It may be repeated that in all this matter—and it is but a skimming of the mass—one may readily discern a distinct and striking personality; not a wraith-like, formless, evanescent shadow, but a personality that can be clearly visualized. One can easily imagine Patience Worth to be a woman of the Puritan period, with, however, none of the severe and gloomy beliefs of the Puritan—a woman of a past age stepped out of an old picture and leaving behind her the material artificialities of paint and canvas. From her speech and her writings one may conceive her to be a woman of Northern England, possibly: for she uses a number of ancient words that are found to have been peculiar to the Scottish border; a country woman, perhaps, for in all of her communications there are only two or three references to the city, although her knowledge and love of the drama may be a point against this assumption; a woman who had read much in an age when books were scarce, and women who could read rarer still: for although she frequently expresses disdain of book learning, she betrays a large accumulation of such learning, and a copious vocabulary, as well as a degree of skill in its use, that could only have been acquired from much study of books. “I have bought beads from a pack,” she says, “but ne’er yet have I found a peddler of words.”
And then, after we have mentally materialized this woman, and given her a habitation and a time, Patience speaks again, and all has vanished. “Not so,” she said to one who questioned her, “I be abirthed awhither and abide me where.” And again she likened herself to the wind. “I be like the wind,” she said, “who leaveth not track, but ever ’bout, and yet like to the rain who groweth grain for thee to reap.” At other times she has indicated that she has never had a physical existence. I have quoted her saying: “I do plod a twist o’ a path and it hath run from then till now.” At a later time she was asked what she meant by that. She answered:
“Didst e’er to crack a stone, and lo, a worm aharded? (a fossil). ’Tis so, for list ye, I speak like ye since time began.”
It is thus she reveals herself clearly to the mind, but when one attempts to approach too closely, to lay a hand upon her, as it were, she invariably recedes into the unfathomable deeps of mysticism.
THE POETRY
Am I a broken lyre,
Who, at the Master’s touch,
Respondeth with a tinkle and a whir?
Or am I strung in full