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.