Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/162

124 to the beauty of nature. Her sublime faith in God is a constant and pervading influence in all her writing, whether verse or prose.

Outwardly calm and decorous, Mrs. Patterson’s interior life was far from tranquil. She had come to Lynn from a period of philosophic abstraction, had come to fulfil her obligations as a wife and this task, as has been shown, was by no means a light or simple one. But difficult, almost desperate as it was, and doomed to failure in the end, it was not the greatest or most important problem of her existence. In meeting the demands of such a task she found the ordinary exercise of long trained domestic and social faculties available. In writing verse and news-letters she exercised developed mental powers. Her news-letters to the Lynn Reporter from Swampscott, the suburb in which she lived, were bright, gossipy communications in which she mentions affairs of the church, the schools, the construction of new and beautiful homes, with descriptions of the laying out of estates in agreeable schemes of landscape gardening. They indicate that she was a special writer of ability with a style peculiar to herself which characterized all her later writings. They betray a vivacity, color, fancy that give a sense of a living, glowing, radiant personality to whom life is always a wonderful revelation.

But underneath all assumption of gaiety and social charm, underneath the outward calm and sweetness of wifely devotion, there was a desolating war going on in the heart of this woman. It betrayed itself only occasionally and in half light to those who