Such are our feelings in regard to the subject of the following Memoir, and such our reasons for offering it to the public. It has not been without scruple, and after an interval of years, that the family and nearest friends of Mrs. Ware have consented to the publication of facts and thoughts so private and sacred as many which must appear in a faithful transcript of her life. Perhaps this reluctance always exists, particularly in regard to a woman and a mother. In this instance it has been very strong, and it is but just that it be made known. Never was there a woman, we may believe, more retiring or peculiarly domestic than she of whom we are to speak. Never, we are sure, were the materials of a life more entirely private, and in one sense confidential, than those which we are to use; for letters are all the materials we have, and letters written in the unrestrained freedom of personal friendship, in the midst of pressing cares, and with a rapidity and unstudied naturalness, which will appear in all the extracts, but are still more manifest in the entire originals. Her correspondence was voluminous, to an extent unsurpassed perhaps in a life so quiet, with no pretence to literary character, and nothing ever written except for the eye of the receiver. How would the writer have felt, had she supposed these letters were ever to be opened to the public eye? It is a question which many ask,--some with pain, some with decided disapproval. It is a question which we have asked ourselves, and we prefer to answer it before we enter upon the work.
To answer it unfavorably, to yield to this natural reluctance to publish any thing designed to be private, and in its nature personal, would deprive us of the best biographies that are written. It would restrict to single families, and to a brief period, the knowledge of facts and features, of all most reliable, most valuable. Indeed, it is this very fact of humility and reserve, of freedom and naturalness, indulged in confidential communion and the quiet of home, that reveals most the reality of virtue, force of character, disinterested nobleness, and the power of religion. Who is willing that the knowledge of such examples should be withheld from the many who crave it, and whom it would stimulate and bless? Shall we make no sacrifice of our own feelings, supposing it to require one, shall we hoard exclusively for our own use the richest of God's gifts, when those by whom the gifts have come to us spent their lives in service and sacrifice for us? To these obvious considerations, we will add our firm faith in the knowledge which departed friends have of the motives from which we are acting, and of the influence which their own modest virtues and lowly efforts on earth may exert upon those remaining here; thus continuing, in a higher and surer way, the very work for which the loved and the pure always live, and are willing to die.