Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/493

 MARY E. NEALY. Mart Elizabeth Hare was bom in the city of Louisville, Kentucky, December twelfth, 1825. Her father, Peter Hare, was a mechanic. Her mother, whose maiden name was Margaret Pickering, died while Mary was nine years old. Mary was sent to the public schools of Louisville from the time she was seven years old, until she was eleven. She made unusual proficiency in her studies for one so young, in consideration of which she received the first premium for scholarship during each of the last two years of her attendance at school. She had no further opportunities of prosecuting her studies under the direction of a master; and when her mother died she was left pretty much to pursue her own inclinations. But she had already acquired a thirst for knowledge, that urged her to read whatever promised to allay it. Of course she read much that was useless, but her mind was too pure and powerful to feel the incumbrance of such materials, and derived continual nour- ishment and means of growth from whatever tended toward the True, the Beautiful, the Good. Although her ascent was through the mists and vapors that float around this "dim spot, which men call earth," yet her own clear eye saw, upon their envelop- ing glooms, bright rainbow gleams that told her of sunshine and daylight above the darkness, and sustained her orphaned spirit in its unfriended struggles toward them. Miss Hare was married to Hugh Nealy, December twenty-fifth, 1842, in Har- rison county, Indiana. Her husband continued to reside in that county, where he held several important offices, until the fall of the year 1856, when he removed to Indian- apolis. He has been peculiarly unfortunate ; soon after his removal to his present resi- dence, having been permanently disabled by a railroad accident. This misfortune devolved the entire burthen of supplying the wants of their family upon his wife. With very feeble health, limited acquaintance, and almost no resources at all, save those found "in the innate force of her own soul," she met the new obligations imposed by her husband's misfortunes, with firmness, capacity and energy. Left alone in the world in early childhood, she became "a lonely, isolated, desolate child," and "sought in the land of dreams what she found not" in the real world. She made friends of the old forest trees, the streams, the clouds, the moon and stars, and found in them companions far dearer to her melancholy spirit than among the children of men. Apart from her human associates she often read or dreamed in the glorious evenings and quiet moonlight, until life's rough places to her seemed smooth, and the glorious gates of Paradise but just beyond. Nevertheless, the loneHuess and sorrow of her early years left their hues upon her profoundest being ; face, voice, thought, poetry and life — all are colored but not marred, by the shadows of those mighty specters — Solitude and Sorrow. Nor has her subsequent life been such as to soften these early glooms. But as the light of night's queen is rendered more glori- ous and beautiful when it falls upon us through a gentle vail of silver clouds, so the (477)