Birth and Childhood of Elizabeth Payson. Early Traits. Devotion to her
Father. His Influence upon her. Letters to her Sister. Removal to New
York. Reminiscences of the Payson Family.
Elizabeth Payson was born "about three o'clock"—so her father records it—on Tuesday afternoon, October 26, 1818. She was the fifth of eight children, two of whom died in infancy. All good influences seem to have encircled her natal hour. In a letter to his mother, dated October 27, Dr Payson enumerates six special mercies, by which the happy event had been crowned. One of them was the gratification of the mother's "wish for a daughter rather than a son." Another was God's goodness to him in sparing both the mother and the child in spite of his fear that he should lose them. This fear, strangely enough, was occasioned by the unusual religious peace and comfort which he had been enjoying. He had a presentiment that in this way God was forearming him for some extraordinary trial; and the loss of his wife seemed to him most likely to be that trial. "God has been so gracious to me in spiritual things, that I thought He was preparing me for Louisa's death. Indeed it may be so still, and if so His will be done. Let Him take all—and if He leaves us Himself we still have all and abound." The next day he writes:
Still God is kind to us. Louisa and the babe continue as well as we could desire. Truly, my cup runs over with blessings. I can still scarcely help thinking that God is preparing me for some severe trial; but if He will grant me His presence as He does now, no trial can seem severe. Oh, could I now drop the body, I would stand and cry to all eternity without being weary: God is holy, God is just, God is good; God is wise and faithful and true. Either of His perfections alone is sufficient to furnish matter for an eternal, unwearied song. Could I sing upon paper I should break forth into singing, for day and night I can do nothing but sing "Let the saints be joyful," etc., etc. But I must close. I can not send so much love and thankfulness to my parents as they deserve. My present happiness, all my happiness I ascribe under God to them and their prayers.
Surely, a home inspired and ruled by such a spirit was a sweet home to be born into!
The notices of Elizabeth's childhood depict her as a dark-eyed, delicate little creature, of sylph-like form, reserved and shy in the presence of strangers, of a sweet disposition, and very intense in her sympathies. "Until I was three years old mother says I was a little angel," she once wrote to a friend. Her constitution was feeble, and she inherited from her father his high-strung nervous temperament. "I never knew what it was to feel well," she wrote in 1840. Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy. She had an eye wide open to the world about her, and quick to catch its varying aspects of light and beauty, whether on land or sea. The ships and wharves not far from her father's house, the observatory and fort on the hill overlooking Casco Bay, the White Mountains far away in the distance, Deering's oaks, the rope-walk, and the ancient burying-ground—these and other familiar objects of "the dear old town," commemorated by Longfellow in his poem entitled "My Lost Youth," were indelibly fixed in her memory and followed her wherever she went, to the end of her days. In her movements she was light-footed, venturesome to rashness, and at times wild with fun and frolic. Her whole being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a diamond. Whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and did as for her life. Allusion has been made to the intensity of her sympathies. The sight or tale of suffering would set her in a tremor of excitement; and in her eagerness to give relief she seemed ready for any sacrifice, however great. This trait arrested the observant eye of her father, and he expressed to Mrs. Payson his fear lest it might some day prove a real misfortune to the child. "She will be in danger of marrying a blind man, or a helpless cripple, out of pure sympathy," he once said.
But by far the strongest of all the impressions of her childhood related to her father. His presence was to her the happiest spot on earth, and any special expression of his affection would throw her into an ecstasy of delight. When he was away she pined for his return. "The children all send a great deal of love, and Elizabeth says, Do tell Papa to come home," wrote her mother to him, when she was six years old. Her recollections of her father were singularly vivid. She could describe minutely his domestic habits, how he looked and talked as he sat by the fireside or at the table, his delight in and skillful use of carpenters' tools, his ingenious devices for amusing her and diverting his own weariness as he lay sick in bed, e.g., tearing up sheets of white paper into tiny bits, and then letting her pour them out of the window to "make believe it snowed," or counting all the bristles in a clothes-brush, and then as she came in from school, holding it up and bidding her guess their number—his coolness and efficiency in the wild excitements of a conflagration, the calm deliberation with which he walked past the horror-stricken lookers on and cut the rope by which a suicide was suspended; these and other incidents she would recall a third of a century after his death, as if she had just heard of or just witnessed them. To her child's imagination his memory seemed to be invested with the triple halo of father, hero, and saint. A little picture of him was always near her. She never mentioned his name without tender affection and reverence. Nor is this at all strange. She was almost nine years old when he died; and his influence, during these years, penetrated to her inmost being. She once said that of her father's virtues one only—punctuality—had descended to her. But here she was surely wrong. Not only did she owe to him some of the most striking peculiarities of her physical and mental constitution, but her piety itself, if not inherited, was largely inspired and shaped by his. In the whole tone and expression of her earlier religious life, at least, one sees him clearly reflected. His devotional habits, in particular, left upon her an indelible impression. Once, when four or five years old, rushing by mistake into his room, she found him prostrate upon his face—completely lost in prayer. A short time before her death, speaking of this scene to a friend, she remarked that the remembrance of it had influenced her ever since. What somebody said of Sara Coleridge might indeed have been said with no less truth of Elizabeth Payson: "Her father had looked down into her eyes and left in them the light of his own."
The only records of her childhood from her own pen consist of the following letters, written to her sister, while the latter was passing a year in Boston. She was then nine years old.
PORTLAND, May 18, 1828.
My dear sister:—I thank you for writing to such a little girl as I am, when you have so little time. I was going to study a little catechism which Miss Martin has got, but she said I could not learn it. I want to learn it. I do not like to stay so long at school. We have to write composition by dictation, as Miss Martin calls it. She reads to us out of a book a sentence at a time. We write it and then we write it again on our slates, because we do not always get the whole; then we write it on a piece of paper. Miss Martin says I may say my Sunday-school [lesson] there. Mr. Mitchell has had a great many new books. I have been sick. Doctor Cummings has been here and says E. is better and he thinks he will not have a fever…. G. goes to school to Miss Libby, and H. goes to Master Jackson. H. sends his love. Good-bye.
Your affectionate sister, E. PAYSON,