fortune of her
grandfather was lost by the burning of that city in 1775, and he soon
afterward removed to Medford, across the Mystic river, where Maria
Gowen was born about the year 1795. Her father was a man of education,
and among his intimate friends were several of the professors of
Harvard College, whose occasional visits varied the pleasures of a
rural life. From this society she derived at an early period a taste
for letters and learning. Before the completion of her ninth year she
had committed to memory many passages from the best poets; and her
conversation excited special wonder by its elegance, variety and
wisdom. She grew in beauty, too, as she grew in years, and when her
father died, a bankrupt, before she had attained the age of fourteen,
she was betrothed to a merchant of Boston, who undertook the
completion of her education, and as soon as she quitted the school was
married to her. Her early womanhood was passed in commercial
affluence; but the loss of several vessels at sea in which her husband
was interested was followed by other losses on land, and years were
spent in comparitive indigence. In that remarkable book, "Idomen, or
the Vale of Yumuri," she says, referring to this period: "Our table
had been hospitable, our doors open to many; but to part with our
well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with
one servant, to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were sought
no longer by those who had come in our wealth. I looked earnestly
around me; the present was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My
parents were dead, my few relatives in distant countries, where they
thought perhaps but little of my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved
other than as a father and protector; but he had been the benefactor
of my fallen family, and to him I owed comfort, education, and every
ray of pleasure that had glanced before me in this world. But the sun
of his energies was setting, and the faults which had balanced his
virtues increased as his fortune declined. He might live through many
years of misery, and to be devoted to him was my duty while a spark of
his life endured. I strove to nerve my heart for the worst. Still
there were moments when fortitude became faint with endurance, and
visions of happiness that might have been mine came smiling to my
imagination. I wept and prayed in agony."

In this period poetry was resorted to for amusement and consolation.
At nineteen she wrote a