Memoir of Mary L. Ware, Wife of Henry Ware, Jr.Hall, Edward B. (Edward Brooks)
Religion
Memoir of Mary L. Ware, Wife of Henry Ware, Jr.
Hall, Edward B. (Edward Brooks)
Unitarians -- United States -- Biography; Ware, Mary L. (Mary Lovell), 1798-1849
undergraduate who was friendless and penniless." There are others, and
many, who could tell much more; and whose recollections of her delicate
sympathy, generous aid, and unpretending goodness, will hardly suffer
them to speak of her, but with silent tears. They felt her _moral_
power; and all the more, because she seemed utterly unconscious of it.
"Never have I been with her," writes one, who says he had but a common
acquaintance, "no matter how short the time or slight the occasion,
without the feeling of greater elevation of soul. I never knew one of
whom this were truer. Virtue came out of her." And he only adds, of one
connected with him, "Even now the thought of Mrs. Ware moves her more
than the presence of any living friend."
While writing these passages, we have received the testimony of another
of those students, more extended, but too pertinent and valuable to be
abridged.
"The members of the Theological School were always sure of her
sympathy. They went to her as they would to an elder sister.
There was something peculiarly engaging and attractive about
her, which we all felt, but could not well understand. Yet she
did not encourage, as some kind-hearted women do, the morbid
sensibilities of young men, which, even while apparently
depreciating their own powers, almost always have their origin
in an exaggerated egotism or some masked form of selfishness.
Mrs. Ware's peculiar excellence was, that, without encouraging
such a state of mind and without repelling those who had
cherished it, she, by the healthiness of her own mind and the
cheerful disinterestedness of her character, dissolved the
gloomy spell, and sent away her visitors with new hope and
life. It was the atmosphere in which she lived, more than any
particular words or acts, that made her presence in Cambridge
so attractive, and so beneficent to the young at that period of
life when they are likely to be in a morbid condition. To go
from our rooms to her house, when we had got discouraged or
worn down, was like going into a different climate. And we
went back, like invalids who have been spending a winter at the
South, with new vitality in our veins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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