Daily am I in expectation of beholding with the eye of sense, the spirit that now lingers on the threshold of this terrestrial life, and only awaits the bidding of the Reaper within, to usher itself into the presence of mortals. It standeth at the door and waiteth for admission to the exterior scene of things.... Let the time come. Two little ones in advance await its coming; and greetings of joy shall herald its approach.
The birth of Elizabeth is followed by this entry in his journal:
At sunset this day a daughter was born to us.
One of the most trying of the Alcott family's experiences came after the birth of Elizabeth, when Bronson Alcott, again in Boston, aroused a storm of protest with his radical teachings and his advanced interpretations of the Bible. Shocked that the city where he expected to find sympathy and encouragement should have repudiated him, his school disrupted and abject poverty his lot, broken mentally and physically, he met with another cruel disappointment in the death of his infant son. Yet even then there was no word of bitterness, and no mention is made in his journal of the father's grief. Indirectly it is expressed in a subsequent entry announcing the birth of the fourth daughter, Abba May.
She was born under sunny skies. The storm had passed, and the Alcott family had removed to Concord, where they enjoyed many of their happiest years. A presage of May Alcott's artistic gifts, her queenly bearing, elegance, and charm, all familiar to readers of "Little Women," is found in this entry in the father's journal:
July, 1840.
A new life has arrived to us (July 26th). She was born with the dawn, and is a proud little Queen, not deigning to give us the light of her royal presence, but persists in sleeping all the time, without notice of the broad world or ourselves. Providence, it seems, decrees that we shall provide selectest ministries alone, and so sends us successive daughters of Love to quicken the Sons of Life. We joyfully acquiesce in the Divine behest and are content to rear women for the future world. As yet the ministry is unknown in the culture of the nations, but the hour draws near when love shall be felt as a chosen Bride of Wisdom, and the celestial pair preside over all the household of mankind.
Bronson Alcott did not feel his responsibility as a father alone; he appreciated his own debt to his children, the mental and spiritual help that came to him through them, an appreciation that found expression in this poem, entered in his journal before the birth of Elizabeth:
June, 1835