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.