This principle was now to be put to a severe test, the severest, perhaps, of her whole life. We have seen what she did, and what she suffered, in her former visit abroad. Totally different were the circumstances now, but none of them such as to make the trial less. Then she had been alone as a traveller, and also alone as to all exposure and peril. Now she was to feel and fear for the one most dear to her in life, one who was ill able to bear the fatigues and discomforts to which he must be subjected, and whom neither his own faith nor her serenity could keep from depression and discouragement. Through the whole period of their absence, which proved to be a year and a half, Mr. Ware could not be said to be well for a single day. Much of the time, he yielded to dejection and apprehension, as she had never known him before. He enjoyed much, but suffered more. Not bodily suffering wholly, or chiefly; but that which is much harder to bear,--the hardest of all,--a sense of helplessness and the increasing fear of uselessness; the conviction, in the very prime of life, that life's work must be left undone, a calling which he dearly loved be relinquished, and he either remain abroad a wanderer in search of health, or return home with only the capacity of projecting numerous plans and labors, not one of which would be ever accomplished. All this his wife shared, at least in its effect; against all this she had constantly to contend, bearing most of the responsibility of measures and results, her own health not strong, and soon subjected to peculiar and most anxious trials. We have no desire to magnify these trials. We only wish to set them in their true light, as making an unusual--not an unprecedented, but an unusual--demand upon the trust, endurance, and energy of a wife and mother. She herself has been heard to say, that this was the most trying period of her life; that no other experience equalled it. Yet this would hardly be inferred from her letters at the time. They were necessarily few, but written with her usual cheerfulness and unfailing hopefulness. Not all of them, however. One or two we have seen, such as cannot be used, that intimate, rather than express, peculiar suffering and solicitude. But this was in confidence, and for counsel; it being one of the peculiarities of the case that it presented many points where it was very difficult to decide whether wisdom and duty should carry them farther on, or turn them instantly back,--and the decision was with her.