A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Taggart, Cynthia
TAGGART, CYNTHIA,
Has won herself a place among those who deserve to be remembered, by her serene patience under the severest bodily sufferings, and the moral energy whereby she made these sufferings serve as instructors to her own mind, and to the hearts of pious Christians who may read her sorrowful story. The father of Cynthia Taggart was a soldier in the American war for independence. During this struggle his property was destroyed; and, dying in poverty, be had nothing to leave for the support of his daughters. They resided in Rhode Island, about six miles from Newport; and there, in a little cottage, this poor girl was born, about the year 1804. Her training was religious, though she had few opportunities of leaning; and when, at the age of nineteen, her strength became utterly prostrated by severe sufferings from a chronic disease of the bones and nerves, or rather of her whole physical system, she began her intellectual life, self-educated by her own sensations and reflections; and her soul was sustained in this conflict of bodily pain with mental power, by her strong and ardent faith in her Saviour. She enumerates among her greatest sufferings, her inability to sleep. For many years she was unable to close her eyes in slumber, except when under the powerful effect of anodynes; and it was during these long, dark watches of the night, when every pulse was a throb of pain, and every breath an agony of suffering, that she composed her soul to contemplations of the goodness of God and the beauties of nature, and breathed out her strains of poetry.
Her poems were collected and published in 1834, with an auto-biography sadly interesting, because it showed the hopeless as well as helpless condition of Miss Taggart; enduring death in life. The work has passed through several editions. Miss Taggart has been I released from her unparalleled sufferings. She died in 1849. Her poetry will have an interest for the afflicted; and few there are who pass through the scenes of life without feeling a chord of the heart respond to her sorrowful lyre.