To a person organized as was Mrs. Pierce, public observation was extremely painful, and she shrank from it always, preferring the quiet of her New England home to the glare and glitter of fashionable life in Washington. A friend has said of her: “How well she filled her station as wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend, those only can tell who knew her in these private relations. In this quiet sphere she found her joy, and here her gentle but powerful influence was deeply and constantly felt, through wise counsels and delicate suggestions, the purest, finest tastes and a devoted life.” “She was not only ministered to, but ever ministering,” and there is so much of the spiritual in her life that from Bulwer we gather a refrain most applicable to her. “The cast of her beauty was so dream-like and yet so ranging; her temper was so little mingled with the common characteristics of women; it had so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence of all jealousy and all anger; it was so made up of tenderness and devotion, and yet so imaginative and fairy-like in its fondness, that it was difficult to bear only the sentiments of earth for one who had so little of earth’s clay.” In 1838, Mr. Pierce removed from Hillsborough to Concord, where he afterward continued to reside. Four years later, he resigned his seat in the Senate to practise law, and thereby make provisions for the future. A bereavement, the second of its kind, occurred two years later in the loss of his second son, Frank Robert. When President Polk tendered Mr. Pierce the position of Attorney-General, it was the illness of his wife which drew from him his reply declining it. He says: “Although the early years of my manhood were devoted to public life, it was never really suited to my taste. I longed, as I am sure you must often have done, for the quiet and independence that belong only to the private citizen, and now, at forty, I feel that desire stronger than ever. “Coming so unexpectedly as this offer does, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to arrange the business of an extensive practice, between this and the first of November, in a manner at all satisfactory to myself, or to those who have committed their interests to my care, and who rely on my services. Besides, you know that Mrs. Pierce’s health, while at Washington, was very delicate. It is, I fear, even more so now; and the responsibilities which the proposed change would necessarily impose upon her, ought, probably, in themselves to constitute an insurmountable objection to leaving our quiet home for a public station at Washington.” Mrs. Pierce was not called upon to leave her pleasant home, and for another year she passed her time in tranquil happiness, little dreaming that her country would so soon demand the sacrifice of him who thought not of public honors when she was concerned.