Mrs. Maria Bickford was a native of Oldtown, a small parish near the city of Bangor, in Maine—the daughter of poor but respectable parents. Her maiden name was Dunn. She was born in the year 1822, and was, consequently, twenty-three years old at the period of her awful and untimely end. It is said of her, that, from earliest childhood, she had been the sport of ill omens and startling reverses. At her birth, which occurred before sunrise on a beautiful morning in autumn, a light of strange radiance shone into the apartment, and a sparrow fluttered against the window panes, uttering a plaintive wail, as if seeking admittance.

Whether these occurrences were the results of unexplained natural causes, or were the foreshadowings of an invisible fate, the judgment is not for us to pronounce—perhaps a future life and another world will interpret them. But certain it is, that their recital made a most fruitful theme for conjecture with the wonder-loving neighborhood, at the time. Old maids tied their cap-strings with a double knot for many a night thereafter.[1] Old women spun long yarns while smoking their old-fashioned iron pipes in the chimney corners—and the old men scoffed at what they declared to be ridiculous. However it might have been, a marked singularity of thought and action was developed in the succeeding years of Maria’s youth. Her childish prattle was unlike that of other children—she saw not as others see—she heard not as others hear—she laughed not as others laugh—but in all and with all there seemed to be a new development—a strangeness.

At about the seventh year of her age, those visitings of mysterious thoughtfulness which, in after years, imparted to her a peculiar fame, first began to be observed. During the recurrence of these periods she would remain for hours unmoved, regardless of all that was passing around her—as if in communion with the ascended spirit of some loved playmate, or in happy contemplation of the joys to be realized far away in the dim future. It was then that she discovered charms in solitude, Alone, in the fields and in the woods, she laughed with the flowers, and talked with the shadows of the trees—and that oaken giant, near her father’s house, which had sternly derided the blasts of many centuries, creaked as though it were glad when Maria came, as she often did, and leaned against its brawny trunk, and exchanged salutations with the sentinel of time.

“They say I have a soul,” she would say, in a revery, “an immortal soul—that a good man, who was the son of God, died for me, that I might live. What have I done to need such an awful atonement? Is it very wrong to while the Sabbath hours away, out here, with these birds, and bees, and squirrels? Is it a sin to love these pretty violets?—And this cool shade, too, and the breeze which fans me so gently—how calmly I sleep, and how pleasant are my dreams, in their refreshing presence! But they tell me it is not right to cherish the endearments of this world. It is neglecting God. I will kneel down here and pray.”

And this was Maria’s theology. What a mistake it is to teach the young to restrain their love of nature in the desire of “serving God!” As though his works had not the impress of his greatness and beneficence! We cannot but regard this very prevalent practice as the vulgar offspring of ignorance: and we trust that the time is at hand when the religion of nature will assume, in the human mind, the place and importance so long usurped by the hypocritical and soul-deadening religion of formality.[2] What honest heart can entertain a doubt that Maria returned from her Sunday rambles amid the luxuriance and enlivening beauties of nature, a purer and better child than when she had, all the tiresome day, been listening to the dry and repulsive jabbering of a hireling pulpit sycophant? Oh, had the wisdom of the child been the monitor of the woman, varied and sweet would have been the closing years of the life of Maria Dunn.