Helen D'Arcy Stewart

The philosopher was sufficiently engaged by the poem to make an acquaintance with Helen, leading to their marriage on 26 July 1790, the age of the bride being twenty-five, and that of the bridegroom thirty-seven.

He himself said that, although she did not probably understand the abstract points of his philosophy so well as he did himself, yet when he had once made out a truth into an intelligible shape, she helped him to illustrate it "by a play of fancy and of feeling which could only come from a woman's mind.

In one of his letters to the Bishop of Llandaff, Lord Dudley says of her: "She has as much knowledge, understanding, and wit as would set up three foreign ladies as first-rate talkers in their respective drawing-rooms, but she is almost as desirous to conceal as they are to display their talents."

[3] Her character is summed up, in an obituary notice in the Edinburgh Evening Courant of 9 August 1838: "To the last she was remarkable for a winning gentleness of manner — a meekness more impressive than austerity — by which, during her whole life, she had exercised greater influence on those around her than others could do by an assumption of dignity.

Her poem The tears I shed must ever fall was noted by Robert Burns, who recommended it a "song of genius" and supplied the initial four lines for the final stanza.