professor Ware
entered the ministry, Henry and William, the latter the first
Unitarian minister settled in New York city. Rev. John F. Ware, well
remembered as pastor of Arlington St. Church in Boston, was the son
of Henry, so that for more than half a century, the name of Ware was a
great factor in Unitarian history.
After Dr. Channing, Henry Ware was perhaps the most popular preacher
in any Boston pulpit. One sermon preached by him on a New Year's eve,
upon the Duty of Improvement, became memorable. In spite of a violent
snow storm, the church was filled to overflowing, a delegation coming
from Cambridge. Of this sermon, a hearer said: "No words from mortal
lips ever affected me like those." There was a difference between
Unitarian preaching then and now. That famous sermon closed like this:
"I charge you, as in the presence of God, who sees and will judge
you,--in the name of Jesus Christ, who beseeches you to come to him
and live,--by all your hopes of happiness and life,--I charge you let
not this year die, and leave you impenitent. Do not dare to utter
defiance in its decaying hours. But, in the stillness of its awful
midnight, prostrate yourselves penitently before your Maker; and let
the morning sun rise upon you, thoughtful and serious men." One does
not see how the so-called 'Evangelicals' could have quarreled with
that preaching.
Mr. Ware had been in his parish nine years, his age was thirty-two, he
was in the prime of life, and at the climax of his power and his
popularity. Three years before, he had been left a widower with three
young children, one of whom became Rev. John F. Ware. That these two
intensely religious natures, that of Mary Pickard and that of Henry
Ware, should have been drawn together is not singular. In writing to
his sister, Mr. Ware speaks tenderly of his late wife and says, "I
have sought for the best mother to her children, and the best I have
found." Late in life, one of these children said, "Surely God never
gave a boy such a mother or a man such a friend."