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
In the summer of 1821 Mary went with her father to live in Dorchester.
And the change from town to country, and from a life of business and
care to the free and still enjoyment of nature, seems to have had both a
favorable and unfavorable effect upon her mind. Unfavorable in part, if
we may trust her own account of herself. In this account, however, there
is a nearer approach to morbidness than we have before seen, and a kind
of self-disparagement, which must have been sincere at the time, but
was not, we think, a part of her essential character. Humble she was
always; truly, deeply humble; yet no one knew better than she, or acted
more upon the truth, that genuine humility says very little about
itself. And the expressions of it which appear in the letters that
follow were made, we are to remember, to a confiding friend, to whom she
declared all that she felt, though it were but the feeling of the
moment, and the next moment recalled. She says herself, in this
connection,--"I believe I have given an extravagant detail of my danger;
and I may be under the influence of one of those fits of distempered
mind, to which I have always been prone." If this were so, it shows the
more what efforts she made, and how completely she brought every such
disposition under the sway of principle, so that few who knew her ever
suspected, we imagine, that any effort was necessary.
But we are ourselves overstating, it may be, the disposition to which we
refer. Wherever it appears, as here, it is connected with such just and
exalted sentiments, that it seems incidental and unimportant.
"_Dorchester, June 18, 1821._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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