The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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‘ [62] Friend, named Mary Ellis.’ He had been for several years acquainted with her, but now he ‘found his heart secretly drawn and inclining towards her.’ ‘At length,’ he tells us, ‘as I was sitting all alone, waiting upon the Lord for counsel and guidance in this, in itself and to me, important affair, I felt a word sweetly arise in me, as if I had heard a Voice which said, Go, and prevail! and faith springing in my heart at the word, I immediately rose and went, nothing doubting.’ On arriving at her residence, he states that he ‘solemnly opened his mind to her, which was a great surprisal to her, for she had taken in an apprehension, as others had also done,’ that his eye had been fixed elsewhere and nearer home. ‘I used not many words to her,’ he continues, ‘but I felt a Divine Power went along with the words, and fixed the matter expressed by them so fast in her breast, that, as she afterwards acknowledged to me, she could not shut it out.’

‘I continued,’ he says, ‘my visits to my bestbeloved Friend until we married, which was on the 28th day of the eighth month, 1669. We took each other in a select meeting of the ancient and grave Friends of that country. A very solemn meeting it was, and in a weighty frame of spirit we were.’ His wife seems to have had some estate; and Ellwood, with that nice sense of justice which marked all his actions, immediately made his will, securing to her, in case of his decease, all her own goods and moneys, as well as all that he had himself acquired before marriage. ‘Which,’ he tells, ‘was indeed but little, yet, by all that little, more ’