"But why indulge myself in this strain? I find I cannot write, or even think, connectedly; so I will stop.
Language so strong as this, from a nature so calm as Mary Ware's, means a great deal. Nor can we marvel. For what a change is that through which a true woman passes,--from wife to widow! Is it not greater than even the first change? Often has Mary referred to the difference, which few could feel as she had, between her former isolation as to natural ties, and her adoption into a large and united family circle. But _now_ she felt the change through which she was passing still more,--inasmuch as she had a more profound and pervading sense of all that is comprised in conjugal affections and parental responsibilities. And while none can have a higher standard of duty and obligation, very few have a meeker estimate of their own powers; particularly as regards the care and the training of Children. This was to be now her great work,--the chief object and anxiety of her remaining days. And unfeignedly did she shrink, not from the task, but from the vastness of the trust and the burden to be sustained _alone_. "When I think of this large family of little children to be left to my care, instead of _his_, it requires a process of thought to feel so assured that God can bring good out of seeming evil, and work out his purposes by the weakest instruments, as to be able to calm the throbs of anxiety, and say, 'Peace, be still!' to the troubled spirit." True, her ideal was high, and she could never be satisfied with that which would more than satisfy many parents. Years before had she said of one of her children: "For her intellectual progress I have no anxiety, that is, so far as the acquisition of knowledge goes; but how to cultivate the moral, so that it shall govern and guide this intellectual progress into the right channels, and establish the supremacy of the _spiritual_ in the character, I know not." Again, she exclaims: "And these are Mary Pickard's children! When I go back in recollection to Pearl Street days, to its long hours of lone watching, when my mind dwelt upon the deficiencies of my condition until it had exaggerated to a more than earthly possibility the happiness of having something to love which would satisfy the desires of my mind and heart,--and then compare that longing with the present reality,--is it strange that I can scarcely realize my identity with that same lone one?" The time had now come when she was again a "lone one." And this is what we would say,--that the loneliness which _follows_, is far greater than that which precedes, the knowledge and enjoyment of such communion and coöperation as she had known. Nor is there any thing inexplicable in the fact, that the most conscientious, even the strongest in character and highest in aim, suffer most from a sense of their own deficiencies, and use language which seems to many exaggerated and hardly sincere. "I am so perpetually oppressed," writes Mary at this time, "with the sense of nothingness, it is so very difficult for me to realize that I am to be regarded even by my children as the leader in any matter, that it all but frightens me to have any one look to me as one who is expected to have some influence. This is no mock humility; I think as well of myself as I deserve. I am aware that it grows in some measure out of the newness of my position, and know that time and habit may bring somewhat different feelings; but it is only these which _can_ do it, and I must suffer for a long time yet from this as well as from the other effects of isolation."