A few pages farther on in the diary appears this poem: 

  “Esther

  “Living, the hearts of all around
    Sought hers as slaves a throne;
  Dying, the reason first we found—­
    The fulness of her own.

  “She gave unconsciously the while
    A wealth we all might share—­
  To me the memory of the smile
    That last I saw her wear.

  “Earth lost from out its meagre store
    A bright and precious stone;
  Heaven could not be so rich before,
    But it has richer grown.”

“Sept. 19, 1853.  I am surprised to find the verse which I picked up somewhere and have always admired—­

  “’Oh, reader, had you in your mind
  Such stores as silent thought can bring,
  Oh, gentle reader, you would find
  A tale in everything’—­

belonging to Wordsworth and to one of Wordsworth’s simple, I am almost ready to say silly, poems.  I am in doubt what to think of Wordsworth.  I should be ashamed of some of his poems if I had written them myself, and yet there are points of great beauty, and lines which once in the mind will not leave it.

“Oct. 31, 1853.  People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.  My letter came from Cambridge [the Harvard Observatory], and I had some work to do over.  It was a wearyful job, but by dint of shutting myself up all day I did manage to get through with it.  The good of my travelling showed itself then, when I was too tired to read, to listen, or to talk; for the beautiful scenery of the West was with me in the evening, instead of the tedious columns of logarithms.  It is a blessed thing that these pictures keep in the mind and come out at the needful hour.  I did not call them, but they seemed to come forth as a regulator for my tired brain, as if they had been set sentinel-like to watch a proper time to appear.

“November, 1853.  There is said to be no up or down in creation, but I think the world must be low, for people who keep themselves constantly before it do a great deal of stooping!

“Dec. 8, 1853.  Last night we had the first meeting of the class in elocution.  It was very pleasant, but my deficiency of ear was never more apparent to myself.  We had exercises in the ascending scale, and I practised after I came home, with the family as audience.  H. says my ear is competent only to vulgar hearing, and I cannot appreciate nice distinctions....  I am sure that I shall never say that if I had been properly educated I should have made a singer, a dancer, or a painter—­I should have failed less, perhaps, in the last. ...  Coloring I might have been good in, for I do think my eyes are better than those of any one I know.

“Feb. 18, 1854.  If I should make out a calendar by my feelings of fatigue, I should say there were six Saturdays in the week and one Sunday.