The mother of Henry Ward died when he was three years old; his father was immersed in theological investigations and a wide sphere of pastoral labors and great general ecclesiastical interests, his grown-up brothers and sisters in their own separate life history, and the three younger children were therefore left to their mortal pilgrimage, within certain well-defined moral limits, much after their own way. The step-mother, who took the station of mother, was a lady of great personal elegance and attractiveness, of high intellectual and moral culture, who from having been in early life the much admired belle in general society, came at last from an impulse of moral heroism combined with personal attachment, to undertake the austere labors of a poor minister's family. She was a person to make a deep impression on the minds of any children. There was a moral force about her, a dignity of demeanor, an air of elegance and superior breeding, which produced a constant atmosphere of unconscious awe in the minds of little ones. Then her duties were onerous, her conscience inflexible, and under the weight of these her stock of health and animal spirits sunk, so that she was for the most part pensive and depressed. Her nature and habits were too refined and exacting for the bringing up of children of great animal force and vigor, under the strain and pressure of straitened circumstances. The absurdities and crudenesses incident to the early days of such children appeared to her as serious faults, and weighed heavily on her conscience. The most intense positive religious and moral influence the three little ones of the family received was on Sunday night, when it was her custom to take them to her bed-room and read and talk and pray with them. At these times, deep though vague religious yearnings were created; but as she was much of her time an invalid, and had little sympathy with the ordinary feelings of childhood, she gave an impression of religion as being like herself, calm, solemn, inflexible, mysteriously sad and rigorously exacting.