was ever blessed with an affectionate and loving wife, I am that man; and if ever children had a watchful, assiduous, devoted mother, mine have. I tell Helen that the only fear I have is, that her attachment for me is carried to an undue extent. She always feels my absence so keenly that I never leave home without great reluctance, though she never wishes me to forego the discharge of any duty to please her. May I ever prove worthy of one so confiding, faithful, and loving!Most anxious hours my mother certainly passed in these absences, if one considers only her responsibility for the health of a large family. But her husband's health also caused solicitude, and when he left her, in stormy times, to attend the anniversaries in New York, with the certainty of violent disturbance from the mob, her forebodings were natural and most poignant. They often arose over the daily delays in my father's arriving home from the printing-office, he being exposed even in Boston to personal attack, and in frequent receipt of menaces through the mails. My mother's paralysis devolved the care of her—and it was a very great care at night—upon her husband and only daughter, who repaid to the full all the tenderness and affection she had lavished upon them. For an extremely active person reduced to sudden dependence, she bore her fate with singular fortitude. ‘If I needed to learn a lesson of patience and resignation, the example of your invalid mother would be most instructive,’ wrote my father to his absent son, in 1874. ‘How closely in2 her waking hours, during the long period of eleven years, has she been confined to her chair at the window, without ’
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circumstances might have afforded at a period when, to be sure, the higher education was withheld from women, she all the more was ambitious for her children.
She encouraged and stimulated us in our studies, and, according to our respective love of them, would have had us advance as long and as far as her self-sacrifice could maintain us.
‘If any man,’ wrote my father to Elizabeth Pease in 1846,1
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