Frances Mary Buss and her work for educationRidley, Annie E.
History
Frances Mary Buss and her work for education
Ridley, Annie E.
Buss, Frances Mary, 1827-1894
“How many lives will be impoverished now! She was so true and
great-hearted. Wasn’t it wonderful how she remembered the
details of so many lives? She never treated us collectively. My
life would have been so different but for the time spent with
her. She prepared many for a sharp wrestle with life’s
difficulties. And how she remembered one’s home people too!
“Such a wave of sadness comes over me as I think of her; and
yet, what a life hers was to rejoice over! So full and generous.
Hers was such a rich loving nature. Surely many, thinking of
what she has done, may indeed ‘take heart again!’ If I felt
less, I might be able to say more.”
We could go on adding witness after witness in those who have thus loved
her. One thing only is more wonderful than this general love, and that
is the power of loving to which it all came as response. It is by
putting together the impressions of complete satisfaction given to each
of these many varying needs, that we finally reach some adequate
estimate of this grand personality. Each person in any relation to her,
had a special and real place in her regard, just as each child has its
own place in its mother’s heart—a place of its very own. In this wide
heart there was room for all, and each distinct and distinctly separate.
There was here no mere jumble of meaningless amiability. The loves and
the likings were quite definite. And possibly the dislikings also; but
of these no one heard very much. Of hate and scorn there was none for
anything but evil itself. Her practice, like her teaching, was “to be
merciless to the sin, but very tender to the sinner.”
Almost more telling, in their intensity of regret, than even these
thanksgivings for the joy of such a friendship, are the thoughts of one
who was “glad just to claim a place among the old pupils” in the crowded
church on that sad New Year’s Eve, when every heart in the vast assembly
beat in unison in the same love and sorrow. During life there seemed
always a vitalizing principle in the influence of the leader thus
mourned; and who may measure the latent forces set free in this great
wave of feeling?—forces that might help to bring about the hope of these
first words—
“As for the public loss, that is greater than we can understand,
because we shall never know how much she has done for women till
we know how much women will be able to do in the future. But she
helped more than women by what she did. She raised the whole
standard of life in raising the standard of women’s education.”
And then, in the light of this flash of insight into the greatness of
the work, comes a sense of personal loss, in a lament which seems to
bear with it the echo of all the sighs of all the women of past ages,
who desired and aspired, but yet strove in vain, to break the chains of
ignorance that held them bound—chains broken at length by this strong
hand!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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