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OUR FAMOUS WOMEN. 
 
 COMPRISING THE 
 
 WHO HAVE DISTINGUISHED THEMSELVES IN 
 
 LITERATURE, SCIENCE. ART, MUSIC, AND THE DRAMA, 
 
 OR ARE FAMOUS AS HEROINES, PATRIOTS, 
 
 ORATORS, EDUCATORS, PHYSICIANS. 
 
 PHILANTHROPISTS, ETC. 
 
 Numerous &necfcotes, Enctoents, ano Personal Experiences, 
 
 BY THE FOLLOWING TWENTY AUTHORS. 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 MARION HARLAND. 
 MARY CLEMMER. 
 KATE SANBORN. 
 
 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTOS. 
 LUCY LAKCOM. 
 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 SUSAN COOLIDGE. 
 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 LAURA CURTIS BULLAKD. 
 LILIAN WHITING. 
 ELIZABETH T. SPRING. 
 ELIZABETH BRYANT JOHNSTON. 
 MAUD HOWE. 
 
 Superblg Illustrated 
 
 WITH FrLlr-PAGE PORTRAITS ENGRAVED BY EMINENT ENGRAVERS, MAINLT 
 FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN EXPRESSLY KOR THIS WORK. 
 
 HARTFORD, CONN.: 
 A. D. WORTHINGTON & CO., PUBLISHERS. 
 
 A. Q. NBTTLETON Ic, CO., CHICAGO, ILLS. 
 
 1884. 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, 
 
 BY A. D. WORTHINGTON AND COMPANY, 
 in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D.C. 
 
In compliance with current copyright law, 
 
 U. C. Library Bindery produced this replacement volume on 
 
 paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1984 to replace 
 
 the irreparably deteriorated original 
 
 1998 
 
07 
 
 TO 
 
 fHen anti flymen 
 
 WHO HONOR MAN AND WOMAN, 
 
 AND SEE THF SPECIAL FITNESS OF 
 THIS BOOK, TO-DAY, 
 
 IT IS DEDICATED. 
 
PUBLISHEKS PKEFACE. 
 
 N these book-making days, a new volume of 
 biography needs, perhaps, a word of intro 
 duction to the kindly households wherein it 
 seeks a welcome. 
 
 Probably no aspect of our time is more sig 
 nificant of progress than the ever-growing dis 
 cussion of the place and duties of women in 
 the social state. Causes both economical and 
 moral have tended to break up old habits of life and 
 thought, and make new demands upon their capacity and 
 conscience, which experience has not yet taught them to 
 satisfy. All over the land, women are conscious of a fer 
 ment and disturbance of thought which is the prophesy of 
 better things. Everywhere they are asking, " What can / do 
 to hasten the New Day ? " 
 
 It seemed, therefore, to the Publishers of this volume that 
 the time had come when the simple story of what a few 
 women have done would prove an inspiration and incentive 
 to the many women who long to do. The book contains 
 thirty sketches of lives, which, in various ways, have made the 
 world richer for tfleir presence. Excepting six, the subjects 
 
vi PUBLISHERS PREFACE. 
 
 of the sketches are living and working. With the natural 
 modesty of worth, these ladies shrank from needless publicity, 
 and at first hesitated to allow the use of their names. But 
 when assured by the Publishers that the aim of the book 
 was not to gratify a vulgar curiosity, but to kindle new hopes 
 and ambitions in unknown hearts, and that it was the story 
 of their labors, discouragements, and successes which was 
 desired, rather than of their private joys and sorrows, they 
 generously said that if the knowledge of anything which they 
 had done could be of use to other women, struggling for 
 bread, or the right to labor, or an honorable fame, they 
 should hold it churlish to refuse. In no case has the name 
 of a living person been used without its owner s consent. In 
 almost every instance the writer of the sketch is the personal 
 friend of its subject, a relati6n which has insured an ex 
 ceptional faithfulness and sympathy in treatment. The 
 arrangement of the papers is, of course, purely arbitrary, 
 an alphabetical order having been held the most convenient. 
 
 The Publishers believe that they may fairly call their book 
 representative. For while there are necessarily omitted 
 names perhaps as well-known and well-beloved as those 
 which appear, these thirty cover as wide a range of endeavor 
 and achievement as the limits of the volume permit. That 
 the subjects of the memoirs are all American, either by birth 
 or adoption, gives the book a title to be considered not less 
 national than representative. 
 
 The twenty women who have contributed these sketches 
 need no commendation. Their names are a sufficient guar 
 antee of the volume s worth. But the Publishers desire to 
 express their sense of personal indebtedness to these co- 
 workers for the accuracy, ability, and hearty good-will which 
 have made the book better than their hopes. 
 
PUBLISHERS PREFACE. vii 
 
 In the mechanical execution of the work, the Publishers 
 take an honest pride. They have spared neither money nor 
 trouble to make it worthy of the subject-matter. Its por 
 traits represent the best work of the best workers, and the 
 likenesses are as faithful as the execution is artistic. 
 
 Finally, the Publishers venture to hope that they have not 
 misconceived the temper of the time, and that to every one 
 of the thousands of homes which the book may enter, it will 
 bring something of the courage, patience, steadfastness of 
 purpose, cheerfulness, and lofty aspiration which fill the lives 
 history it records. 
 
NAMES OF AUTHORS 
 
 HAVE WRITTEN FOR THIS WORK, 
 
 WITH A LIST OF THEIR SUBJECTS. 
 
 SUBJECTS. 
 AUTHORS. 
 
 f Catherine E. Beecher. 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE J 
 
 I Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney. 
 
 , Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
 ROSE TERRY COOKE 
 
 Harriet Prescott Spoffbrd. 
 
 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke. 
 Clara Loitise Kellogg. 
 Louise Chandler Moulton. 
 Mary L. Booth. 
 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS Mary A. Livcrmore. 
 
 LUCY LARCOM Ciara Barton. 
 
 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY Lucy Larcom. 
 
 KATE SANBORN 
 
 Margaret Fuller. 
 Frances E. Willard. 
 Mary Virginia Terhune 
 
 (" Marion Harland "). 
 
 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON Louisa M. Alcott. 
 
 MARY CLEMMER Lucretia Mott. 
 
 MARY A. LIVERMORE Anne Whitney. 
 
 MARION HARLAND Elizabeth Prentiss. 
 
NAMES OF AUTHORS. 
 
 AUTHORS. SrBJECTB. 
 
 SUSAN COOLDDGE Lydia Maria Child. 
 
 f The Doctors Blackwell. 
 
 LUCIA GILBERT RCNKLB J Mary Mapes Dodge. 
 
 [ Abby Hopper Gibbons. 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE Maria Mitchell. 
 
 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON Susan J3. Anthony. 
 
 LAURA CURTIS BULLARD Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 
 
 Mary Clemmer. 
 
 LILIAN WHITINO 
 
 Charlotte Cushman. 
 
 ELIZABETH T. SPRINO Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 
 
 ELIZABETH BRYANT JOHNSTON Frances Hodgson Burnett. 
 
 MAUD HOWB Julia Ward Howe. 
 
LIST OP 
 
 OUR FAMOUS WOMEN; 
 
 IN THE ORDKB IN WHICH 
 
 SUBJECTS. WRITERS. PAGR 
 
 LOUISA M. ALCOTT Louise Chandler Moulton .... 29 
 
 SUSAN B. ANTHONY Elizabeth Cady Stanton 53 
 
 CATHBRINE E. BEECHEB .... Harriet Beecher Stowe 75- 
 
 CLARA BARTON Lucy Larcom 94 
 
 MART L. BOOTH Harriet Prescott Spofford .... 117 
 
 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL .... Lucia Gilbert Runkle 134 
 
 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT . . . Elizabeth Bryant Johnston . . . 152 
 
 ROSE TERRY COOKE Harriet Prescott Spofford .... 174 
 
 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN Lilian Whiting 207 
 
 LYDIA MARIA CHILD Susan Coolidge 2.10 
 
 MARY CLEMMER Lilian Whiting 250 
 
 MARY MAPES DODGE Lucia Gilbert Runkle 276 
 
 MARGARET FULLER Kate Sanborn 205 
 
 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS Lucia Gilbert Runkle 31 G 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE Maud Howe 337 
 
 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG .... Harriet Prescott Spofford .... 369 
 
 MAJRY A. LIVERMORE Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 386 
 
 LUCY LABCOM Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney 415 
 
LIST OF "OUR FAMOUS^ WOMEN." xi 
 
 StTHJECTS. WRITERS. PAOB 
 
 MARIA MITCHELL Julia Ward Howe 437 
 
 I/UCRETIA MOTT Mary Clemmer ,62 
 
 Ix)uisE CHANDLER MOULTON . . . Harriet Prescott Spofford .... 408 
 
 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD . . Rose Terry Cooke 521 
 
 ELIZABETH PRENTISS "Marion Harland" 539 
 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS . . . Elizabeth T. Spring 560 
 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWK .... Rose Terry Cooke 581 
 
 ELIZABETH CADT STANTON .... Laura Curtis Bullard 603 
 
 MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE .... Kate Sanborn 624 
 
 (" Marion Harland.") 
 
 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY .... Harriet Beecher Stowe 652 
 
 ANNE WHITNEY Mary A. Livermore 668 
 
 FRANCES E. WILLARD Kate Sanborn 691 
 
LIST OF PORTRAITS 
 
 ENGRAVED BY EMINENT ENGRAVERS 
 
 EXPRESSLY FOB THIS WORK, 
 
 MAINLY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN FOR THIS PURPOSE. 
 
 ENGRAVER. PAGB 
 
 1. LOUISA M. ALCOTT ...... Charles Spiegle .... To face 30 
 
 2. CLARA BARTON David Nichols .... " 96 
 
 3. BOSB TERRY COOKB 0. Kruell " 176 
 
 4. CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN Charles Spiegle .... " 268 
 
 5. MARY CLEMMER David Nichols .... " 252 
 
 6. MARY MAPES DODGE T. Cole " 278 
 
 7. MARY A. LIVERMORE Charles Spiegle .... " 388 
 
 8. LUCY LARCOM Henry Velten . . " 416 
 
 9. MARIA MITCHELL Henry Velten .... " 4*8 
 
 10. LUCRETIA MOTT David Nichols .... " 4f>4 
 
 11. LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON . . . Charles Spiegle .... " WX) 
 
 12. HARRIET PRBSCOTT SPOFFORD . . O. Kruell " 523 
 
LIST OF PORTRAITS. xiii 
 
 KNORAVKR. PAOH 
 
 13. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS ... 6?. Kruell ..... .To face 863 
 
 U. MART VIRGINIA TERHUNB .... David Nichols .... 626 
 (" Marion Ear land.") 
 
 15. Mas. A. D. T. WHITNKY .... Henry Velten .... M 664 
 
 16, FRANCES E. WILLARD . . . . Charles Spiegle .... " 693 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CfMiapter I. 
 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 BY LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Amos Bronson Alcott His Early Life The " Sage of Concord " 
 Louisa M. Alcott Girlhood Days High Talk and Low Diet 
 Her First Story A Very Stage-Struck Young Lady End 
 of Her Dreams of Dramatic Glory Seeking Her Own For 
 tune Toilsome Years Story-Writing Advised to " Stick 
 to Teaching " Hospital Nurse Shattered Health Her 
 First Book How " Little Women " Came to be Written Fame 
 and Fortune at Last Amusing Requests An Extraordinary 
 Effusion Miss Alcott s Portrait of Herself at Fifteen Miss 
 Alcott at Fifty Incidents Precious Memories Methods of 
 Work An Old Atlas for a Desk How She Plans Her Stories . 29 
 
 (Pxaptet* ii. 
 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony s Parentage Her Girlhood A Rebellious Qua 
 ker Incident in Her Early Life The Heighth of Her Ambition 
 
 A "High-Seat Quaker Incident in Her Experience as 
 Teacher Advocating Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and Woman 
 Suffrage Her Facility and Power as an Orator Speaking to a 
 Deaf and Dumb Audience Incident on a Mississippi Steamboat 
 
 Celebrating Her Fiftieth Birthday Trip to Europe Inci 
 dents of Foreign Travel Arrested for Voting The Legal 
 Struggle that followed Her Labors for Woman Suffrage Her 
 Industry and Self-denial for the Cause Personal Appearance . 53 
 
XV1 CONTENTS. 
 
 Clxitptev III. 
 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 PAOR 
 
 A Leaf from Dr. Lyruun Beecher s Diary The Old Parsonage at 
 Litchfield Miss Beecher s Early Education Her Keen Sense 
 of Humor A Sprightly Poem Lines Written on the Death of 
 Her Mother Her First Published Poems " Who is this C. D. 
 D. ? " Engagement to Prof. Alexander M. Fisher Bright 
 Prospects for the Future Prof. Fisher Sails for England Ship 
 wreck of the "Albion" and Death of Prof. Fisher Th6 Sur 
 vivor s Narrative of the Shipwreck Effect of the Distressing 
 News Miss Beecher Establishes the Hartford Female Seminary 
 Her Energy and Incessant Activity Last Years of Her Life 
 Her Death Lines Written to a Dying Friend ....... 75 
 
 iv. 
 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 BY LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 Clara Barton s Early Life; A Faithful Little Nurse at Eleven 
 Devotion to Her Sick Brother Breaking Out of the Civil War 
 Her Loyalty and Devotion to the Union The Old Sixth Mas 
 sachusetts Regiment First Blood Shed for the Union Miss 
 Barton s Timely Services Consecrating Her Life to the Soldiers 
 Needs At the Front Army Life and Experiences Her Un 
 daunted Heroism Terrible Days Errands of Mercy " The 
 Angel of the Battlefield " Instances of Her Courage and Devo 
 tion Narrow Escape-* Her Labors for Union Prisoners 
 Record of the Soldier Dead Dorrance Atwater Work After 
 the War Her Visit to Europe The Franco-Prussian War 
 At the Front Again Unfurling the Banner of the Red Cross 
 Record of a Noble Life . . , 94 
 
CONTENTS. Xvll 
 
 v. 
 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 PAOK 
 
 A Woman of Rare Intellect Childhood of Mary Louise Booth 
 An Indefatigable Little Student Beginning of Her Literary 
 Life A Great Historical Work Breaking Out of the Civil 
 War Miss Booth s Sympathy with the North Her Anxiety to 
 Help the Cause How She did it A Prodigious Task "It 
 Shall be Done" Marvellous Industry and Perseverance 
 Charles Sumner s Friendship A Letter of Thanks from Abraham 
 Lincoln Assuming the Management of " Harper s Bazaar " 
 A Signal Success A Model Paper Miss Booth s Home True 
 Hospitality Pen-portrait of a Gifted Woman ....... 117 
 
 v VI. 
 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 Early Home of the Blackwell Sisters " Little Shy " Her Indom 
 itable Pluck and Wonderful Physique A Feat Showing Her 
 Strength Death of Her Father Struggle of the Family with 
 Misfortune and Poverty Elizabeth Begins the Study of Medi 
 cine How She Acquired Her Professional Education Sur 
 mounting Great Difficulties Some of Her Experiences as a 
 Medical Student Graduates with High Honor First Medi 
 cal Diploma ever Granted to a Woman A Proud Moment in 
 Her Life Her Sister, Emily Blackwell Her College Life 
 Battling Against Opposition Final Success Her Studies 
 Abroad The Two Sisters Establish Themselves in Practice in 
 New York Founding the Woman s Hospital and College . 134 
 
 VII. 
 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH BRYANT JOHNSTON. 
 
 Mrs Burnett s English Home Tales of Her Childhood Emigra 
 tion to America A Helpless Family in a Strange Land The 
 2 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOH 
 
 Struggle for Subsistence Incidents of Her Girlhood Sym 
 pathy for the Poor How She Acquired Her Knowledge of 
 English Dialect The Original "Lass o Lowrie s" First 
 Literary Efforts Seeking a Publisher Devising Ways and 
 Means Diplomacy A Day of Triumph and Happiness 
 " Who is She ? " Life at Mt. Ararat Revisiting England 
 Her Washington Home A Thrilling Incident at Long Branch 
 A Heroine in Real Life Mrs. Burnett s Personal Appearance . 152 
 
 VIM. 
 
 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke s Ancestry Her Description of an Old-Fash 
 ioned Thanksgiving Scenes in Her Childhood A Picture of 
 Old New-England Life Her Deep Love of Nature Passion 
 for Flowers School Life Reading at the Age of Three 
 Inimitable Skill in Depicting New-England Life and Character 
 
 Her Bright Humor and Keen Sense of the Ridiculous Begin 
 ning Her Literary Career Opening of Her Genius A Novel 
 Incident in Plymouth Church The Story of an Opal Ring 
 How a Little Slave-Child was made Free A Romantic Story 
 
 Odd Experiences with Impostors and Counterfeiters Mrs. 
 Cooke s Home and Domestic Life A Woman of Rare Genius . 174 
 
 IX. 
 
 CHARLOTTE GUSH MAN. 
 
 BY LILIAN WHITING. 
 
 Charlotte Cushman s Childhood Her Remarkable Imitative Faculty 
 First Appearance on the Stage A Scanty Stage Wardrobe 
 A Friend in Need An Amusing Experience The Struggle for 
 Fame Macready s Sympathy and Influence First Visit to 
 Europe "Waiting in the Shadow" Dbut in London A 
 Brilliant Triumph Her Ability Recognized at Last in Her 
 Native Land Glimpse of Her Life in Rome Unfaltering 
 Patriotism Her Munificent Gift to the Sanitary Commission 
 The Culmination of Her Power A Notable Dramatic Tri 
 umph Her Farewell to the Stage Address of William Cullen 
 Bryant Miss Cushman s Response Her Illness, Death, and 
 Last Resting-Place 207 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 X. 
 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 BY SUSAN COOLIDGE. 
 
 PACK 
 
 The Little Maid of Medford Her Early Life and Happy Mar 
 riage Books She has Written Surprise and Indignation ex 
 cited by Her " Appeal" The Battle of Life Rowing against 
 the Tide Her Patience, Fortitude, and Reliance Stirring 
 Times Devotion to Her Husband Life at Wayland Her 
 Bright Humor Her Sympathy for Old John Brown Mrs. 
 Mason s Violent Letter Mrs. Child s Famous Reply She is 
 Promised a " Warm Reception " Her Loyalty, Self-Denial, and 
 Work during the Civil War Princely Generosity Serene Old 
 Age Death of Her Husband Mrs. Child s Tribute to His 
 Memory Waiting and Trusting Her Death and Funeral . 230 
 
 xi. 
 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 BY LILIAN WHITING. 
 
 Mary Clemmer s Ancestry Pen-portraits of Her Father and Mother 
 
 Her Childhood School-life and Early Education Publishing 
 Her First Verses Beginning Her Literary Career Removal 
 to New York First Newspaper Letters Marvellous Industry 
 and Capacity for Work Contracting to Write a Column a Day 
 for Three Years A Chapter from Her Experiences During the 
 War Vivid Description of the Surrender of Maryland Heights 
 
 Her Journalistic Work How she Gathers Materials for "A 
 Woman s Letter from Washington " Charles Sumner s Friend 
 ship A Busy Life Tribute to the Memory of Alice and Phrcbe 
 Cary Mary Clemmer s Washington Home ...... 250 
 
 <$tatpter xi L 
 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 New York Society Forty Years Ago Prof. James J. Mapes An 
 Ideal Home Genuine Hospitality Mary Mapes Dodge Her 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Two Boys What First Turned Her Attention to Writing 
 First Workshop A Cosy "Den" Birthday Feasts for Jamie 
 and Harry A Birthday Poem Red-letter Days How " Hans 
 Brinker, or the Silver Skates," came to be Written Merited 
 Reward Mrs. Dodge s Remarkable Editorial Capacity Her 
 Clear Insight and Sound Judgment Editing " St. Nicholas " 
 A Model Magazine for Children Who and What Makes it So 
 The Care and Labor Bestowed upon Each Number Mrs. 
 Dodge s Home Life and Happy Surroundings . 276 
 
 xill. 
 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 (MARCHIONESS D OSSOLI). 
 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 Conflicting Opinions An English Estimate of Margaret Fuller 
 Her Childhood and School-life Her Life as Seen by Others 
 A Peep at Her Journal An Encounter with Doctor Channing 
 Emerson s Opinion Wonderful Power as a Converser Her 
 Great Ambition The Influence She Exerted Horace Greeley s 
 Fi iendship Connection with tne "New York Tribune" 
 " Alone as Usual " Visits Europe Noted Men and Women of 
 the Time Harriet Mai-tineau s Opinion The Great Change 
 in Miss Fuller s Life Her Romantic Marriage in Italy Ter 
 rible Trials Homeward Bound Shipwrecked on the Shores of 
 Her Native Land Last Scenes in Her Life . . . 295 
 
 XIV. 
 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 " Father Hopper s" Work Among Convicts and Felons First Sun 
 day Services in a Jail Abby Hopper s Girlhood Following in 
 the Footsteps of Her Father Her Work Among the Inmates of 
 the New York Tombs The " Isaac T. Hopper Home " The 
 School for Street Children The Waifs and Strays of Randall s 
 Island Charity Children An Appeal for Dolls Generous 
 Response Affecting Incident The Story of Robert Denyer 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Mrs. Gibbons Work During the War Nursing Union 
 Soldiers The Draft Riots in New York An Exciting Time 
 Attacking Mrs. Gibbons House Havoc and Devastation 
 Wrought by the Mob Work After the War A Noble Life . . 316 
 
 (fttatpiev xv. 
 
 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 BY HER DAUGHTER, MAUD HOWE. 
 
 Little Miss Ward " The Influences that Surrounded Her Early 
 Life Her Education Her Faculty for Acquiring Languages 
 "Bro. Sam" Miss Ward s First Visit to Boston Meets Dr. 
 Samuel G. Howe Her Marriage Wedding Trip to the Old 
 World Cordial Reception by Famous People Declining Tom 
 Moore s Offer to Sing Reminiscences of European Travel 
 Her Patriotism in the Days of the Rebellion "Madame, You 
 Must Speak to My Soldiers " Writing the Battle-Hymn of the 
 Republic The " Brain Club" A Many-sided Woman 
 Mrs. Howe as a Public Speaker Reminiscences of Her Life in 
 Santo Domino A Woman of Genius and Intellect .... 337 
 
 xvi. 
 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 Clara Louise Kellogg s Birth and Parentage Girlhood and Early 
 Education Her Extraordinary Musical Genius Its Early 
 Development Intuitive Knowledge of Tone and Pitch Mar 
 vellous Execution Patient Study and Unwearied Devotion to 
 Her Art Beginning of Her Career An Unusual Compliment 
 at Rehearsal First Trial in Opera Her Debut Carrying 
 the Audience Captive Wild Enthusiasm Triumphant Suc 
 cess Verdict of the Critics Visits Europe Debut in Lon 
 don A Brilliant and Enthusiastic Audience Acknowledged 
 to be the Queen of Song Return to America Reception in 
 New York Triumphal Tours Her Charity and Kindness 
 Personal Appearance and Characteristics ......... 3">9 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xvn. 
 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Mrs. Livermore s Ancestry Stories of Her Childhood The Little 
 Minister Her Marriage Journalistic Experiences The 
 War of the Rebellion Her Loyalty and Devotion to the Union 
 The Northwestern Sanitary Commission Army Experiences 
 Incidents of Hospital Life Wonderful Nerve and Ready 
 Resources in Emergencies A Remarkable Achievement 
 Mighty Work for Union Soldiers Their Love and Reverence 
 for Her " Mother " to them All Touching Story of a Soldier s 
 Ring A Thrilling Incident of Chicago Life An Errand of 
 Mercy Terrible Death-Bed Scene Labors after the War 
 Her Christian Life and Influence* Work as a Reformer Fame 
 as an Orator Personal Appearance Home Life A Grand 
 and Noble Woman ................ 386 
 
 xvin. 
 LUCY LARGO M. 
 
 BY MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 A Happy Name Lucy Larcom s Childhood First Literary Ven 
 ture Removal of the Family to Lowell Lucy s Mill Life 
 The Little "Doffer" A Glimpse of the Daily Life of a Lowell 
 Mill Girl The Lowell " Offering " First Meeting with the 
 Poet Whittier His Lifelong Friendship Removal to Illinois 
 Pioneer Life Teaching a Real " Deestrick " School Incidents 
 in Her Life as Teacher Mysterious Disappearance of one of 
 Her Pupils An Amusing Incident Return to Old New 
 England Work as Teacher in Wheaton Seminary Her 
 Loyalty During the War Editing "Our Young Folks". . 415 
 
 XIX. 
 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 BY JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 Miss Mitchell s Nantuckot Home Her Ancestors " Poor but 
 Happy " Her Early Life Her Father s Love for Astronomy 
 How She Obtained Her Education Unwearied Devotion to her 
 
CONTENTS. XXi il 
 
 PAOR 
 
 Studies A Great Event in Her Life Discovers a Telescopic 
 Comet Claiming the Prize Offered by the King of Denmark 
 Difficulty in Obtaining it Edward Everett s Efforts in Her 
 Behalf Final Recognition of Her Claim Receives the Gold 
 Medal from the Danish King Her Fame Abroad Visiting the 
 Old World Entertained and Honored by" Distinguished Scien 
 tists Her own Account of Some of Them Amusing Experi 
 ences Interesting Incidents Her Life and Daily Work . . . 437 
 
 Clxaptev xx. 
 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 BY MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 A Rare Example of Womanhood Ancesti-y of Lucretia Mott The 
 Women of Nantucket Celebrating the Fourth of July A 
 Nantucket Tea-party Lucretia Mottfs Marriage A Marvel 
 lously Mated Pair A Perfect Wedded Life of Fifty-seven Years 
 Power as a Preacher Abhorrence of Slavery How the 
 Colored People Revered Her Name Surrounded by a Mob 
 Claiming and Receiving Protection from a Ruffian Daunt 
 less Bravery Reception in England Mrs. Mott s Domestic 
 Life Devotion to Her Children Her Thrift, Industry, and 
 Economy Her Home a Refuge for Runaway Slaves The 
 Meeting-place of Reformers Last Years of Her Life A Great 
 Philanthropist, Great Preacher, and Perfect Woman ..... 462 
 
 xxi. 
 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 A Charming Woman Mrs. Moulton s Parentage Influences that 
 Surrounded Her Childhood Rigid New England Training 
 Girlhood and School Days First Literary Efforts Pub 
 lication of Her First Book Letters to the New York 
 "Tribune" First Visit to Europe Impressions of the Old 
 World Paris Rome Pictures of Italian Life Venice 
 Cordial Reception in London Honors Shown by Distinguished 
 People Flattering Attention Delightful Experiences How 
 Her Book of Poems was Received in London High Praise 
 from Eminent Critics A Famous Traveller Her Personal 
 Appearance Her Charm of Manner A Gifted and Popular 
 Woman ................... 498 
 
XXIV CONTENTS. 
 
 xxn. 
 
 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 BY ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 Mrs. Spofford s Parentage Anecdotes of Her Childhood A Novel 
 Expedition Girlhood Days Writing Dramas for School Exhi- 
 . bition First Literary Efforts Brilliant Debut The Story 
 that First Made Her Famous How it was Received The 
 Commotion it Created Wonderful Command of Language 
 Newburyport and its Surroundings A City by the Sea 
 Some of its Odd People A Locality Justly Famed for its Noted 
 Persons Old Traditions and Associations Amusing Anecdote 
 
 Why the Colored Woman Named Her Baby Gene vi eve instead 
 of Harriet Mrs. Spofford s Present Home A Romantic Spot 
 
 Genuine Hospitality A Charming New England Home . . 521 
 
 xxin. 
 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 BY MARION HARLAND. 
 
 Childhood of Elizabeth Payson Her Parentage Death of Her 
 Father The Struggle with Adversity A Glimpse of Her Life 
 at Nineteen " The Night Before Thanksgiving " Fond 
 ness and Facility for Writing Preparing to Become a Teacher 
 
 Early Religious Experiences Marriage to Rev. Dr. Prentiss 
 
 Wife and Mother Mrs. Prentiss First Books A Peep into 
 Her Domestic Life Cares of a Pastor s Wife Ill-health and 
 Suffering Patience in Affliction Marvellous Industry and 
 Courage Writing under Difficulties How " Stepping Heaven 
 ward" was Written Its Wonderful Sale Fortitude and 
 Resignation of a Noble Christian Woman ........ 539 
 
 xxiv. 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH T. SPRING. 
 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ancestry Her Childhood The Old 
 Home at Andover Her Story-telling Faculty Improvising 
 Stories for Her Schoolmates Her Education Pen-portrait of 
 
CONTENTS. XXV 
 
 PAGK 
 
 Miss Phelps at Sixteen Memories of the War An Unwritten 
 Story An Incident in Her School-life " Thimble or Paint 
 brush, WhichP" First Literary Ventures The Abbott Mis 
 sion "The Gates Ajar" Its Enormous Sale and Helpful 
 Influence Miss Phelps as a Lecturer Power Over Her Audi 
 ences Her Summer Home by the Sea Her Winter Study 
 Interest in Reform Movements Personal Work Among the 
 Fishermen The Strength of Her Writings 660 
 
 : XXV. 
 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 BY ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe s Father, Rev. Dr. Lyraan Beecher His Fame and Worth 
 His Wife, Roxanna Foote Mrs. Stowe s Early Training 
 Incidents in Her Childhood A Famous School Reminiscences 
 of Her Girlhood Early Passion for Writing Marriage to Prof. 
 C.-ilvin E. Stowe Life on the Banks of the Ohio Where and 
 How She Received Her First Impressions of Slavery What 
 Led to the Writing of "Uncle Tom s Cabin " Difficulties 
 Under Which it was Written How it was Received Excite 
 ment it Created Mrs. Stowe s Visit to England Her Recep 
 tion The True Stcry of " A Vindication of Lady Byron " 
 Celebrating Mrs. Stowe s Seventy-first Birthday Her Two 
 Homes Looking Toward the Other Side of Jordan . . . .581 
 
 xxvi. 
 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 BY LAURA CURTIS BULLARD. 
 
 George Sand s Inquiry Mrs. Stanton as the Originator of the 
 Woman Suffrage Movement Birth and Parentage Early 
 Sympathies with Ill-treated Women Tries to be a Boy 
 Studies Law in Her Father s Office Her Marriage and Wed 
 ding Tour Meets Lucretia Mott, and Decides upon a Future 
 Career Calls the First Woman Suffrage Convention Fred 
 erick Douglass Her only Helper Effect of the Convention 
 Progress of the Movement Lectures and Addresses Edits 
 "The Revolution" Travels in France and England Wit 
 Anecdotes Personal Appearance and Characteristics 
 Future of the Cause . ........... 602 
 
XXVl CONTENTS. 
 
 xxvn. 
 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 ("MARION IIAKLANO.") 
 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Popular Fallacy " Marion Harland " A Versatile and Successful 
 Author A Visit to Her Home Her Domestic Life A Peep 
 into Her Kitchen An Inviting Place Her Husband, Rev. Dr. 
 E. P. Terhune; the Man and His Power Characteristic Letter 
 from "Marion Harland" An Interesting Bit of Autobiography 
 
 Her Own Account of Her Early Life Reminiscences of Her 
 Girlhood Her First Book Its Marked Success Career as a 
 Novelist A New Departure Her " Cookery Books " Their 
 Enormous Sale A Boon to Housekeepers Her Love for Little 
 Folks What She says about Santa Claus Sound Advice to 
 Girls and Wise Words for Wives A Gifted and Famous 
 Woman 624 
 
 CUftapiev xxvni. 
 
 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 The Influence of Good Literature in the Formation of Character 
 Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney Her Childhood Early Life and Sur 
 roundings Memories of Good Old Days Her Education and 
 Religious Training Marriage Faculty for Portraying Do 
 mestic Life Why She Excels in Painting Perfect Homes 
 Books She has Written Selections from Her Poems Sympa 
 thy with Young People Gaining an Insight into Practical 
 Questions The Sparkle and Humor of Her Writings The 
 Soundness of their Teachings Their Great Influence for Good 
 
 Comparison between Her Books and Miss Edgeworth s Ex 
 tracts Illustrating their Religious Tendencies 6. r )2 
 
 <haptcv xxix. 
 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 BY MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 Anne Whitney s Girlhood School Days Testimony of One of Her 
 Teachers Her Literary Talents Book of Poems The Cir- 
 
CONTENTS. XXV11 
 
 PAQR 
 
 cumstance that turned Her Thoughts to Art An Interesting 
 Incident Beginning Her Work in Sculpture First Attempts 
 Marvellous Skill Her Statue of " Godiva " Attention it 
 Attracted "Africa" "The Lotus-Eater" Studies and 
 Travels Abroad " Roma " " A Thinking Statue" Com 
 mission from the State of Massachusetts Statue of Samuel 
 Adams Miss Whitney s Studio Devotion to Her Art Work 
 that will Endure . . 6G8 
 
 xxx. 
 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 An After-dinner Speech An Amusing Incident A Southern 
 Clergyman s Opinion Miss Willard s Ancestry Memories of 
 Childhood s Days Scenes from the Past Amusing Extract 
 from Her Diary Her Keen Sense of Humor Climbing the 
 Pyramids " Genteel " Gymnastics " Paul Tucker, of New 
 York, Aged 18^" Miss Willard s Life- Work Delivering Her 
 First Lecture A Genuine Sensation Enlisting in the Tem 
 perance Work Liberality and Sense of Justice Religious 
 Nature Specimen of Her Oratory Marvellous Command of 
 Language Experiences in the South A Southern Welcome 
 How She is Appreciated at Home Universally Loved, 
 Honored, and Respected 691 
 
" // is an ungenerous silence which leaves all the fair 
 words of honestly-earned praise to the writer of obituary 
 notices, and the marble worker" 
 
 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
OUR FAMOUS WOMEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 BY LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 Amos Bronson Alcott His Early Life The " Sage of Concord " Louisa 
 M. Alcott Girlhood Days High Talk and Low Diet Her First Story 
 
 A Very Stage-Struck Young Lady End of Her Dreams of Dramatic 
 Glory Seeking Her Own Fortune Toilsome Years Story-Writing 
 Advised to " Stick to Her Teaching " Hospital Nurse Shattered Health 
 
 Her First Book How " Little Women" Came to be Written Fame 
 and Fortune at Last Amusing Requests An Extraordinary Effusion 
 Miss Alcott s Portrait of Herself at Fifteen Miss Alcott at Fifty- 
 Incidents Precious Memories Methods of Work An Old Atlas for a 
 Desk How She Plans Her Stories Where They are Written. 
 
 N writing of an author still living, and still busily 
 at work, there is always a certain difficulty. 
 We are too near at hand for perspective, and 
 too much under the spell of a sympathetic per 
 sonality to be able to anticipate the judgments 
 of posterity. Our utmost endeavor, then, must 
 be to make the world, so far as possible, sharers 
 in the pleasure of personal intercourse with a 
 gifted and remarkable woman, and to gratify to some 
 extent the general curiosity about a general favorite. 
 In the literature of our own country and time there are 
 few more picturesque figures than Louisa May Alcott ; since 
 we must consider not only her own distinguished achievement, 
 but also the surroundings of her life. Unless heredity were 
 
30 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 a word without a meaning the world had a right to expect 
 much of Miss Alcott by virtue of inheritance, and the highest 
 of these expectations she has certainly fulfilled. 
 
 Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, the " Sage of Concord," 
 as he has often been called, is not less widely known than his 
 distinguished daughter. He came of a good old New Eng 
 land stock, his ancestors having been among the earliest 
 settlers of the town of Wolcott, Conn., where Mr. Alcott 
 himself was born, in 1799. Wolcott was in the neighbor 
 hood of wooden clocks, and while still a schoolboy Mr. 
 Alcott worked, in his vacations, at clock-making. After he 
 left school came a season of peddling, with alternations of 
 school-teaching ; and through those years a half-formed pur 
 pose of entering the ministry of the Episcopal church had 
 some influence on his studies and his life. By the time he 
 was twenty-six, however, the young philosopher Avho was 
 afterwards to be so closely connected with the great Trans 
 cendental movement in New England had discovered that 
 he was not called to the ministry, and had set himself to 
 the task of reforming the prevailing methods of early edu 
 cation. 
 
 He first began the development of his educational ideas in 
 Cheshire, Conn., but in 1828, at the age of twenty-nine, he 
 was invited to take charge of a school for young children in 
 Boston by certain persons who had seen and admired the 
 working out of his ideas in Cheshire. 
 
 In 1830 he married Miss May, a daughter of Col. Joseph 
 May, and a descendant of the Sewells and the Quincys of 
 Boston. I have heard that the May family were strongly 
 opposed to the union of their beautiful daughter with the 
 penniless teacher and philosopher. But love found out a 
 way to soften their opposition ; and the poverty of plain liv- 
 
 ino 1 and high thinking had no terrors for the petted child of 
 
 o o ~ * 
 
 the prosperous Boston merchant. Tall and slight, fair, bluo- 
 eyed, and delicate, she was yet strong enough to resolve and 
 to do, this gently-nurtured young lady, of whom her hus 
 band long afterwards wrote : 
 
LOUISA M. ALCOTT. 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 33 
 
 "Mean are all titles of nobility 
 And kings poor spendthrifts, while I do compare, 
 The wealth she daily lavishes on me 
 Of love the noble kingdom that I share." 
 
 This auspicious marriage took place in King s Chapel, Bos 
 ton, in the month of May fit time for these happy, tune 
 ful, improvident young lovers to pair. In November of the 
 same year they removed to Germantown, Penn., where Mr. 
 Alcott opened a school, which he continued for four years. 
 
 It was in Germantown, November 29, 1832, that Louisa 
 May Alcott was born. Concerning this date she writes : " I 
 was born on the 29lh of November. The same day was my 
 father s own birthday, that of Christopher Columbus, Sir 
 Philip Sidney, Wendell Phillips, and other worthies." 
 
 Until I began to retrace her history for the purpose of this 
 brief biography, I had always supposed that Miss Alcott had 
 been born in Concord that town with which she is so in 
 timately associated in the minds of us all. I fancied she 
 might even herself have been the child-sage whom the 
 stranger in Concord saw digging in the soil, and accosted 
 with the question, " What are you doing, my pretty maid?" 
 " Digging for the infinite," was the unexpected answer ; and 
 all Concord seems to me to have been digging for the infinite 
 for two or three generations. Miss Alcott, however, has 
 been rather the exception to this Concordian habit. She 
 has contented herself with the study of the finite, which she 
 has pursued to such purpose that she has given more lively 
 and more living characters to juvenile literature than any 
 other author of her time. Perhaps she escaped the fate of a 
 philosopher by being born in Germantown, and not going to 
 Concord until she was eight years old. 
 
 Her first remove from Germantown was to Boston, where, 
 in 1834, Mr. Alcott opened a school in the Masonic Temple, 
 which Miss Peabody described in her book, entitled " Record 
 of Mr. Alcott s School," first published in 1835. This " Rec 
 ord of a School " would be, in itself, sufficient to prove Mr. 
 Alcott s claim to a high place in the ranks of the world s edu- 
 
34 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 cators. He knew, at that time, little or nothing of the 
 theories of Pestalozzi, yet his own were always kindred, and 
 sometimes the same. 
 
 Miss Peabody, herself a distinguished educator, once said 
 to me, " I would never say to a child, You have a soul, but 
 rather, You have a body, since the real you is the inde 
 structible soul." Proceeding upon this principle, Mr. Alcott 
 addressed himself to the spiritual nature of his pupils. He 
 substituted appeals to their moral instincts and their affec 
 tions for undiscriminating punishments, and sought rather to 
 awaken in them a thirst for knowledge than to force them at 
 the point of a ferule to acquire it. 
 
 Concerning this school, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn has written 
 that it failed in consequence of a public outcry against cer 
 tain opinions, supposed to be inculcated in a remarkable book, 
 entitled " Conversations with Children on the Gospels," which 
 Miss Peabody compiled from Mr. Alcott s daily talks with 
 his pupils, and which was clamorously assailed by the Boston 
 newspapers. Their unjust criticisms drew forth a public 
 defence from Mr. Emerson, who began by saying, "In behalf 
 of this book I have but one plea to make, this, namely, let 
 it be read." 
 
 In 1837 Mr. Alcott removed the school from the Masonic 
 Temple to his own house ; and after that removal committed 
 the still further enormity of showing his readiness to admit 
 little colored children to share the instruction bestowed on 
 the inheritors of the blue blood of Boston. Finally, in 1839, 
 the philosopher abandoned school-keeping, and, in 1840, 
 removed to Concord. 
 
 If I seem to have dwelt too long on the early history of 
 the serene Sage of Concord it is because the importance of 
 such a parentage cannot be overestimated, and I think Louisa 
 Alcott experienced her first supreme good fortune in being 
 the daughter of her father and her mother. 
 
 O 
 
 I like to think of her as she was when, at eight years of 
 age, she went to live in Concord, first at the Hosmer Cottage, 
 and afterwards at " The Wayside," Hawthorne s old home, at 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 35 
 
 present so fitly occupied by fair Rose Hawthorne Lathropand 
 her gifted husband. After the Hawthorne house came the 
 episode of "Fruitlands," in Harvard, Mass., where Mr. Al- 
 cott took his family to live, with a few congenial souls, in a 
 sort of community, on high talk and low diet. This was the 
 experience which Miss Alcott afterwards described so vividly 
 in " Transcendental Wild Oats." After " Fruitlands " came 
 a short residence in Boston, and then the Alcott family went 
 back to congenial Concord, to pass, in their home called 
 "The Orchards," the twenty-five fullest and most active years 
 of Miss Alcott s over-active life. 
 
 As I have said, I love to picture to myself the girl of eight, 
 unusually tall, and so lithe and active that even before she 
 left Boston she could drive a hoop entirely round the " Com 
 mon "without once stopping, able to run faster than most 
 boys, and therefore always welcome to share their sports. 
 After her father left off school-teaching she went no more to 
 school, but studied at home. She learned religion from 
 Nature, and the high example of virtuous parents, who 
 literally loved their neighbors better than themselves, and in 
 the pure atmosphere of whose daily life it was impossible 
 that anything small or mean should thrive. 
 
 Her literary ambition was of early origin. At eight years 
 of age she perpetrated her first literary attempt, in the shape 
 of the following : 
 
 ADDRESS TO A ROBIN. 
 
 " Welcome, welcome, little stranger, 
 Fear no harm, and fear no danger ; 
 We are glad to see you here, 
 For you sing sweet spring is near. 
 Now the snow is nearly gone, 
 Now the grass is coining on 
 The trees are green, the sky is blue, 
 And we are glad to welcome you." 
 
 "This gem," said Miss Alcott, "my proud mother pre 
 served with tender care, assuring me that if I kept on in this 
 hopeful way I might be a second Shakspeare in time." 
 3 
 
36 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 Fired by this modest and laudable ambition, she continued 
 to write poems upon dead butterflies, lost kittens, the baby s 
 eyes, and other kindred themes, until, suddenly, the story 
 telling mania set in, and the world began to be peopled for 
 her with ideal shapes. For a long time she only frightened 
 her sisters by awful tales whispered in bed. It makes one 
 think of those other sisters in the Moorlands of Yorkshire, 
 who used to sit arid " make up" stories round the fire, when 
 the sun had set, and the shadows haunted the corners, and 
 they drew close together in the shadow-casting firelight. 
 
 After a while Louisa began to write out these histories of 
 giants, and ogres, and dauntless maidens, and magic transfor 
 mations, till the children s room at the Wayside had quite a 
 library of small paper-covered volumes, illustrated by their 
 author. 
 
 Later on, the poems grew sad and sentimental, and the 
 tales less tragic, lovely elves and spirits of earth and air tak 
 ing the place of the former monsters. 
 
 At sixteen Miss Alcott wrote, for Ellen Emerson s pleas 
 ure, her first book. It was entitled "Flower Fables." It 
 was afterwards published, but not until 1854, when Miss 
 Alcott was twenty-two. It made no marked impression, its 
 dainty fancies being obscured by too many adjectives, and its 
 illustrations so bad as to be anything but an adornment. 
 
 At sixteen, besides writing "Flower Fables," Miss Alcott 
 began to teach a little school of some twenty pupils, to whom 
 she told her stories instead of writing them. She says that 
 she never liked teaching; though, in one way or another, she 
 pursued it for some fifteen years sometimes teaching home- 
 schools, sometimes going out as daily governess. Among 
 her pupils in those years she numbered the children of E. P. 
 Whipple, R. E. Apthorpe; John T. Sargent, J. S. Lovering, 
 and many others. Story-telling time, she says, was the one 
 pleasant hour in her school-day ; and even now she meets 
 from time to time the young men and women who had the 
 happiness to be her pupils in those old days, and finds that 
 they still recall her tales and laugh over them afresh with 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 37 
 
 their children, when some of them reappear in new forms in 
 her many books. 
 
 Miss Alcott s first full-grown romantic story was printed 
 in "Gleason s Pictorial," and for this tale she received five 
 dollars. Ah, who of us scribes does not remember the pride 
 and pleasure with which we received our first five dollars 
 earned by literature ; and why is a beginner s recompense 
 always five dollars, no more, no less? This first published 
 story appeared in 1851, when Miss Alcott was nineteen. The 
 next yenr she sent to the "Boston Saturday Evening Gazette" 
 " The Ilival Prima Donnas," which was accepted, and munifi 
 cently, as it then seemed, rewarded with ten dollars, and a 
 request for more. Nor was this all ; for Miss Alcott herself 
 dramatized the tale, and it was accepted by Mr. Thomas 
 Barry, then manager of the Boston Theatre. The play was 
 never really put upon the stage, owing to a disagreement 
 about the distribution of the parts between Mrs. Barrow and 
 Mrs. John Wood, then rival actresses at " The Boston." In 
 spite of this mischance, however, its author considered it a 
 transcendent success ; since, for its sake, a free pass was 
 given her, and she went to the theatre forty times that winter. 
 Think of the unmitigated rapture of those forty evenings to 
 a very stage-struck young lady ! 
 
 So strong, indeed, was Miss Alcott s passion at that time 
 for acting that she made an engagement to appear upon the 
 stage herself as Widow Pottle, in " The Jacobite," and was 
 anxiously waiting for the night to be fixed, when the friendly 
 manager broke his leg, and in consequence his contract, and 
 thus came to an untimely end the young girl s dream of 
 dramatic glory. 
 
 A farce of her composition was, however, actually put upon 
 the stao-e, and she tells me that she well remembers the wild 
 
 C5 7 
 
 beat insr of her heart as she sat on this glorious occasion in a 
 
 O *^ 
 
 stage box, holding an enormous bouquet, presented by a 
 friend as stage-struck as herself; and saw Mrs. W. H. Smith, 
 Josie Orton, and Mr. LoMoine enact Nat Bachelor s Pleas 
 ure Trip," for the benefit of Mrs. Smith. 
 
38 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 " The Rival Prima Donnas " afforded Miss Alcott another 
 glimpse of glory, which she herself described as follows : 
 
 " One of the memorial moments of my life is that in which, 
 as I trudged to school on a wintry day, my eyes fell upon a 
 large yellow poster with these delicious words : " Bertha," a 
 new tale by the author of "The Rival Prima Donnas," will 
 appear in the " Saturday Evening Gazette." I was late ; it 
 was bitter cold ; people jostled me ; I was mortally afraid I 
 should be recognized ; but there I stood feasting my eyes on 
 the fascinating poster, and saying proudly to ni3 r self, in the 
 words of the great Vincent Crummies, This, this is fnme ! 
 That day my pupils had an indulgent teacher ; for, while they 
 struggled with their pot-hooks, I was writing immortal works, 
 and when they droned out the multiplication table, I was 
 counting up the noble fortune my pen was to earn for me in 
 the dim, delightful future. That afternoon my sisters made 
 a pilgrimage to behold this famous placard, and finding it 
 torn by the wind, boldly stole it, and came home to wave it 
 like a triumphal banner in the bosom of the excited family. 
 The tattered paper still exists, folded away with other relics 
 of those early days, so hard and yet so sweet, when the first 
 small victories were won, and the enthusiasm of youth lent 
 romance to life s drudgery." 
 
 These thrilling experiences, however, came after that 
 memorable autumn, described with such rare blending of 
 humor and pathos long afterwards, in " Work," when Louisa 
 Alcott went out into the world to seek her own fortune, as 
 did the heroine of that book. I think the true story was 
 quite as pathetic as the romance. 
 
 A trunk "a little trunk " full of the plainest clothes 
 of her own making, and twenty dollars which she had earned 
 by writing, these were the armor with which she went forth 
 to fight for existence in the world s struggle for the survival 
 of the fittest. Nay, she had more she had firm principles, 
 perfect health, and the dear consciousness of a loving and 
 waiting home to which to retreat if worsted in the fight. 
 And thus armed she struggled and conquered. With this out> 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 39 
 
 fit she travelled to Boston one dull November day, intent on 
 carrying out her resolution to be, for evermore, self-helpful 
 and independent. And she succeeded triumphantly. By 
 teaching, sewing, writing anything that came to hand to be 
 done she not only supported herself for many long, busy, 
 toilsome years before any grand, paying triumph came, but 
 sent home to the dear ones left behind an ever-increasing 
 store of material help and comfort ; an unselfish pleasure 
 which lightened her hard tasks and sweetened every small 
 success. 
 
 Her days were devoted to unrelenting toil, but her even 
 ings, when she was not writing, she gave to such small 
 pleasures as came in her way ; and chief among these she 
 reckoned the golden hours spent at the house of Theodore 
 Parker, where, sitting bashfully in a corner, she caught 
 glimpses of all that was best in Boston society. 
 
 Emerson came there, with ever a kind word for the girl he 
 had known in his own Concord ; Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, 
 Mrs. Howe, just then beginning her crusade against all sorts 
 of iniquities; all those brave women who in those days were 
 leading the van in the cause of abolition, and who, later, set 
 themselves to win for women suffrage and social freedom. 
 Fugitive slaves came there, too ; cultured and inquiring for 
 eigners ; transcendcntalists, with bees in their bonnets and 
 the light of enthusiasm in their eyes ; the hangers-on, who 
 surround all great men, striving to glorify themselves a little 
 by means of reflected light, since they have no candles of 
 their own ; beautiful women ; merchant princes ; all kinds 
 and conditions of men. Such was the society as varied 
 and shifting as the scenes in a panorama, and interesting as 
 life is interesting which the tall girl out of Concord 
 watched with those eager, gray-blue eyes of hers, whose 
 keen glances nothing escaped. 
 
 Dearest, best, most inspiring, and most memorable of all 
 was her host himself the one only Parker who never 
 omitted to give her at least a few words of greeting and fare 
 well. No other hand, she says, had so firm and warm a 
 
40 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 grasp as his ; and his cheery, " How goes it, my child ? " or, 
 "God bless you; keep your heart up, Louisa," helped her 
 over many a rough place, and sustained her under that de 
 spondency which comes sometimes to the bravest young 
 woman fighting her own battle in a world where her place is 
 not ready made. 
 
 Theodore Parker is the " Mr. Power" of " Work," as Miss 
 Alcott herself is the " Christie " of that book. Who does 
 not remember the description of Mr. Power s prayer " so 
 devout, so comprehensive, and so brief, a quiet talk with 
 God," and of his "judgment-day sermons," in which 
 " kingdoms and thrones seemed going down, and each man 
 being sent to his own place." As he spoke thus, what won 
 der that " a curious stir went through the crowd at times, as 
 a great wind sweeps over a cornfield, lifting the broad leaves 
 to the light and testing the strength of root and stem." 
 
 In those years Miss Alcott began to write "sensation" 
 stories ; following up the first attempts already mentioned 
 with many others. It seems almost incredible, but after a 
 little practice in crowding much wrath, ruin, and revenge 
 into twenty-five manuscript pages, she found she could turn 
 out ten or twelve tales in a month. Frank Leslie gladly 
 accepted these exciting romances for his numerous publica 
 tions. After a while Louisa grew weary of this kind of writ 
 ing. "Wrath, ruin, and revenge" pall at length upon the 
 bravest of us ; and when novellettcs were called for, of 
 twenty-four chapters, with a breathless catastrophe in at least 
 every other chapter, thirty pages a day of such work proved 
 too much even for the indefatigable Miss Alcott. 
 
 Then she knocked at the doors of the " Atlantic Monthly" ; 
 and the first story she sent there was returned by Mr. Fields, 
 with the friendly advice that she should stick to her teaching. 
 Soon after this, however, the "Atlantic" opened its pages to 
 her and she also began to write for some of the semi- 
 religious papers, where a reasonable amount of the milk of 
 human kindness was admissible, and which therefore offered 
 a welcome change from the " sensation stories." 
 
LOUISA MAT ALCOTT. 41 
 
 After all, those were happy years in which she dreamed 
 through the summer in that Concord of which Hawthorne has 
 said : " It was necessary to go but a little way beyond my 
 threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men 
 than might have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a 
 thousand miles" and which yet, in spite of its strange and 
 gifted denizens, must have been a very sane place, since Mr. 
 F. B. Sanborn says of it, in his admirable "Life of Thoreau " : 
 "Perpetuity, indeed, and hereditary transmission of every 
 thing that, by nature and good sense, can be inherited, are 
 among the characteristics of Concord." 
 
 O 
 
 Here, where great and good men were growing old, and 
 other great and good men had left behind them fragrant 
 
 O C O 
 
 memories of their just lives where Nature herself appeared 
 to have a sense of her own responsibility, and not to be quite 
 the capricious vagrant she seems elsewhere Miss Alcott 
 went with the spring, like the home-returning birds ; and 
 like them went away again in the autumn, not to the South 
 and the summer, but to busy Boston, teaching there her little 
 invalid pupil on Beacon street, or writing away at her numer 
 ous stories in the nest she found under the eates of some 
 quiet house, or indulging her taste for acting by taking part 
 in a play for the benefit of some charity she would not other 
 wise have been able to assist. One does not half know Miss 
 Alcott who has not seen her as Mrs. Jarley display her 
 "wax- works." I think it is quite the best bit of broad 
 comedy I can remember. 
 
 One break in these busy years I have not mentioned 
 that December of 1862, when she went forth full of enthusi 
 asm to nurse in the Soldier s Hospital a veritable Florence 
 Nightingale for courage, tenderness, and helpfulness, as I 
 have been told blessing scores of dying-beds with her 
 presence, and laboring until she herself was stricken down 
 with fever, and brought home with her dark hair shorn from 
 her head, with wan face, shaken strength, and unstrung 
 nerves, and for sole reward the blessed consciousness that she 
 had done what she could. "I was never ill," she said to me, 
 
42 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 "until after that hospital experience, and I have never been 
 well since." 
 
 It was concerning this period of Miss Alcott s life that her 
 father wrote his sonnet 
 
 " When I remember with what buoyant heart, 
 
 Midst war s alarms and woes of civil strife, 
 In youthful eagerness thou did st depart 
 
 At peril of thy safety, peace, and life, 
 To nurse the wounded soldier, swathe the dead 
 
 How, pierced soon by fever s poisoned dart, 
 And brought unconscious home with wildered head 
 
 Thou, ever since, mid languor and dull pain, 
 To conquer fortune, cherish kindred dear, 
 
 Hast with grave studies vexed a sprightly brain, 
 In myriad households kindled love and cheer ; 
 
 Ne er from thyself by Fame s loud trump beguiled ; 
 Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere : 
 
 I press thee to my heart as duty s faithful child." 
 
 "Hospital Sketches" was first published in 1865, but re- 
 published, with additions, in 1869. 
 
 Even before "Hospital Sketches," "Moods" had been 
 issued by Loring ; but that has also been recently reprinted, 
 with a large amount of revision. When Miss Alcott first 
 wrote this book she was still so young as to be in love with 
 the tragic aspects of life ; and death seemed to her the only 
 possible solution for the perplexities of her heroine. When 
 it was republished she had grown old enough to perceive that 
 nothing is irreparable but death ; and as the sun sets to rise 
 to-morrow, it is possible that the sun of a human life shall 
 rise again after it has seemed to set forever ; and she kindly 
 allowed Sylvia the benefit of this larger knowledge and more 
 cheerful faith. 
 
 In the July of 1865 Miss Alcott went abroad for the first 
 time. She went over as the companion of an invalid lady, 
 and passed the summer at German baths, the autumn at 
 Vevay, and the spring in Paris and London. By this lime 
 she was alone ; and she stayed in London with the Con ways, 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 43 
 
 and made the acquaintance of such well-known persons as 
 John Stuart Mill, George H. Lewes, Jean Ingelow, Frances 
 Power Cobbe, and many others. 
 
 It was in 1868 that Mr. Alcott took to Roberts Brothers 
 those publishers whose name has been so intimately associated 
 with all the most successful and brilliant years of Miss 
 Alcott s life a volume composed of various stories with 
 which the readers of newspapers were already familiar. Mr. 
 Niles, one of the firm, read them, and recognized their merit, 
 but he said : " We do not care just now for volumes of col 
 lected stories. Will not your daughter write us a new book 
 consisting of a single story for girls ? " 
 
 The result of this suggestion was " Little Women." Miss 
 Alcott says she wrote it to prove that she could not write a 
 girls story, having always preferred to play with boys, and 
 therefore knowing very little about any girls except her 
 sisters and herself. This matchless tale was sent to the pub 
 lishers in about two months after it had been first asked for, 
 with the amusing suggestion that if the title that happiest 
 title which juvenile book ever had was not liked the author 
 would willingly change it for something else. 
 
 The first part of " Little Women " was published in October, 
 1868 ; but it attracted comparatively little attention until the 
 publication of the second part, in April, 1869, when sud 
 denly Miss Alcott became famous. I do not, of course, 
 mean that the first part of the book was not widely read and 
 cordially welcomed ; but only that the actual furore began 
 with the publication of the second part. Many young read 
 ers got quite desperately excited over the first, and one such 
 enthusiast wrote to Miss, Alcott : 
 
 DEAR Miss ALCOTT, I have read the first part of "Little 
 Women," and cried quarts over Betli s sickness. If you don t 
 have her marry Laurie in the second part, I shall never forgive 
 you, and none of the girls in our school will ever read any more 
 of your books. Do ! Do ! have her, please. 
 
 All the young people who had read the first part of this 
 fascinating story were eager to get hold of the second, and 
 
44 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 these readers talked about the wondrous tale to others, BO that 
 the sale grew and grew. No more hard work for Miss 
 Alcott ! The tide of her fortunes was rising fast. As early 
 as the 29th of December, 1869, she wrote to her publishers : 
 
 Many thanks for the check which made my Christmas an 
 unusually merry one. After toiling so many years along the 
 up-hill road, always a hard one to women-writers, it is peculiarly 
 grateful to me to find the way growing easier at last, with pleas 
 ant little surprises blossoming on either side, and the rough places 
 made smooth. 
 
 This was the beginning of the most shining success ever 
 achieved by any author of juvenile literature so great a 
 success that when "Little Men" was issued, its publication 
 had to be delayed until the publishers were prepared to fill 
 advance orders for fifty thousand copies. 
 
 "Little Women" was succeeded by the new edition of 
 "Hospital Sketches," "An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Little 
 Men," "Eight Cousins," "Rose in Bloom," "Under the 
 Lilacs," "Jack and Jill," " Work," " Moods," in the revised 
 edition " Silver Pitchers," "Proverb Stories," and the six 
 volumes of "Aunt Jo s Scrap-Bag," namely, "My Boys," 
 "Shawl-Straps," "Cupid and Chow-Chow," "My Girls," 
 "Jimmy s Cruise in the Pinafore," and "An Old-Fashioncd 
 Thanksgiving," those last six volumes having been chiefly 
 compiled from her numerous contributions to " St. Nicholas " 
 and other juvenile publications. 
 
 There is another book of Miss Alcott s, the authorship of 
 which is still a mystery to the general public, "A Modern 
 Mephistopheles." This was contributed to the first scries of 
 Roberts Brothers "No Name" books, and the puzzle of its 
 authorship has remained a vexed question. It was so much 
 more like Mrs. Spoflbrd than like Miss Alcott that many 
 people set it down to the author of "Sir Rohan s Ghost," and 
 were satisfied. 
 
 On these various books Miss Alcott has received copyright 
 amounting to not far from one hundred thousand dollars. 
 They have not only been reprinted and largely sold in Eng- 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 45 
 
 land, but also translated into several foreign languages, and 
 thus published with persistent success. Take it altogether, 
 Miss Alcott has had a most prosperous life ; and yet she com 
 plains, mildly, of the drawbacks attending success. She 
 says it is very trying to " live in a lantern " ; and to ail 
 obscurity-loving soul it is not pleasant to feel that one has 
 suddenly become public property. She endorses, with re 
 freshing zeal, Dr. Holmes s " Atlantic " article on the Right of 
 Authors to Privacy. She says she could compile a very 
 amusing book from the curious requests she has received, and 
 the ill-judged confidences bestowed on her during the last ten 
 years. Of these modest requests here is one, from a lady in 
 South Carolina : 
 
 MADAME, As it has pleased God to bless you with a million, 
 I feel no hesitation in asking you for the sum of one hundred dol 
 lars, to get a communion service for the new Episcopal chapel in 
 our town. A speedy reply is requested. 
 
 The petition which follows, from a resident of Los Vegas, 
 is even more amazing : 
 
 L. M. ALCOTT, Author. 
 
 I am interested in the oldest ruin in the United States. 
 We wish to rebuild and keep the Pecas Ruin as long as the 
 IT. S. Government lasts. If you can interest your friends in 
 the cause, and send us funds, They will be gratefully received. 
 Our Country is full of Relicts of the past. If you wish to 
 write a legion of the ruins we will send the facts. It is about 
 the residence of Montezuma, and the indians tell how a liedi- 
 ous flying serpent carried him to Mexico and his fate. I am a 
 teacher. 
 
 Not all Miss Alcott s odd letters, however, are of the 
 "your-money-or-your-life" order. Here is one which con 
 tains an amusing offer of assistance : 
 
 DEAR AUNT Jo, I am nine years old. I like your books 
 most of all in the world. Please do some more. Have a sequel 
 to Jack and Jill. I will pay for it if you will. I have seventy- 
 five cents. Won t that be enough ? 
 
 Your little friend, WILLY. 
 
46 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 Miss Alcott generously keeps secret the amazing confidences 
 which have been reposed in her unresponsive heart. The 
 religious advice, so freely proffered, she accepts gratefully ; 
 the " matrimonial advances " she will not disclose ; and of all 
 the reams of poetry which have been lavished at her shrine 
 she has only afforded me this one remarkable example : 
 
 TO MY DEAR. 
 
 " Who is the geranium of the world, 
 
 Blooming proud and fair 
 Sweet as mignonette is she, 
 Perfuming all the air 
 
 Louisa M. Alcott. 
 
 " Who is best of human women, 
 
 Growing ever to the sky, 
 Scattering joy and compensation 
 From her life s inspiring eye 
 Louisa M. Alcott." 
 
 This extraordinary production was signed " Jim " ; and 
 Miss Alcott tells me that so many similar effusions, all signed 
 "Jim, "and all postmarked " Hartford," have been received 
 as to suggest to her that she has inspired the profound and 
 lasting admiration of some amiable occupant of the Hartford 
 Retreat for the Insane. 
 
 Perhaps it is hardly matter for wonder that the recipient 
 of a long series of such letters and such rhymes should have 
 grown inflexible, and should turn a deaf ear to the syren 
 tongue of the interviewer, and reject all petitions for auto 
 graphs and photographs. If people want to know her they 
 must divine her from her books ; and, indeed, the works of 
 no writer with whom I am acquainted convey so faithful and 
 complete an impression of their author as those of Miss 
 Alcott. 
 
 One of the questions I asked her in behalf of this sketch 
 was how large a portion of her books was actually founded 
 upon the facts of her life. She has told me that " Little 
 Women " was really the story of herself and her sisters, 
 with such slight changes of time, place, and denouement as 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 47 
 
 were necessary to make the tale complete. "Meg," who 
 afterwards became Mrs. Annie Pratt, witli her genius for 
 making a happy home "Amy," otherwise May, with her 
 artistic taste and aspirations " Beth," with her sweet and 
 gentle nature, and early death and " Jo," who was Miss 
 Louisa herself did not Concord know them all, and smile 
 at them as old friends when they looked out of the pages of 
 " Little Women " ? " Mr. March " was Mr. Alcott, who did 
 not, however, really go to the war ; and " Mrs. March " was 
 the dear house-mother, for whom the utmost praise never 
 seemed to her fond child half good enough. " John Brooke s" 
 life and death, "Demy s" quaint character, all the little 
 domestic devices and diversions these are history, as veri 
 table as it is entertaining. 
 
 Here is Miss Alcott s portrait of herself at fifteen : " Jo 
 was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, 
 for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, 
 which were very much in her way. She had a decided 
 mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes which appeared 
 to see everything, and were by turns fierce, or funny, or 
 thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it 
 was usually bundled into a net to be out of her way. Round 
 shoulders had Jo, and big hands and feet, a fly-away look to 
 her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl 
 who was rapidly shooting up into a woman, and didn t like 
 it." 
 
 "Work," as I have said before, was very largely the story 
 of the author s own struggle with the world ; as " Hospital 
 Sketches " was the simple record of her own experience as a 
 hospital nurse. 
 
 " Little Men " was chiefly imaginary, and was written in 
 Rome in 1871. " Moods " was composed, in its earliest form, 
 at eighteen ; and was, says Miss Alcott, " the book into 
 which I put most time, love, and hope ; and it is much truer 
 than people suppose. Sylvia was suggested by my own 
 moods, through which, however, I never got into any senti 
 mental woes. But they have gone with me through my life, 
 
48 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 and made it both harder and richer by the alternations of 
 delight and despondency which they have brought me the 
 success the world sees, and the private trials and defeats are 
 known to myself only." 
 
 Some time after " Moods " was published a lady asked Miss 
 Alcott how she knew her story. " I had never known be 
 fore," said Miss Alcott, "that she had a story at all. But I 
 was glad of the question, which assured me that the fanciful 
 heart-experiences of my book were possible." 
 
 " An Old-Fashioned Girl," and, indeed, all the remaining 
 books, with the exception of " Shawl-Straps," are imaginary. 
 " Shawl-Straps " is the record of Miss Alcott s second Euro 
 pean journey a year in duration in which she was accom 
 panied by her artist sister May, and Miss Bartlett, an inti 
 mate friend. This journej , taken in 1870-71, is described 
 in so lively a manner that the reader really feels as if he had 
 shared it. In this book the author figures as " Livy," other 
 wise " the Raven," otherwise " the old Lady ; " the last a title 
 which she began to bestow on herself before the rest of the 
 world had dreamed of calling her middle-aged. She repre 
 sents Livy as groaning with rheumatism and neuralgia, nurs 
 ing her woes, and croaking as dismally as any other raven ; 
 but you cannot help finding out that she was, after all, the 
 brightest, most delightful travelling companion, and most in 
 dulgent duenna with whom any two girls were ever blessed. 
 
 Miss Alcott had learned her London by heart in 1865, and 
 had made up her mind that, next to Boston, it was the most 
 delightful of cities. Its mud and fog were dear to her ; its 
 beef and beer outrivalled nectar and ambrosia ; and its 
 steady-going, respectable citizens were heroes and heroines 
 to her fancy. Therefore, when she got there, "the old lady" 
 sniffed with delight the familiar fogs, and found herself in a 
 paradise more congenial than France or Italy had been. 
 
 The last twelve years have been for Miss Alcott full of tri 
 umphant prosperity. She has orders so numerous that she 
 cannot fulfil them her books go through edition after edi 
 tion iind in acknowledgment of a gift from her publishers 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 49 
 
 om her fiftieth birthday, November 29, 1882, she wrote : "It 
 was very kind of you to remember the old lady, and thus to 
 make this peculiarly sad birthday happier. . . . The burden 
 of fifty years is much lightened by the expressions of affec 
 tion that come to me from east and west, and as I turn my 
 face toward sunset I find so much to make the down-hill jour 
 ney smooth and lovely, that, like Christiana, I go on my way 
 rejoicing with a cheerful heart." 
 
 Miss Alcott certainly carries the burden of her fifty years 
 lightly. If you met her now, you would see a stately lady, 
 unusually tall, with thick, dark hair, clear-seeing, blue-gray 
 eyes, and strong, resolute features, full of varied expression. 
 
 How well I remember the humorous twinkle in her eyes, 
 which half belied the grave earnestness of her manner, when 
 she told me once that she was inclined to believe in the trans 
 migration of souls. 
 
 " I have often thought," she said, " that I may have been a 
 horse before I was Louisa Alcott. As a long-limbed child I 
 had all a horse s delight in racing through the fields, and toss 
 ing my head to sniff the morning air. Now, I am more than 
 half-persuaded that I am a man s soul, put by some freak of 
 nature into a woman s body." 
 
 " Why do you think that?" I asked, in the spirit of Bos- 
 well addressing Dr. Johnson. 
 
 " Well, for one thing," and the blue-gray eyes sparkled 
 with laughter, " because I have fallen in love in my life with 
 so many pretty girls, and never once the least little bit with 
 any man." 
 
 These recent years, that have brought to Miss Alcott such 
 great prosperity, have also brought to her much keen sorrow. 
 The dear mother, whose story reads like one of the lives of 
 the saints, who never was so poor that she had not something 
 to give, and who was herself the guide and teacher of her 
 children, not in books alone, but in everything that was 
 lovely and noble and of good report, lived long enough, 
 thank Heaven, to taste all the sweetness of her daughter s 
 good fortune. The most precious thing in Miss Alcott g 
 
50 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 triumph was that she could lay its fruits at her mother s feet, 
 and cheer with them the last years of that brave and faithful 
 life. Mrs. Alcott had dearly loved noble books. When her 
 girls were young she used to read aloud to them from the 
 best authors while they sewed ; and this was a large part of 
 their education. Her own love for books went with her all 
 through her life, till one day in 1877, a week before her 
 death, she laid down her favorite Johnson, too weary to go 
 on with him, and said, quietly, "I shall read no more, but I 
 thank my good father for the blessing the love of literature 
 has been to me for seventy years." 
 
 The death of this faithful and loving mother was as beauti 
 ful as her life had been. Her last words to her husband 
 were, " You are laying a very soft pillow for me to rest on." 
 And when her failing breath made it difficult to speak, she 
 whispered, with a lovely, loving look, "A smile is as good 
 as a prayer," and soon, waving her hand to the picture of her 
 absent daughter, then in Europe, she said " Good-by, my 
 little May, good-by ! " and so died, to use Miss Alcott s 
 own words, " in the arms of that child who owed her most, 
 who loved her best, and had counted as her greatest success 
 the power of making these last years a season of happy rest 
 to the truest and tenderest of mothers." 
 
 It is the dearest plan in Miss Alcott s scheme of future 
 literary work to write the biography of this noble mother, 
 who had a heart warm enough and large enough to shelter the 
 sinful as well as the sorrowful ; and who so loved the worst 
 and weakest of her fellow-creatures that she joyed in noth 
 ing so much as in spending and being spent for them. 
 
 In March, 1878, Miss Alcott s youngest sister, May, was 
 married, in Paris, to Ernst Nieriker ; and in December, 
 1879, she died, leaving to Louisa s care her infant daughter, 
 Louisa May Nieriker, who was brought home to her aunt in 
 September, 1880, the partial consolation for so grievous a 
 loss. 
 
 " The Orchards," for twenty-five years the home of the 
 Alcotts, is now devoted to the " Summer School of Philoso- 
 
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 51 
 
 phy," .and Miss Alcott and her father live at present in the 
 house where Tliorcau died, together with Mrs. Pratt, Miss 
 Alcott s widowed sister, and her children. Here for some 
 time past Miss Alcott had been absorbed in the care of her 
 father, stricken the 22d of October, 1882, with paralysis. 
 
 I cannot forget my own last interview with this serene old 
 man, of whom Thoreau wrote : " Great Looker ! Great Ex- 
 pecter ! to converse with him was a New England night s 
 entertainment." 
 
 It was, I think, in February, 1882, I stood under an um 
 brella, in a light snow, waiting for a horse-car. Mr. Alcott 
 came by and stopped to speak to me, with that wise yet 
 genial smile which always seemed like a benediction. He 
 said a few friendly sentences, and then I spoke of his book 
 of " Sonnets and Canzonets," and asked, " How is it, Mr. 
 Alcott, that at eighty-two you are so vigorous and strong, 
 and with a poet s heart alive in you yet? " 
 
 "It is," he said, "because I have kept the ten command 
 ments. Men were meant to live a hundred years at least 
 only they have disobeyed the laws. Let us have several 
 generations of people who live healthfully and keep the com 
 mandments, and we may have those who will be able to say, 
 I think I will not stop at a hundred years. I will live on! 
 
 " Great Expecter," indeed ! It seemed to me, then, that 
 he might probably realize his own idea of living a hundred 
 years ; and the news of his illness shocked me with surprise as 
 well as with grief. He is a man who has walked so long in 
 heavenly places that for him to die will be but " to pass from 
 this room into the next." 
 
 Concerning Miss Alcott, it remains only to speak of her 
 education and her methods of work. She was educated 
 rather by reading than by study. She was always a great 
 reader, never a great student. At fifteen Ralph Waldo Em 
 erson introduced her to the works of Goethe, which have 
 ever since been her delight. Her personal library consists of 
 Goethe, Emerson, Shakspeare, Margaret Fuller, Miss Edge- 
 worth, and George Sand. George Eliot she does not care 
 4 
 
52 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT. 
 
 for, nor does she enjoy any of the modern poets, except 
 Whittier; but she likes Coleridge, Keats, and, farther back, 
 Crashaw, and godly George Herbert, and a few of their con 
 temporaries. 
 
 She never had a study any corner will answer to write 
 in. She is not particular as to pens and paper, and an old 
 atlas on her knee is all the desk she cares for. She has the 
 wonderful power to carry a dozen plots in her head at a time, 
 thinking them over whenever she is in the mood. Sometimes 
 she carries a plot thus for years, and suddenly finds it all 
 ready to be written. Often, in the dead waste and middle 
 of the night, she lies awake and plans whole chapters, word 
 for word, and when daylight comes has only to write them 
 oft* as if she were copying. In her hardest-working days she 
 used to write fourteen hours in the twenty-four, sitting 
 steadily at her work, and scarcely tasting food till her daily 
 task was done. 
 
 Very few of her stories have been written in Concord. 
 This peaceful, pleasant place, whose fields are classic ground, 
 utterly lacks inspiration for Miss Alcott. She calls it " this 
 dull town " ; and when she has a story to write she goes to 
 Boston, hires a quiet room, and shuts herself up in it, and 
 waits for an east wind of inspiration, which never fails. In a 
 month or so the book will be done, and its author comes out, 
 " tired, hungry, and cross," and ready to go back to Concord 
 and vegetate for a time. When engaged in the work of com 
 position her characters seem more real to her than actual 
 people. They will not obey her she merely writes of them 
 what she seems to see and hear and sometimes these 
 shadows whom she has conjured almost affright her with 
 their wilful reality. She never copies, and seldom corrects 
 from before these men and women, great and small, she 
 pulls away the curtain and lets us see them as they are. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony s Parentage Her Girlhood A Rebellious Quaker 
 Incident in Her Early Life The Heighth of Her Ambition A 
 " High-Seat" Quaker Incident in Her Experience as Teacher Advo 
 cating Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and Woman Suffrage Her Facility 
 and Power as an Orator Speaking to a Deaf and Dumb Audience 
 Incident on a Mississippi Steamboat Celebrating Her Fiftieth Birth 
 dayTrip to Europe Incidents of Foreign Travel Arrested for 
 Voting The Legal Struggle that followed Her Labors for Woman 
 Suffrage Her Industry and Self-denial for the Cause Personal Ap 
 pearance. 
 
 " He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune ; for they are Impedi 
 ments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of 
 greatest merit, for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men ; 
 which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public." 
 
 HIS bit of Baconian philosophy, as alike applica 
 ble to women, was the subject, not long since, 
 of my conversation with a remarkably gifted 
 young English woman. She was absorbed in 
 many public interests, and had conscientiously 
 resolved never to marry, lest the cares neces 
 sarily involved should make inroads upon her 
 lime and thought to the detriment of the gen 
 eral good. " Unless," said she, " some women 
 dedicate themselves to the public service, society is 
 robbed of needed guardians for the special wants 
 of the weak and unfortunate. There should be in the secular 
 world certain orders, corresponding in a measure to the grand 
 
 53 
 
54 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 sisterhoods of the Catholic Church, to the members of which, 
 as freely as to men, all offices, civic and ecclesiastical, should 
 be open." That this ideal will be reali/ed may be inferred 
 from the fact that exceptional women have, in all ages, been 
 leaders in great projects of charity and reform, and that now 
 many stand waiting only the sanction of their century, ready 
 for wide altrinstic labors. 
 
 The world has ever had its vestal virgins, its holy women, 
 mothers of ideas rather than men : its Marys, as well as its 
 Marthas, who, rather than be busy housewives, preferred to 
 sit at the feet of divine wisdom, and ponder the mysteries of 
 the unknown. All hail to Maria Mitchell, Harriet Hosmer, 
 Charlotte Cushman, Alice and Phoebe Gary, Louisa Alcott, 
 and Frances Willard ! All honor to the noble women that 
 have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of man 
 kind ! 
 
 In this galaxy of single women we shall place one other 
 star, to be pronounced, perhaps, by the future as of the 
 first magnitude. If we seek out what first kindled that flame, 
 
 O 
 
 we find but a tiny spark, a few rough words, roughly spoken : 
 "It takes some time to get the hang of the barn," uncouth 
 answer to kindly inquiry of gentle Quaker host, as to the 
 new teacher s first day s experience in his public school. The 
 vulgar words fell not on stony grounds, but on rich virgin 
 soil, and have borne fruit to us. Demure Quaker daughter 
 sitting there, apparently intent upon the wholesome New 
 England dinner, was, in truth, putting to her ardent soul a 
 mighty question, to which her life was to give answer. The 
 modest, conscientious girl of twenty for Susan Anthony 
 was twenty on the fifteenth day of the second month of that 
 year, 1840, just a score of years younger than her century 
 fell to pondering. For many days Susan had been eagerly 
 anticipating the arrival of the male teacher, whom the board 
 of education had selected to take her school during the win 
 ter. Surely, thought she, he must be very superior ; for 
 even her teaching and discipline had now unbounded praise, 
 and he was to receive treble her salary ! And here at last is 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 55 
 
 the ugly fact, " It takes some time to get the hang of the 
 barn ! " Think you not that our quiet, earnest, Susan longed 
 to rescue her village bairns, with immortality struggling in 
 each little soul, from the guidance of that homespun farmer 
 lad? Burning questions arose in the girl s mind, and she 
 went apart to think. Susan Anthony did not then solve her 
 vast problem : perhaps true solution has not yet come to any 
 seeker ; but friends and even many foes begin to think that 
 she had found at least one unknown quantity in this equation 
 of the vague, this world mystery, what is the true rela 
 tion of man to woman ; what can render justice between them? 
 This bit of womanhood had not received unwholesome train 
 ing for a clear insight into questions of absolute right. 
 
 Susan B. Anthony was of sturdy New England stock, and it 
 was at the foot of Old Greylock, South Adams, Massachu 
 setts, that she gave fKrth her first rebellious cry against the 
 world of formulas that awaited her. There the baby steps 
 were taken, and at the village school the first stitches were 
 learned, and the A, B, C, in good, old, stupid, orthodox 
 fashion, duly mastered. When live winters had passed over 
 the solemn little head there came a time of great domestic 
 commotion, and the child-mind, in its small way, seized the 
 idea that permanence is not the rule of life. The family 
 moved to Battenville, New York, where Mr. Anthony became 
 one of the wealthiest men in Washington County. Susan can 
 still recall the stately coldness of the great house, how large 
 the bare rooms, with their yellow painted floors, seemed in 
 contrast with her own diminutiveness, and the outlook of the 
 schoolroom where for so many years, with her brothers and 
 sisters, she pursued her studies under private tutors. 
 
 The father of our young heroine was a stern Hicksite Qua 
 ker. In Susan s early life he objected on principle to all 
 forms of frivolous amusement, such as music, dancing, novel 
 reading ; games and even pictures were regarded as mean 
 ingless luxuries, if not as relaxing to strict morality. Such 
 puritanical convictions might have easily degenerated into the 
 nieagerest formalism, expressing itself in most nasal cant; 
 
56 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 but underlying all was a broad and firm basis of wholesome 
 respect for individual freedom, and a brave adherence, in deed 
 as well as word, to the best truth that lay hid in the heart of 
 him. No personal belief could blind him to the essentials of 
 life. He was a man of good business capacity, and a thorough 
 
 manager of his wide and lucrative interests. He saw that 
 o 
 
 compensation and not chance ruled in the commercial world ; 
 and he believed in the same just, though often severe, law in 
 the sphere of morals. Such a man was not apt to walk humbly 
 in the path mapped out by his religious sect. He early of 
 fended by choosing a Baptist for his wife. Heinous offence ! 
 for which he was disowned, and, according to Quaker usage, 
 could only be received into fellowship again by declaring him 
 self " sorry " for his crime in full meeting. Sad plight this for a 
 happy bridegroom ! yea, very sad ! For his heart said that 
 he was full of devout thankfulness for the good woman by 
 his side, and destined to be thankful to the very end for this 
 companion, so calm, so just, so far-seeing. Sturdily he rose 
 in meeting, and in quiet, manly way, said he was " sorry " 
 that the rules of the society were such, that, in marrying the 
 woman he loved, he had committed offence ! Here s a man 
 of worth ; necessary to the society ; he admits he is " sorry " 
 for something, it does not matter what, let him be taken 
 back into the body of the faithful ! But this rebel s faith had 
 begun to weaken in many minor points of discipline ; his coat 
 soon becomes a cause of offence, and calls forth another 
 reproof from the moralities tightly buttoned in conforming 
 garments. The convenient coat was adhered to ; forgiveness 
 once more granted. The petty forms of Liberal Quaker 
 ism began to lose their weight with him altogether, and he 
 was finally disowned for allowing the village youth to be 
 taught dancing in a large upper room of his dwelling. He 
 was applied to for this favor on the ground that young men 
 were under great temptation to drink if the lessons were 
 given in the hotel ; and, being a rigid temperance man, he 
 readily consented, though his principles in regard to dancing 
 would not allow his own sons and daughters to join in the 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 57 
 
 amusement. But the society could accept no such nice dis 
 crimination in what it deemed sin, nor such compromise with 
 worldly frivolity. Flagrant cause this for reprimand ! But 
 the final appeal, this time, the rebel makes to his own con 
 science, and receives the verdict, " well done, good and 
 faithful servant," and he is seen no more in meeting, nor 
 in churches where the creeds rule. But in later years, in 
 Rochester, he sits an attentive listener to the soul truths of 
 Rev. William Henry Channing. 
 
 The effect of all this on our young reformer is the question 
 of interest. No doubt she early weighed the comparative 
 moral effects of coats cut with capes and those cut without, 
 of purely Quaker conjugal love, and that deteriorated with 
 Baptist affection. Weighty problems, too, she heard dis 
 cussed, and decisions on all the vital questions of the hour, 
 overriding compromises based on the absolutely true. Susan 
 had an earnest soul, a conscience tending to morbidity; but 
 a strong, well-balanced body and simple family life soothed 
 the too active moral nature, and gave the world, instead of a 
 religious fanatic, hypochondriac philosopher, a sincere, con 
 centrated worker. Every household art was taught her by 
 her mother, and so great was her ability that the duty de 
 manding especial care was always given into her hands. But 
 ever, amid school and household tasks, the day-dream of the 
 demure little maid was that in time she might be a " high- 
 scat" Quaker. Each Sunday, up to the time of the third 
 disobedience, Mr. Anthony, with honest faith, went to his 
 distant Mecca, the Quaker meeting-house, some thirteen miles 
 from home, wife and children usually accompanying him ; 
 though, as non-members, they were rigidly excluded from all 
 business discussions. Exclusion was very pleasant in the 
 bright days of summer ; but not so for the seven year-old 
 Susan, her father s sole companion, on one occasion in frosty 
 December. When the blinds were drawn at the close of the 
 religious meeting, and non-members retired, Susan, with de 
 termination on her brow, remained. Soon she saw a thin old 
 lady with blue goggles come down from the " high-seat." 
 
58 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 Approaching her, the Quakeress spoke softly ; and Susan 
 wondered if she was moved by the spirit when she said, 
 "Thee is not a member, theo must go out." "No; my 
 mother told me not to go out in the cold, was the child s 
 firm response. "Yes, but thee must go out, thee is not a 
 member." But my father is a member." Calm logic fol 
 lowed. " Thee is not a member." Finally, with all the voice 
 she could muster, the child pleads, " It is cold ! " But the 
 " high-seat " constable of the decencies gently answers, "Thee 
 must go," and Susan felt as if the spirit was moving her, and 
 soon found herself in outer coldness. Fingers and toes be 
 coming numb, and a bright fire in a cottage over the way 
 beckoning warmly to her, the exile from the chapel of the 
 tender mercies resolved to seek secular shelter. But alas ! 
 she was confronted by an advocate of " might makes right," 
 in the shape of a huge dog, and just escaped with whole skin 
 though capeless jacket. Stern defender this was, no doubt, 
 of Quaker faith as to fitting style of garment. We may be 
 sure there was much talk that night at the home fireside 
 about "high-seat goggles," meaningless forms, and cant, and 
 stern resolution was taken by the good Baptist wife that no 
 child of hers should attend meeting again till made a mem 
 ber. " So it was," says Miss Anthony, " by means of a rent 
 in my best jacket that I can lay claim to being a member of 
 any church. 
 
 Later definite convictions took root in Miss Anthony s 
 heart. Hers is, indeed, a sincerely religious nature, not 
 of the " blue-goggle" sort, but of the humanitarian. To be a 
 simple, earnest Quaker was the aspiration of her girlhood ; 
 but she shrank from adopting the formal language and plain 
 dress. Dark hours of conflict were spent over all this, and 
 she interpreted her disinclination as evidence of unworthiness. 
 Poor little Susan, as we look back with the knowledge of 
 your later life, we translate the heart-burnings as unconscious 
 protests against labelling your free soul, against testing your 
 reasoning conviction of to-morrow by any shibboleth of to 
 day s belief. We hail this child-intuition as a prophecy of 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 59 
 
 the uncompromising truthfulness of the mature woman. Su 
 san Anthony was trained to no dogmas, taught simply that 
 she must enter into the holy of holies of her own self, meet 
 herself, and be true to the revelation. She first found words 
 to express her convictions in listening to William Henry 
 Channing, whose teaching had a lasting spiritual influence 
 upon her. To-day Miss Anthony is an agnostic ; as to the 
 nature of the Godhead, and of the life beyond her horizon she 
 does not profess to know anything. Every energy of her 
 soul is centred upon the needs of the world. To her work 
 is worship. She has not stood aside shivering in the cold 
 shadows of uncertainty ; but has moved on with the whirling 
 world, has done the good given her to do, and thus in darkest 
 hours has been sustained by an unfaltering faith in the final 
 perfection of all things. Her belief is not orthodox, but it 
 is religious, based on the high and severe moralities. In 
 ancient Greece she would have been a Stoic ; in the era of 
 the Reformation, a Calvinist ; in King Charles s time, a 
 Puritan ; but in this nineteenth century, by the very laws of 
 her being, she is a Reformer. 
 
 For the arduous work that awaited Miss Anthony her 
 years of young womanhood had given preparation. The 
 father, though a man of wealth, made it a matter of conscience 
 to train his girls as well as his boys to honest self-support. 
 Accordingly Susan chose the profession of teacher, and made 
 her first essay during a summer vacation, in a school her 
 father had established for the children of his employees. Her 
 success was so marked, not only in imparting knowledge, but 
 also as a disciplinarian, that she followed this career steadily, 
 with the exception of some months given in Philadelphia 
 to her own training, for fifteen years. Of the many school 
 rebellions which she overcame one rises before me prominent 
 in its ludicrous aspects. Before whirling off into Miss 
 Anthony s broader fields of conquest, let us take a peep into 
 the district school at Centre Falls, in the year 1839. Bad 
 reports were current there of male teachers ignominiously 
 driven out by a certain strapping lad, through open windows. 
 
60 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 Rumor new tells of a Quaker maiden coming to teach, Quaker 
 maiden of peace principles. She can be sent out circum 
 spectly by open door. She is to bo gently dealt with, for 
 she s against floggings. The anticipated day and Susan arrive. 
 She looks very meek to the barbarian of fifteen, so he soon 
 begins his antics. lie is called to the platform, told to lay 
 aside his jacket, and thereupon with much astonishment 
 receives from the mild Quaker maiden, with a birch-rod 
 applied calmly but with precision, an exposition of the 
 argumentum ad hominem based on the d posteriori method 
 of reasoning. Thus Susan departed from her principles, but 
 not from her school. 
 
 But now there are mighty conflicts in the outside world 
 disturbing our young teacher. Her mmd wanders ; the 
 multiplication-table and spelling-book no longer enchain her 
 thoughts ; larger questions begin to fill her mind. About 
 the year 1850 Susan B. Anthony hid her ferule quite away, 
 and put off her laurel crown in teacherdom. Temperance, 
 anti-slavery, woman suffrage, three pregnant questions, 
 presented themselves, demanding consideration. Higher, 
 ever higher, rose their appeals, until she resolved, in the 
 silence of her individual self, to dedicate her every energy and 
 thought to the burning needs of the hour. Owing to early 
 experience of the disabilities of her sex, the first demand for 
 equal rights for women found echo in Susan Anthony s heart. 
 And though she was in the beginning startled to hear that 
 women had actually met in convention, and by speeches and 
 resolutions declared themselves man s peer in political rights, 
 urging radical changes in State constitutions, and the whole 
 system of American jurisprudence ; yet the most casual review 
 convinced her that these claims were but the logical outgrowth 
 of the fundamental theories of our republic. 
 
 Miss Anthony first carried her red flag of rebellion into the 
 State conventions of teachers, and there fought, almost single- 
 handed, the battle of equality. At the close of the first 
 decade she had compelled conservatism to yield its ground so 
 far as to permit women to participate in all debates, deliver 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 61 
 
 essays, vote, and hold honored positions as officers. She 
 labored as sincerely in the temperance movement, until con 
 vinced that woman s moral power amounted to little as a civil 
 agent until backed by a ballot, and coined into State law. 
 She still never loses an occasion to defend teetotalism and 
 prohibition ; but to every question the refrain of Poe s raven 
 was not more persistently "never more," than Miss Anthony s 
 response, " woman suffrage." 
 
 It was in 1852 that anti-slavery, through the eloquent lips 
 of such men as Pillsbury, George Thompson, Phillips, and 
 Garrison, first proclaimed to her its pressing necessities. To 
 their inspired words she gave answer four years afterwards 
 by becoming a regularly employed agent in the Anti-Slavery 
 Society. For her espoused cause she has always made 
 boldest demands. In the abolition meetings she used to tell 
 each class why it should support the movement financially, 
 invariably calling upon Democrats to give liberally, as the 
 success of the cause would enable them to cease bowing 1 the 
 
 O 
 
 knee to the slave power, and to be " decent sort of men." 
 Mr. Garrison said, the first time he heard this plea, "Well, 
 Miss Anthony, you re the most audacious beggar I ever 
 heard." 
 
 There is scarce a town, however small, from New York to 
 San Francisco, that has not heard the ringing voice of our 
 heroine. Who can number the speeches she has made on 
 lyceum platforms, in churches, school-houses, halls, barns, 
 and in the open air, with lumber wagons and carts for her 
 rostrum? Who can describe the varied audiences and social 
 circles she has cheered and interested? Now we see her on 
 the far-off prairies entertaining, with her sterling common 
 sense, large gatherings of men, women, and children, seated 
 on rough boards in some unfinished building ; again, holding 
 public debates in some town with half-fledged editors and 
 clergymen ; next, sailing up the Columbia River, and, in hot 
 haste to meet some appointment, jolting over the rough 
 mountains of Oregon and Washington Territories ; and, then, 
 before legislative assemblies, constitutional conventions, and 
 
62 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 congressional committees, discussing with senators and judges 
 the letter and spirit of constitutional law. 
 
 Miss Anthony s style of speaking is rapid and vehement ; 
 in debate, ready and keen ; and she is always equal to an 
 emergency. Many times in travelling with her through the 
 West, especially on our first trip to Kansas and California, we 
 were suddenly called on to speak to the women assembled 
 at the stations. Filled with consternation, I usually appealed 
 to her to go first; and, without a moment s hesitation, she 
 could always fill five minutes with some appropriate words, 
 and inspire me with thoughts and courage to follow. The 
 climax of these occasions was in an institution for the deaf 
 and dumb in Michigan. I had just said to my friend, " There 
 is one comfort in visiting this place, we shall not be asked to 
 speak," when the superintendent approaching us said, "Ladies, 
 the pupils are assembled in the chapel ready to hear you. I 
 promised to invite you to speak to them as soon as I heard 
 you were in town." The possibility of addressing such an 
 audience was as novel to Miss Anthony as to me ; yet she 
 promptly walked down the aisle to the platform as if to per 
 form an ordinary duty, while I, half distracted with anxiety, 
 wondering by what process I was to be placed in communi 
 cation with the deaf and dumb, reluctantly followed. But 
 the manner was simple enough when illustrated. The super 
 intendent, standing by our side, repeated in the sign language 
 what was said as fast as uttered, and by tears, laughter, and 
 earnest attention the pupils showed that they fully appreciated 
 the pathos, humor, and argument. 
 
 One night, crossing the Mississippi at McGregor, Iowa, we 
 were ice-bound in the middle of the river. The boat was 
 crowded with people, standing hungry, tired, cross with the 
 delay. Some gentlemen, Avith whom we had been talking 
 on the cars, started the cry for a speech on woman suffrage. 
 Accordingly, in the middle of the Mississippi river, at mid 
 night, we presented our claims to political representation, 
 and debated the question of universal suffrage until we landed. 
 Our voyagers were quite thankful that we had shortened the 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 63 
 
 mnny hours, rmd we equally so . it having made several con 
 verts, and held a convention in the very bosom of the great 
 "Father of Waters." Only once in all these wanderings was 
 Miss Anthony taken by surprise, and that was on being asked 
 to speak to the inmates of an insane asylum. "Bless me," 
 said she, " it is as much as I can do to talk to the sane ! 
 What could I say to an audience of lunatics ? " Her com 
 panion, Mrs. Virginia L. Minor, of St. Louis, replied, 
 " This is a golden moment for you, the first opportunity you 
 have ever had, according to the constitutions, to talk to your 
 peers ; for is riot the right of suffrage denied to idiots, 
 criminals, lunatics, and women?" 
 
 Much curiosity has been expressed as to the love-life of 
 Miss Anthony ; but if she has enjoyed or suffered any of the 
 usual triumphs or disappointments of her sex she has not yet 
 vouchsafed this information to her biographers. While few 
 women have had more sincere and lasting friendships, or a 
 more extensive correspondence with a large circle of noble 
 men, yet I doubt if one of them can boast of having received 
 from her any exceptional attention. She has often playfully 
 said, when questioned on this point, that she could not con 
 sent that the man she loved, described in the constitution as 
 a white male, native-born, American citizen, possessed of the 
 right of self-government, eligible to the office of President of 
 the great Republic, should unite his destinies in marriage 
 with a political slave and pariah. " No, no ; when I am 
 crowned with all the rights, privileges, and immunities of a 
 citizen, I may give some consideration to these social prob 
 lems ; but until then I must concentrate all my energies on 
 the enfranchisement of my own sex." Miss Anthony s love- 
 life, like her religion, has manifested itself in steadfast, 
 earnest labors for man in general. She has been a watchful 
 and affectionate daughter, sister, friend ; and those who have 
 felt the pulsations of her great heart, know how warmly it 
 beats for all. 
 
 As the custom has long been observed among married 
 women of celebrating the anniversaries of their wedding-day, 
 
64 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 quite properly the initiation has been taken, in late years, of 
 doing honor to the great events in the lives of single women. 
 Being united in closest matrimony to her profession, Dr. Har 
 riet K. Hunt, of Boston, celebrated her twenty-fifth } r ear of 
 faithful service as a physician by giving to her friends and 
 patrons a large reception, which she called her silver-wed 
 ding. From a feeling of the sacredness of her life-work, the 
 admirers of Susan B. Anthony have been moved to mark by 
 reception and conventions her rapid flowing years, and the 
 passing decades of the suffrage movement. To the most 
 brilliant occasion of this kind, the invitation cards, finely 
 engraved, with the letters " W. B " elaborately wrought in an 
 embossed monogram, were as follows : 
 
 " The ladies of the Woman s Bureau invite you to a reception 
 on Tuesday evening, February 15, to celebrate the fiftieth birth 
 day of Susan B. Anthony, when her friends will have an oppor 
 tunity to show their appreciation of her long services in behalf of 
 woman s emancipation. 
 
 " ELIZABETH B. PHELPS, 
 "ANNA B. DARLING, 
 " CHARLOTTE BEEBE WILBOUR. 
 " 49 EAST 23o STREET, NEW YORK, 
 February 10, 1870." 
 
 In response to the invitation the parlors at the Bureau were 
 crowded with friends to congratulate Miss Anthony on the 
 happy event, many bringing valuable gifts as an expression 
 of their gratitude. Among other presents were a handsome 
 gold watch, and checks to the amount of a thousand dollars. 
 The guests were entertained with music, recitations, the read 
 ing of many piquant letters of regret from distinguished peo 
 ple, and witty rhymes, written for the occasion by the Cary 
 sisters. Miss Anthony received her guests with her usual 
 straightforward simplicity, and in a few earnest words ex 
 pressed her thanks for the presents and praises showered 
 upon her. The comments of the leading journals next day 
 were highly complimentary and as genial as amusing. All 
 dwelt on the fact that at last a woman had arisen brave 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 65 
 
 enough to assert her right to grow old, and openly declare 
 that half a century had rolled over her head. 
 
 As a writer Miss Anthony is clear and concise, dealing in 
 facts rather than rhetoric. Of carefully-prepared written 
 speeches she has had few ; but these, by the high praise they 
 called forth, prove that she can in spite of her own declara 
 tion to the contrary put her sterling thoughts on paper 
 concisely and effectively. After her exhaustive plea in 1880 
 for a XVIth Amendment before the Judiciary Committee of the 
 Senate, Senator Edmonds accosted her as she was leaving the 
 Capitol, and said he neglected to tell her in the committee- 
 room that she had made an argument, no matter what his 
 personal feelings were as to the conclusions reached, which 
 was unanswerable, an argument, unlike the usual platform 
 oratory given at hearings, suited to a committee of men 
 trained to the law. 
 
 It was in 1876 that Miss Anthony gave her much criticised 
 lecture on tf Social Purity " in Boston. As to the result she 
 felt very anxious ; for the intelligence of New England com 
 posed her audience, and it did not still her heart-beats to see 
 sitting just in front of the platform her revered friend, 
 William Lloyd Garrison. But surely every fear vanished 
 when she felt the grand old abolitionist s hand warmly press 
 ing hers, and heard him say, that to listen to no one else 
 would he have had courage to leave his sick-room, and that he 
 felt fully repaid by her grand speech, which neither in matter 
 nor manner would he have changed in the smallest particular. 
 But into Miss Anthony s private correspondence one must 
 look for examples of her most effective writings. Verb or 
 subject is usually wanting, but you can always catch the 
 thought, and will ever find it clear and suggestive. It is a 
 strikingly strange dialect, but one that touches at times the 
 deepest chords of pathos and humor, and, when stirred by 
 some great event, is highly eloquent. 
 
 From being the most ridiculed and mercilessly persecuted 
 woman, Miss Anthony has become the most honored and re 
 spected in the nation. Witness the praises of press and peo- 
 
66 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 pie, and the enthusiastic ovations she received on her depart 
 ure for Europe. Never were warmer expressions of regret 
 for an absence, nor more sincere prayers for a speedy return, 
 accorded any American on leaving his native shores. This 
 slow awaking to the character of her services shows the abid 
 ing sense of justice in the human soul, that, sooner or later, 
 seeks to atone for the martyrdom of those who are called to 
 expiate the sins of the people. Having spent the winter of 
 1882-3 in Washington, trying to press to a vote the bill for a 
 XVIth Amendment before Congress, and the autumn in a 
 vigorous campaign through Nebraska, where a constitutional 
 amendment to enfranchise women had been submitted to the 
 people, she felt the imperative need of an entire change in 
 the current of her thoughts. Accordingly, after one of the 
 most successful conventions ever held at the national capital, 
 and a most flattering ovation in the spacious parlors of the 
 Riggs House, she went to Philadelphia. Here she was given 
 another public reception by the Citizens Suffrage Associa 
 tion, whose president, Mr. Robert Purvis, presented to her, 
 in the name of the society, an engraved testimonial of their 
 regard and allegiance. To some it may suggest a pregnant 
 thought that the date of Miss Anthony s departure for Europe 
 Avas the birthday anniversary of the first President of the 
 United States. 
 
 Fortunate in being perfectly well during the entire voyage, 
 our traveller received perpetual enjoyment in watching the 
 ever-varying sea and sky. To the captain s merry challenge 
 to find anything so grand as the ocean, she replied : " Yes, 
 these mighty forces in nature do indeed fill me with awe ; but 
 this vessel, with deep-buried fires, powerful machinery, 
 spacious decks, and tapering masts, walking the waves like 
 a thing of life, and all the work of man, impresses one still 
 more deeply. Lo ! in man s divine creative power is fulfilled 
 the prophecy, Ye shall be as gods I " 
 
 In all her journeyings through Germany, Italy, and 
 France, Miss Anthony was never the traveller, but always 
 the humanitarian incognito, the reformer in traveller s guise. 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 67 
 
 Few of the great masterpieces of art gave her real enjoy 
 ment ; the keen appreciation of the beauties of sculpture, 
 painting, architecture, one would have expected to find in so 
 deep a religious nature, was wanting, warped, no doubt, by 
 her early training in Quaker utilities. That her travels gave 
 her more pain than pleasure, was, perhaps, not so much that 
 she had no appreciation of aesthetic beauty, but that she 
 quickly grasped the infinitude of human misery ; not because 
 her soul did not feel the heights to which art had risen, but 
 that it vibrated in every fibre to the depths to which man 
 kind had fallen. Wandering through a gorgeous palace one 
 day, she exclaimed, "What do you find to admire here? If it 
 were a school of five hundred children being educated into 
 the right of self-government, I could admire it, too ; but 
 standing for one man s pleasure, I say, No ! " In the quarters 
 of one of the devotees, at the old monastery of the Certosa, 
 there lies, on a small table, an open book in which visitors 
 register themselves. On the occasion of Miss Anthony s 
 visit the pen and ink proved so unpromising that her entire 
 party declined this opportunity to make themselves famous. 
 But our heroine looked higher than individual glory, and 
 made the rebellious pen inscribe the principle, "Perfect 
 equality for woman, social, political, religious. Susan B. 
 Anthony, U. S. A." Friends who visited the monastery next 
 day reported that lines had been drawn through this heretical 
 sentiment. 
 
 During her visit at the Berlin home of Senator and Mrs. 
 Sargent, Miss Anthony quite innocently posted her letters 
 in the official envelopes of the Suffrage Association of Amer 
 ica. After the revolutionary sentiment, " No just govern 
 ment can be formed without the consent of the governed," 
 printed on the outside, had been carefully examined by 
 the German officials, all the letters were returned ; prob 
 ably nothing saving her from arrest as a socialist under 
 the tyrannical police regulations but the fact that she was 
 the guest of the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United 
 States. 
 
 5 
 
68 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 Miss Anthony s host, during her visit in Paris, writes : "I 
 had never before seen her in the rdle of tourist. She seemed 
 interested only in historical monuments and in the men and 
 questions of the hour. The galleries of the Louvre had little 
 attraction for her, but she gazed with deep pleasure at Napo 
 leon s tomb, Notre Dame, and the ruins of the Tuilleries. 
 She was always ready to listen to discussions on the political 
 problems before the French people, the prospects of the 
 republic, the divorce agitation, and the revolution in favor of 
 women s instruction. I had rather see Jules Terry than all 
 the pictures of the Louvre, Luxembourg, and Salon, she 
 remarked at table. A day or two later she saw Terry at 
 Laboulaye s funeral. The three things which made the 
 deepest impression on Miss Anthony, during her stay at 
 Paris, were probably the interment of Laboulaye, the friend 
 of the United States and of the women s movement ; the 
 touching anniversary demonstration of the Communists, at 
 the Cemetery of Pere La Chaise, on the very spot where the 
 last defenders of the Commune of 1871 were ruthlessly shot 
 and buried in a common grave ; and a woman s rights meet 
 ing, held in a little hall in the Rue de Rivoli, at which the 
 brave, far-seeing Mile. Hubertine Auchet was the leading 
 spirit. 
 
 While on the continent, Miss Anthony experienced the 
 unfortunate sensation of being deaf and dumb ; to speak and 
 not be understood, to hear and not comprehend, were to her 
 bitter realities. We can imagine to what desperation she 
 was brought, when her Quaker prudishness could hail an 
 emphatic oath in English from a French official with the 
 exclamation, "Well, it sounds good to hear some one even 
 swear in old Anglo-Saxon ! " After two months of enforced 
 silence, she was buoyant in reaching the British Islands once 
 more, where she could enjoy public speaking and general con 
 versation. Here she was the recipient of many generous 
 social attentions, and on May 25 a large public meeting of 
 representative people, presided over by Jacob Bright, was 
 called in her honor by the National Association of Great 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 69 
 
 Britain. She spoke on the educational and political status 
 of America, leaving to me the religious and social position of 
 our countrywomen. 
 
 Before closing my friend s biography, I shall trace two 
 golden threads in this closely-woven life of incident. One 
 of the greatest services rendered by Miss Anthony to the 
 suffrage cause was in casting a vote in the Presidential 
 election of 1872, in order to test her rights under the XlVth 
 Amendment. For this offence the brave woman was arrested 
 on Thanksgiving Day, the national holiday handed down to 
 us by Pilgrim Fathers escaped from England s persecutions. 
 New World republicanism, based on inconsistencies, does not 
 contrast favorably with Old World injustice, founded on pre 
 scriptive rights. But this farce of the equities hastens on 
 quickly to its close. Miss Anthony appeals for a writ of 
 habeas corpus. The writ being flatly refused her in January, 
 1873, the courtly counsel gives bonds. Our daring defendant, 
 finding, when too late, that this not only keeps her out of 
 jail, but her case out of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, regretfully determines to fight on and gain the utter 
 most by a State decision. Her trial is appointed for the 
 Rochester term in May. Quickly she canvasses the whole 
 country, laying before every probable juror the strength of 
 her case. The time of trial arrives ; but the Attorney-Gen 
 eral, fearing the result if decision be left to a jury drawn from 
 Bliss Anthony s enlightened county, postpones the trial to 
 the Ontario County Session, in June, 1873. Another county is 
 now to be instructed in all its length and breadth. So short 
 is the time that Miss Anthony asked and received valuable 
 assistance from Matilda Joslyn Gage ; and to meet all this 
 new expense, financial aid was generously given, unsolicited, 
 by Thomas Went worth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, and other 
 sympathizers. But in vain was every effort ; in vain the 
 appeal of Miss Anthony to her jurors ; in vain the logical 
 argument of her gifted counsel, Henry R. Selden ; in vain 
 the moral influence of the leading representatives of the bar 
 of Central New York rilling the court-room, for Judge Hunt, 
 
70 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 without sympathy or precedent to sustain him, declaring it a 
 case of law and not fact, refuses to give the case to the jury, 
 reserving to himself final decision. Is it not an historic scene 
 being enacted here in this little court-house of Canandaijnia ? 
 
 O O 
 
 Do we not witness there all the inconsistencies embodied in 
 this judge, so punctilious in manner, so scrupulous in attire, 
 so conscientious in trivialities, and so obtuse on great prin 
 ciples, fitly described by Charles O Conner, " a very lady-like 
 judge." Behold him sitting there, balancing all the niceties 
 of law and equity in his Old World scales, and at last saying, 
 " The prisoner will stand up. [Whereupon the accused arose.] 
 The sentence of the court is, that you pay a fine of one hun 
 dred dollars and the costs of the prosecution." Strange, 
 unruly defendant, this : " May it please your honor, I shall 
 never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty, * and more to 
 the same effect, all of which she has lived up to. The "lady 
 like " judge has gained some insight into the determination 
 of the prisoner ; so, not wishing to incarcerate her to all 
 eternity, he adds gently, Madame, the court will not 
 order you committed until the fine is paid. * 
 
 It was on the 17th of June that the verdict was given ; the 
 decision was a victory for the inconsistencies. On that 
 very day, a little more than a century before, other injustices 
 gained in an encounter with truth. The brave militia was 
 driven back at Bunker s Hill, back, back, almost wiped out ; 
 yet truth was in their ranks, and justice, too ; but how ended 
 this rebellion of weak colonists? The cause of American 
 womanhood, embodied for the moment in the liberty of a 
 single individual, received a rebuff on June 17, 1873 ; but 
 just so sure as our Revolutionary heroes were in the end 
 victorious, so sure will the alienable rights of our heroines 
 of the nineteenth century receive final vindication. 
 
 In his speech of 1880 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at 
 Harvard, Wendell Phillips said what as a rule is true 
 that a reformer to be conscientious must be free from bread- 
 winning. I should like to open my heroine s account-book 
 and show that this reformer, being perhaps the exception 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 71 
 
 which proves the rule, has been consistently and conscien 
 tiously in debt. Turning over her year-books the pages give 
 a fair record up to 1863. Here begins her first herculean 
 labor. The Woman s Loyal League, sadly in need of funds, is 
 not an incorporated association, so its secretary assumes the 
 debts. Accounts here became quite lamentable, the deficit 
 reaching five thousand dollars. ,It must be paid, and, in 
 fact, will be paid. Anxious, weary hours were spent in 
 crowding Cooper Institute, from week to week, with paid 
 audiences, to listen to such men as Phillips, Curtis, and 
 Douglass, who contributed their services, and lifted the 
 secretary out of debt. Next a cunning device was resorted to 
 in asking the people who signed petitions against slavery to 
 contribute a cent each. "Audacious beggar," this? Yes, and 
 successful, too. At last, after many wanderings, we see cash- 
 book 1863 honorably pigeon-holed. In 1867 we can read 
 account of herculean labor the second. Twenty thousand 
 tracts are needed to convert the voters of Kansas to woman 
 suffrage. That occasions all the sorry plights revealed in the 
 accounts of this year. Travelling expenses to Kansas and 
 the rebellious tracts make the debtor column overreach the 
 creditor some two thousand dollars. There is recognition on 
 these pages of more than one thousand dollars obtained by 
 soliciting advertisements, but no note is made of the weary, 
 burning July days spent in the streets of New York to 
 procure this money, nor of the ready application of the 
 savings made by petty economies from her salary from the 
 Hovey Committee. Enough is it to say that herculean labor 
 number two reached a victorious conclusion cash-book 1867 
 honorable burial in some pigeon-hole ; and chiefest wonder, 
 that our bread-winning reformer remained conscientiously 
 faithful to the truth revealed in her. 
 
 It would have been fortunate for our brave Susan, if cash- 
 books 1868, 1869, and 1870 had never come down from their 
 shelves ; for they sing and sing in notes of debts till all unite 
 in one vast chorus of more than ten thousand dollars. These 
 Tfere the days of the " Revolution," the newspaper, not the war, 
 
72 StTSAtf B. 
 
 though this was warfare for the debt-ridden manager. What 
 
 o o 
 
 is to be done? is the question. Well, five thousand dollars 
 she paid with her fees for lecturing, and with money given her 
 for personal use. One Thanksgiving was in truth a time of 
 returning thanks ; for she received, cancelled, from her 
 cousin, Mr. Lapham, her note for four thousand dollars. 
 After the funeral of Paulina Wright Davis, the bereaved 
 widower pressed into Miss Anthony s hand cancelled notes 
 for five hundred dollars, bearing on the back the words, "In 
 memory of my beloved wife." One other note was cancelled 
 in recognition of her perfect forgetful ness of self-interest and 
 ready sacrifice to the needs of others. When laboring in 
 1874 to fill every engagement in order to meet her debts her 
 mother s Sudden illness called her home. Without one 
 selfish regret, the anxious daughter hastened to Rochester. 
 When recovery Was certain, and Miss Anthony was alxnit to 
 return to her fatiguing labors, her mother gave her at parting 
 her note for a thousand dollars, on which was written, in 
 trembling lines, " In just consideration of the tender sacrifice 
 made to nurse me in severe illness." At last all the "Revolu 
 tion" debt was paid, except that due to her generous sister, 
 Mary Anthony, who used often humorously to assure her she 
 was a fit subject for the bankrupt act. But nothing daunted, 
 this Hercules of the nineteenth century vanquished creditor 
 after creditor, and in 1876 cash-books of revolutionary epoch 
 were safely pigeon-holed. 
 
 There is something humorously pathetic in the death of this 
 first-born of Miss Anthony, whose life proved too rebellious 
 and erratic for even her democratic nature. Mrs. Laura 
 Curtis Bui lard generously assumed the care of the trouble 
 some child, and in order to make the adoption legal, gave 
 the usual one dollar greenback. The very night of the 
 transfer Miss Anthony went to Rochester with the almighty 
 dollar in her pocket, and the little change left after purchas 
 ing her ticket. She arrived safely with her debts, but nothing 
 more, her pocket had been picked ! Oh, thief, would you 
 could but know what value of faithful work you purloined ! 
 
SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 73 
 
 From the close of the year 1876, annuls show favorable signs as 
 to the credit column ; indeed, at the end of five years, there is 
 a solid balance of several thousand dollars earned on severe 
 lecturing tours. But alas I the accounts grow dim again, in 
 fact, credit column fades quite away. Herculean labor in 
 form of " Woman Suffrage History " rises up, and ruthlessly 
 swallows every vestige of Miss Anthony s bank account, 
 excepting one thousand dollars reserved for the European 
 trip. Within the past two years she has been left some 
 twenty thousand dollars, in trust for the cause of woman 
 suffrage, by the will of Mr. Eddy, daughter of Francis Jack 
 son ; but, as the will is in litigation, no part of the money has 
 as yet been received. 
 
 In vain will you search these tell-tale books for evidence 
 of personal extravagance ; for although Miss Anthony thinks 
 it true economy to buy the best, and like Carlyle dislikes 
 shams, her tastes are simple even to Quaker excess. Is there not 
 something very touching in the fact that she has never bought 
 even a book or picture for her own enjoyment? The meagre, 
 personal balance-sheets show but four lapses from severest 
 discipline, lapses that she even now regards as ruthless ex 
 travagances, the purchase of two inexpensive brooches, a 
 much-needed watch, and a pair of cuffs to match a point-lace 
 collar presented by a friend. Long since, friends interested 
 in Miss Anthony s personal appearance have ceased to trust 
 her with the purchase-money for any ornament ; for, however 
 firm her resolution to comply with your wish, the check 
 invariably finds its way to the credit column of these same 
 little cash-books as " money received for the cause." Now, 
 reader, you have been admitted to a private view of Miss 
 Anthony s financial records, and you can appreciate her devo 
 tion to an idea* Do you not agree with me that a " bread 
 winner" can be a conscientious reformer? 
 
 In finishing this sketch of the most intimate friend I have 
 had for the past thirty years, with whom I have spent weeks 
 and months under the same roof, I can truly say she is the 
 most upright, courageous, self-sacrificing, magnanimous. 
 
74 SUSAN B. ANTHONY. 
 
 human being I have ever known. I have seen her beset on 
 every side with the most petty annoyances, ridiculed and mis 
 represented, slandered and persecuted ; I have known women 
 refuse to take her extended hand without vouchsafeing an 
 explanation, women to whom she presented handsomely 
 bound copies of the " History of Woman Suffrage," return it 
 unnoticed, others keep it without one word of acknowledg 
 ment, others write most insulting letters in answer to hers of 
 affectionate conciliation. And yet, under all the cross-fires 
 incident to a reform, never has her hope flagged, her self- 
 respect wavered, nor a feeling of revenge shadowed her mind. 
 Oftentimes when I have been sorely discouraged, thinking 
 that the prolonged struggle was a waste of forces, that in 
 other directions might be rich in achievement, with her sub 
 lime faith in humanity, she would breathe into my soul 
 renewed inspiration, saying, " Pity rather than blame those who 
 persecute us." In their present condition of slavery women 
 cannot have any esprit de corps; they are the victims of gen 
 erations of bigotry, prejudice, and oppression. If you can 
 not stand the malignity of an enemy, and the treason of a 
 friend, where and how can I reinforce myself for the conflict. 
 Thus have we supplemented each other ; and through 
 these long years, though striving, side by side, as writers, as 
 speakers in conventions and on the lyceum platform, and as 
 officers in an influential national society, never has a single 
 break come in our friendship, never has one feeling of envy 
 marred the happiness of each in the success of the other. So 
 closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and 
 experiences, that separated we have a feeling of incomplete 
 ness, united such strength of self-assertion that no ordinary 
 obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insur 
 mountable. Reviewing the life of Susan B. Anthony, I ever 
 liken her to the Doric column in Grecian architecture, so 
 simply, so grandly she stands, free from every extraneous 
 ornament, supporting her one vast idea, the enfranchise 
 ment of woman. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 A Leaf from Dr. Lyman Beecher s Diary The Old Parsonage at Litchfleld 
 
 Miss Beecher s Early Education Her Keen Sense of Humor A 
 Sprightly Poem Lines Written on the Death of Her Mother Her First 
 Published Poems "Who is this C. D. D.?" Engagement to Prof. 
 Alexander M. Fisher Bright Prospects for the Future Prof. Fisher 
 Sails for England Shipwreck of the " Albion," and Death of Prof. Fisher 
 
 The Survivor s Narrative of the Shipwreck Effect of the Distress 
 ing News Miss Beecher Establishes the Hartford Female Seminary 
 Her Energy and Incessant Activity Last years of Her Life Her Death 
 
 Lines Written to a Dying Friend. 
 
 .ISS CATHERINE E. BEECHER, celebrated in 
 a past generation as a leader in the cause of 
 female education, was the oldest child of the 
 numerous family of Dr. Lyman Beecher. She 
 was born at East Hampton, an obscure parish 
 on the shores of Long Island Sound, where 
 her father s ministerial career commenced. 
 Among the family relics is a leaf from Dr. 
 
 Beecher s diary, a fragment yellow with age and 
 
 bearing the following entry : 
 
 "SATUKDAY, September 6, 1800. 
 
 "This moment, blessed be God, my dear, dear wife is 
 delivered of a daughter, and my soul, my very soul from 
 agony. Oh, may I never forget the goodness of God who 
 has heard our prayer. Jesus ! Thou former of the body 
 and father of the spirit, accept as Thine the immortal soul 
 Thou hast ushered into life. Take, O take it to be Thine 
 before it cling round my heart, and never suffer us to take it 
 back again. May it live to glorify Thee on earth, and to 
 
 75 
 
76 CATHERINE E. BEECIIER. 
 
 enjoy Thee forever in heaven. Now, Lord, we look to Thee 
 for grace to help us rear it for Thee, may it be Thine 
 forever, Amen and Amen." 
 
 The spirit of devout earnestness expressed in this relic was 
 characteristic of the whole life of Dr. Beecher. His minis 
 terial career, afterwards so celebrated, commenced in earnest 
 missionary labors in this obscure field. Every night during 
 the week he held some meeting along the shore, now among 
 the Montauk Indians and now in a little settlement of free 
 blacks, and again in the East Hampton village proper. 
 The first nine years of Miss Beecher s life were spent in this 
 region. As her father s eldest child she became his compan 
 ion, and often was taken in the old chaise between him and 
 her mother to his pastoral visitations. Mrs. Beecher was a, 
 woman uniting a rare culture with great strength and sweet 
 ness. As the salary of the parish was a limited one, she 
 opened a family school, receiving a select number of young 
 ladies to study under her instruction. She was aided in 
 these cares by a sister, a lady of great beauty, elegance, and 
 refinement, to whose early instructions Miss Beecher often 
 recurred as having a strong influence upon her life. 
 
 In her ninth year Dr. Beecher removed to Litchfield, Conn., 
 a mountain town celebrated alike for the beauty of its 
 scenery and the exceptional cultivation and refinement of its 
 inhabitants. The law school under Judge Reeves, and sub 
 sequently under Judge Gould, drew to the place students 
 from every part of the Union. The female seminary, under 
 Miss Sarah Pearse, and Mr. J. P. Brace, drew every year 
 hundreds of young ladies while the resident families of 
 the town numbered many of a class distinguished by intel 
 lectual culture and refinement. 
 
 The house, which was bought by Dr. Beecher, and which is 
 remembered still as the early home of the family, was a large, 
 plain, old-fashioned mansion, shaded by elms and maples. 
 The front windows commanded a beautiful prospect, where 
 the waters of two lovely lakes gleamed out from encircling 
 forests of pines, and the blue outlines of Mount Tom rose 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 77 
 
 in the distance. On another side the wooded heights of 
 Chestnut Hills were covered with a veil of native forest trees, 
 which in spring, summer, and autumn gave a rich and 
 varied horizon of verdure. The village street was wide and 
 green, overshadowed with lofty trees, and giving glimpses 
 through deep, shady yards of the ample white houses which, 
 encircled hy stately, old-fashioned gardens, stood in summer 
 time with doors and windows hospitably open. Here, under 
 the care of Miss Pearse, Miss Beecher began her career as a 
 school-girl. 
 
 Possessed of perfect health and an unfailing store of cheer 
 fulness and energy, warm-hearted, enthusiastic, and vigorous, 
 Catherine Beecher was a universal favorite, both with teach 
 ers and companions. In music, painting, poetry, and 
 general literature she evinced both taste and talent, she 
 soon learned to play on the piano, and sing quite a repertoire 
 of the songs and ballads then in vogue. She also showed an 
 early and ready talent for versification, and at a very early 
 age her poetical effusions were handed about among her 
 family friends, and helped diversify the routine of the parson 
 age. Most of them were of a sprightly and humorous turn, 
 called forth by some domestic chance or mischance, such as 
 the breaking of the largest dish in a new dinner-service, which 
 was thus bewailed : 
 
 "High mounted on the dresser s side, 
 Our brown-edged platter stood with pride ! 
 A neighboring door flew open wide, 
 Knocked out its brains, and straight, it died. 
 
 " Come, kindred platters, with me mourn, 
 Hither, ye plates and dishes, turn ! 
 Knives, forks, and carvers, all give ear, 
 And each drop a dish-water tear! 
 
 " No more with smoking roast-beef crowned 
 Shall guests this noble dish surround, 
 Roast pig no more here show his vizard, 
 Nor goose nor even goose s gizzard. 
 
78 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 "But broken-hearted innst it cro 
 
 ~ 
 
 Down to the dismal shades below, 
 While kitchen muses, platters, plates, 
 Knives, forks, and spoons upbraid the Fates ; 
 With streaming tears cry out " I never," 
 Our brown-edged platter s gone forever! 
 
 Another sprightly lyric detailed the nocturnal capers and 
 frolics of the rats that infested the walls of the old parsonage, 
 and were set forth under the title of "The Great Ratification 
 Meeting." In her later years Miss Beecher amused herself 
 with collecting and arranging the memorials of these early 
 days in Litchtield, under the head of "The Merriment and 
 Romance of My Early Life," and often said, in looking back, 
 that her young life seemed to her one continued frolic. 
 Picnics, promenades, concerts, parties of pleasure, in all of 
 which she was the animating spirit, succeeded each other 
 with the varying months. 
 
 In her sixteenth year came the first stroke that taught her 
 the reality of life. On the night of September 25, 181(5, 
 after a short illness, her mother died, the mother who had 
 been to her teacher, friend, and guide for so many years. 
 Instead of gay and fanciful lyrics, she now wrote in a graver, 
 sadder strain, lines entitled " The East Graveyard of 
 Litchfield " : 
 
 " The busy hum of day is o er, 
 
 The scene is sweet and still, 
 And modest eve, with blushes warm, 
 Walks o er the western hill ; 
 
 " All nature round looks sweetly sad, 
 
 And smiles with pensive gloom, 
 The evening breeze soft gliding by 
 Seems sighing o er the tomb. 
 
 " The great, the good, the weak, the wise, 
 
 Lie shrouded here in gloom, 
 And here, with aching heart, I mark 
 My own dear mother s tomb. 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 79 
 
 " Oh, as upon her peaceful grave 
 
 I fix my weeping eyes, 
 How many fond remembrances 
 In quick succession rise. 
 
 " Again I see her gentle form, 
 
 As when in infant days, 
 And through my sporting childish years, 
 She guarded all my ways. 
 
 " As when, with fond and anxious care, 
 
 She watched my early day, 
 And through the dangerous snares of youth 
 She gently cleared my way. 
 
 " Far through the vista of past years 
 
 As memory can extend, 
 She walked, my counsellor and guide, 
 My guardian and my friend. 
 
 " From works of science and of taste, 
 
 How richly stored her mind ; 
 
 And yet how mild in all her ways, 
 
 How modest, meek, and kind. 
 
 "Religion s pure and heavenly light 
 
 Illumined all her road ; 
 Before her house she led the way 
 To virtue and to God. 
 
 " Like some fair orb she blessed my way 
 
 With mild and grateful light ; 
 Till called from hence the opening heavens 
 Received her from my sight. 
 
 "Now left in dark and dubious paths, 
 
 I mourn her guidance o er, 
 And sorrow that my longing eyes 
 Shall see her face no more. 
 
 " Father in Heaven ! my mother s God, 
 
 Oh, grant before Thy seat, 
 Among the blessed sons of iight, 
 Parent and child again may meet. 
 
80 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 " There may I see her happy face, 
 
 And hear her gentle voice, 
 And gladdened by Thy gracious smile 
 Through endless years rejoice." 
 
 The death of the mother brought upon her, as the eldest 
 daughter of the family, many cares and responsibilities. 
 Though only sixteen years of age, she was the eldest of a 
 family of eight children, and, having always been treated by 
 her father as a companion, she sympathized with him fully in 
 the sorrows and anxieties of this bereavement. When, there 
 fore, after a suitable interval, her father announced to her 
 that he had found a lady of culture and piety willing to 
 assume the care s and labors of the head of his family, Miss 
 Beecher at once with generous openness wrote a letter of 
 welcome to the prospective stepmother, and a friendship 
 arose between the two which continued through life. 
 
 Under the new organization the parsonage became a centre 
 of a very charming, cultivated circle of society, where music, 
 painting, and poetry, all combined to shed a charm over life. 
 Parties were formed for reading, and at these parties original 
 compositions were often handed in and read. Mr. J. P. 
 Brace and Miss Beecher simultaneously took up the idea of 
 writing poems, the scene of which should be laid in Litchfield 
 during the time when it existed as an Indian village, called 
 Bantam. Both these poems were presented and read, and 
 circulated in manuscript through the appreciative circles of 
 Litchfield. 
 
 At that time there was no daily press, and none of those 
 magazines which now stimulate the young composer to rush 
 into print. The literature thus confined to an appreciative 
 circle had a charm of its own, uninvaded by sneering criticism, 
 and certainly added to the interest of the Litchfield society. 
 Miss Beecher s ballad of ff Yala " possessed no mean 
 poetic merit as the composition of a girl of seventeen, and 
 was circulated even among the literary circles of New 
 Haven. 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 81 
 
 Dr. Beecher, who had risen into the front ranks of influence 
 in Connecticut, at this time, in concert with the literary gen 
 tlemen connected with Yale College, projected the idea of a 
 monthly magazine of literature and theology to be called the 
 " Christian Spectator." Dr. Beecher was a regular contributor 
 under the signature "D.D." Miss Beecher s first published 
 poems appeared in this under the signature " C. D. D." 
 
 These poems first drew towards her the notice of one, her 
 connection with whom was destined to reverse the whole 
 course of her life. The young professor of mathematics, Alex 
 ander M. Fisher, was led to inquire of a friend, " Who is this 
 C. D. D. that writes these poems ?" and the replies that 
 he received so far increased his interest that he asked a class 
 mate who was to supply Dr. Beecher s pulpit for a Sabbath 
 to allow him to accompany him. As Professor Fisher had 
 hitherto avoided society, and lived a life of scholarly seclu 
 sion, this step was the more remarkable. Miss Beecher, how 
 ever, devoted herself to his entertainment, played and sang 
 for him, and knowing that he was an accomplished musician, 
 drew him out of his diffidence and reserve to play and sing 
 in return, and in fact made his visit so delightful that the 
 memory of it followed him back to his study. 
 
 After a while, hearing from different sources of the lady 
 who had so interested him, he wrote a frank and manly letter 
 to Dr. Beecher, avowing his interest, and begging permis 
 sion to seek the regard of his daughter, and soliciting his aid 
 in providing opportunities. As Miss Beecher was very soon 
 going to take a place as teacher of music and painting in 
 New London, it was easily arranged that she should on her 
 way spend a week in New Haven, at the house of a mutual 
 friend. After a week of devoted attention, Professor Fisher 
 announced to Dr. Beecher that he was going to Massachu 
 setts in a chaise to bring back his sister, and that he would 
 be happy to take Miss Beecher to New London, and so it was 
 arranged. A correspondence followed, in which the delicacy 
 and elegance of his mind, his high principle and keen sense 
 of honor were displayed, while a vein of gentle humor gave a 
 
82 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 grace to scholarly exactness. To this correspondence fol 
 lowed an engagement, and it was arranged that immediately 
 on Professor Fisher s return from a tour in Europe the mar 
 riage w r as to take place. On all hands Miss Beecher received 
 congratulations. Professor Fisher had already distinguished 
 himself in his department of science, and was now going abroad 
 to form the acquaintance of scientists and to observe the 
 methods of teaching in European universities, with a view of 
 improving his department in Yale College. The prospect 
 before Miss Beecher was of a home in the beautiful rural 
 city of New Haven, in cultured literary society, and at the 
 distance of only an hour or two from father and home. 
 Nothing could be asked on her own part or that of her 
 friends more perfectly desirable. 
 
 But like a stroke of lightning from a clear sky came the 
 news in a letter to Dr. Beecher, that on the 22d of April the 
 "Albion" in which Professor Fisher had sailed was wrecked 
 on Kinsale Point, and that every passenger but one had 
 perished. 
 
 Miss Beecher was prostrated by the stroke both in mind 
 and body, and was for some time unable to leave her room. 
 The small glimmer of hope which the saving of one passenger 
 afforded was soon extinguished by further particulars. The 
 sole survivor, Mr. Everhard, thus described the dreadful 
 catastrophe. x\fter saying that a heavy sea had carried 
 away the masts of the "Albion," stove in the hatchways, and 
 carried off the wheel which enabled them to steer, he adds : 
 
 "All night long the wind blew a gale directly on shore, 
 towards which the * Albion was drifting at the rate of about 
 three miles an hour. The complete hopelessness of our 
 situation was known to few except Captain Williams. The 
 coast was familiar to him ; and he must have seen in despair 
 and horror throughout the night the certainty of our fate. 
 
 "At length the ocean dashing and roaring upon the preci 
 pice of rocks under the lee of the ship told us that the hour 
 had come. Captain Williams summoned all on deck, and 
 briefly told us that the ship must soon strike ; it was impos- 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 83 
 
 sible to preserve her. We were crowded about the fore 
 castle, our view curtained by the darkest night I ever beheld, 
 surrounded by waves running mountains high, propelled by 
 a tremendous storm towards an iron-bound shore. The 
 rocks, whose towering heads appeared more than a hundred 
 feet above the level of the sea, against whose side the mighty 
 waves beat with unremitting fury, by their terrific collision 
 Efave the only lijjht bv which we were enabled to see our 
 
 */ O 
 
 unavoidable fate and final destruction. The sea beating for 
 ages against this perpendicular precipice has worn large 
 caverns into its base, into which the waves rush violently 
 with a sound re-echoing like distant thunder, then running 
 out in various directions, form whirlpools of great force. For 
 a perch or two from the precipice rocks rise out of the 
 water, broad at bottom and sharp at top ; on one of these, 
 just at the gray of dawn, the Albion first struck. Tho 
 next wave threw her further on the rock, the third further 
 still, until, nearly balanced, she swung round and her stern 
 was driven against another nearer in shore. 
 
 " In this situation, every wave making a breach over her, 
 many were drowned on deck. It is not possible to conceive 
 the horrors of our situation. The deadly and relentless blast 
 impelling us to destruction ; the ship a wreck the raging of 
 the billows against the precipice on which we were driving 
 the sending back from the caverns and the rocks the hoarse 
 and melancholy warnings of death dark, cold, and wet 
 in such a situation the stoutest heart must have quailed in 
 utter despair. When there is a ray of hope there may be a 
 corresponding buoyancy of spirit. When there is anything 
 to be done, the active man may drown the sense of danger 
 while actively exerting himself; but here there was nothing 
 to do but to die. Every moment might be considered tho 
 last. Terror and despair seized upon the most of us with 
 the iron grasp of death, augmented by the wild shrieks of 
 the females, expressive of their terror. Major Gough, of tho 
 British army, remarked, that Death, come as he would, was 
 an unwelcome messenger, but we must meet him as wo 
 6 
 
84 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 could. Very little was said by others ; the men waiting the 
 expected shock in silence. 
 
 " Presently the ship broke in two, and all those who re 
 mained near the bow were lost. Several from the stern of 
 the ship had got on the side of the precipice and were hang 
 ing by the crags as they could. Although weakened by 
 previous sickness and present suffering, I made an effort and 
 got upon the rock, and stood on one foot, the only hold that 
 I could obtain. I saw several around me, and among the 
 rest Colonel Provost, who observed on seeing me take my 
 station, here is another poor fellow! but the waves rolled 
 heavily against us, and often dashing its spray fifty feet over 
 our heads, gradually swept those who had taken refuge one 
 by one away. One poor fellow, losing his hold, as he fell 
 caught me by the leg, and nearly pulled me from my place. 
 Weak and sick as I was, I stood several hours on one foot on 
 a little crag, the billows dashing over me, benumbed with 
 cold. 
 
 "As soon as it was light, and the tide ebbed so as to render 
 it possible, the people descended the rocks as far as they 
 could, and dropped a rope which I fastened round my body, 
 and was drawn out to a place of safety." 
 
 Such were the distressing images which gathered around a 
 loss in itself great and irreparable. Somo lines written at 
 this time express the sufferings and sorrows of those days : 
 
 " Where can the sorrowing heart find peace 
 
 Whose every throb is filled with woe ; 
 When can the aching head find rest, 
 And bitter tears no longer flow ? 
 
 "Wisdom with kind, inviting voice, 
 
 Directs the soul to paths of peace ; 
 And points the weeping eye to heaven, 
 Where pain shall end and sorrow cease. 
 
 "But vain her call the wayward heart, 
 
 Its best hopes wrecked, its comfort o er, 
 Wanders despairing and unblost, 
 To Erin s cliffs and dismal shore. 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 85 
 
 " There where the dark and stormy wave, 
 
 Hides the dear form forever lost ; 
 Still hovers round uncomforted, 
 Afflicted, lone, and tempest-tossed. 
 
 " Oh, Saviour, at whose sovereign word 
 
 The winds and waves of sorrow cease ; 
 Thou seest my tears, thou hear st my sighs, 
 Speak but the word and all is peace. 
 
 " Be thou my trust while I resign, 
 
 The dearest boon thy mercy gave ; 
 
 And yield my cherished earthly hopes 
 
 To Erin s cliffs and ocean s wave." 
 
 It was not at once that the peace so ardently desired was 
 attained. It is not without a struggle that the soul can 
 accept heavenly hopes in place of earthly joys. MissBeecher 
 at the earnest solicitation of Professor Fisher s parents went 
 to visit them, and spent several months of the ensuing season, 
 and at first the visit seemed only to intensify her sense of 
 loss. She wrote thus to her father : 
 
 " I am now sitting by the fireside which has so often been 
 cheered by the most dutiful son, the most affectionate brother, 
 and the dearest friend. His beautiful picture is banging be 
 fore me, his piano is near, his parents, brothers, and sisters 
 around. I have read letters to his family where are disclosed 
 the dutiful, affectionate feelings of his generous heart. I have 
 seen with what almost idolatrous affection he was beloved by 
 his family, and how dear a place I find in all their hearts for 
 his sake, who loved me so truly alas, I knew but little 
 how tenderly I was beloved till his heart was stilled in 
 death, but now I every day discover renewed proofs of his 
 affection and care. Is it strange that I sometimes feel that 
 my sorrow is greater than I can bear? Oh, that the clouds 
 and darkness that are around Him who made me, might 
 pass away ! " In a more cheerful strain she describes their 
 family life : " Every evening we gather around the par 
 lor fireside to talk over past days. Hu brother and two 
 
86 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 sisters have the sweetest voices T ever heard, and as thoy all 
 sing by note and can read music readily, and have a large 
 collection of good music, we have some delightful singing." 
 
 To prevent herself from sinking into hopeless melancholy 
 she now undertook, under the care of the brother, Willard 
 Fisher, a course of mathematical study as the best means of 
 giving mental discipline and diverting the mind from dis 
 tressing thoughts. It was, however, unfortunate for the 
 attainment of that religious peace that she was seeking that 
 the family were punctual attendants on the preaching of the 
 celebrated Dr. Emmons. 
 
 In his austere mode of presentation God appeared, not as a 
 tender Father but an exacting autocrat, and the chances for 
 shipwrecked souls of final salvation seemed as hopeless as 
 those iron-bound rocks on which the hapless " Albion " was 
 wrecked. * 
 
 The dreary effect of this teaching was increased by finding 
 the mother of Professor Fisher the victim of a settled relig 
 ious melancholy, and discovering by reading Professor Fisher s 
 private journal that those same views had clouded his own 
 religious hopes and driven him at times almost to despair. 
 Miss Beecher kept up a vigorous correspondence with her 
 father, in which the then current New England theology was 
 discussed from every point of view. At last she came to the 
 conclusion to let these insoluble problems alone and devote 
 herself to the simple following of Jesus Christ in a life of 
 practical usefulness. 
 
 She came back to Litchfield, united with her father s church, 
 and selected the field of education as the one to which she 
 would hereafter devote her energies. In the year 1823 she 
 began, in connection with her sister, a select school in Hart 
 ford. She commenced the Latin grammar only a fortnight 
 before she began to tench it herself. Her brother, Edward 
 Beecher, was at this time at the head of the Hartford Latin 
 School, and boarded in the same family with his sisters, and 
 she studied with him while she taught her pupils. Sur 
 rounded by young life, enthusiastic in study and teaching, 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 87 
 
 Miss Beecher recovered that buoyant cheerfulness which had 
 always characterized her. 
 
 She was at this time in her twenty-third year, and had a 
 ready sympathy with all the feelings of the young ; she en 
 couraged her scholars to talk freely with her of the subjects 
 they studied, and the recitation hours were often enlivened 
 by wit and pleasantry. She had under her care some of the 
 brightest and most receptive of minds, and the results, as 
 shown in the yearly exhibitions, to which the parents and 
 friends were invited, were quite exciting. Latin and English 
 compositions versified translations from Virgil s Eclogues 
 and Ovid s Metamorphoses astonished those who had not 
 been in the habit of expecting such things in a female school. 
 The school increased rapidly ; pupils were drawn in from 
 abroad, and it became difficult to find a place to contain the 
 numbers to be taught. 
 
 Miss Beecher had always enjoyed the friendship of the 
 leading ladies of Hartford, and when at the end of four years 
 she drew the plan of the Hartford Female Seminary it was by 
 their influence that the first gentlemen in Hartford subscribed 
 money to purchase the land and erect such a building as she 
 desired, with a large hall for study and general exercises, 
 eight recitation-rooms, and a room for chemical laboratory 
 and lectures. A band of eight teachers, each devoted to some 
 particular department, carried on the course of study. 
 
 At this time she published " Suggestions on Education," in 
 which she forcibly compared the provision that had hitherto 
 been made for the education of men with those which had 
 been deemed sufficient for the other sex. For the brothers 
 of a family the well-endowed college, with its corps of pro 
 fessors, each devoted to one department of knowledge, and 
 with leisure to perfect himself in it and teach it in the most 
 complete manner for the sisters of the family only such 
 advantages as they could get from one teacher in one room, 
 who had the care of teaching in all branches ; and she asked 
 what but superficial knowledge could be the result of such a 
 system. The article was vigorously written and excited much 
 
88 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 attention. It was favorably noticed in the " North American," 
 and in the "Revue Encyclopedique," and drew instant atten 
 tion to the system that was being carried on in the Hartford 
 Female Seminary. 
 
 There was at the time an educational current rising strongly 
 in New England. Mr. Woodbridge, the author of a geog 
 raphy much in use, edited a " Journal of Education," in which 
 the methods of Fellenberg and other European educators 
 were described ; frequent teachers conventions were held in 
 which information on these subjects was disseminated. 
 
 Miss Beecher was enthusiastic in education, and succeeded 
 in imparting her enthusiasm both to her teachers and scholars, 
 and there was scarce a week in which the school was not visited 
 by strangers desirous to observe its methods. The example 
 soon was copied. One of her associate teachers inaugurated 
 a similar institution in Springfield, Mass., supplied with 
 teachers of Miss Beecher s training. A gentleman came 
 north from Huntsville, Alabama, desiring teachers to com 
 mence a similar institution in that State, and Miss Beecher 
 despatched them four of her most promising scholars to com 
 mence the work. 
 
 The efficiency and energy that Miss Beecher displayed at 
 this time of her career was the wonder of every one who 
 knew her. 
 
 With all the cares of a school of between one and two 
 hundred pupils, many of them from distant States of the 
 Union, Miss Beecher s influence was felt everywhere, regu 
 lating the minutest details. She planned the course of study, 
 guided and inspired the teachers, overlooked the different 
 boarding-houses, corresponded with parents and guardians. 
 
 With all these cares she prepared an arithmetic which was 
 printed and used as a text- book in her school and those that 
 emanated from it. The peculiarity of this book was its re 
 quiring of the pupil at every step a clear statement of the 
 rationale of the arithmetic.il processes. It was never pub 
 lished, but printed as wanted for her school and those after 
 wards founded by her teachers. When the teacher in mental 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 89 
 
 philosophy left her institution for that in Springfield, Miss 
 Beecher took charge of that department, and wrote for it a 
 text book of some four or five hundred pages, entitled 
 " Mental and Moral Philosophy, Founded on Reason, Obser 
 vation, and the Bible." Like the arithmetic, this book was 
 printed and not published. As it applied common sense to 
 the interpretation of the language of the Bible, it came in 
 collision with many theological dogmas, but the views of the 
 divine love which it exhibited made it a most powerful 
 assistant in religious and moral education. 
 
 She constantly enforced it upon her teachers that education 
 was not merely the communication of knowledge, but the 
 formation of character. Each teacher had committed to her 
 special care a certain number of scholars, whose character she 
 was to study, whose affection she was to seek, and whom she 
 was to strive by all means in her power to lead to moral 
 and religious excellence. 
 
 The first hour every morning was given to a general relig 
 ious exercise with the assembled school, and the results of 
 those exercises and of the whole system of influences were 
 such that multitudes can look back to the Hartford Female 
 Seminary as the place where they received influences that 
 shaped their whole life for this world and the world to come. 
 
 During all her multiplied cares and engagements she kept 
 up her health by systematic daily exercise on horseback, 
 generally in the early morning hours, and often accompanied 
 by some of her teachers or pupils. She also kept up the 
 practice of piano music as a recreation, and now and then 
 furnished a poem for the weekly " Connecticut Observer," 
 and received on one evening of the week her own friends and 
 those of her pupils, to a social gathering, enlivened by music 
 and conversation. The weekly levees of the Hartford Fe 
 male Seminary were a great addition to the social life of 
 Hartford. 
 
 For some years it seemed as if there were to be no limit to 
 what she could plan and accomplish. As the making money 
 was no part of her object in teaching, so every improvement 
 
00 CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 
 
 which money could procure was added to the many advan 
 tages of the seminary. A lecturer on history was hired who 
 introduced charts of ancient and modern history, afterwards 
 used as the basis of instruction. A lady who first brought 
 into use the system of calisthenics was employed to give a 
 course in the seminary, and thus the exercises became a daily 
 part of the school duties. Dr. Barbour, afterwards Pro 
 fessor of Elocution in Harvard College, was hired to give a 
 course of instruction in his department, and his book (a con 
 densation of Dr. Rush s treatise on the voice) was introduced 
 into the school. So many were the teachers employed, so 
 many the advantages secured to the pupils, that Miss Beecher, 
 at the head of it all, made no more than a comfortable sup 
 port, and laid up nothing for the future. 
 
 After seven years of this incessant activity, her nervous 
 system began to give out, and after several attacks of sciatica 
 she relinquished the charge of the seminary into the hands of 
 Mr. John P. Brace, the associate teacher in the celebrated 
 Litchfield School. 
 
 In 1830, she accompanied her father in his first journey of 
 observation to Cincinnati, preparatory to the removal of his 
 family to the West. When the family went out she also 
 went with them, and, in connection with the younger sister, 
 commenced a school in Cincinnati, which she furnished with 
 teachers of her own training. 
 
 But after this time she did not herself labor personally as a 
 teacher. In connection with many other ladies she formed 
 a league for supplying the West with educated teachers. 
 Governor Slade of Vermont, as agent for this association, 
 travelled and lectured, and as the result many teachers were 
 sent West and many schools founded. It was planned to 
 erect one leading seminary in every Western State, where 
 teachers should be trained to supply the country, and the 
 plan was successfully carried out in Milwaukee and Dubuque, 
 and some other cities. 
 
 During the latter years of her life Miss Beecher was prin 
 cipally occupied in authorship. By great exactness and care 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 91 
 
 of her health she was able to give certain regular daily hours 
 to these labors. Her first work was a treatise on " Domestic 
 Economy," designed as a school-book, and treating of all those 
 subjects which relate to the home-life of women the care of 
 house and furniture, the making and repairing of garments, 
 the care of young children, the nursing of the sick the 
 training of servants. When this work was first issued 
 
 o 
 
 there was no other of its kind, and it was felt to be a most 
 important aid in female education. It was published first 
 in Boston and afterwards transferred to the Harpers of New 
 York. 
 
 This was followed by a " Domestic ^Receipt Book," devoted to 
 the preparation and care of food. The mode of preparing this 
 was somewhat peculiar. She collected round her in Hartford 
 the graduates of her school, and induced them to bring to her 
 from each family the best receipts. As the housekeepers of 
 Hartford had always been famous for the excellence of their 
 menages, she had a basis of solid fact and experience to go 
 upon in preparing her work, which also was published by the 
 Harpers. Under their care the sale of these works afforded 
 her a yearly income, which she spent freely in forwarding her 
 educational plans.* 
 
 Miss Beecher lived to be seventy-eight years of age, and 
 though the last ten years of her life she w r as crippled by 
 sciatica and in many respects an invalid, the activity of her 
 mind and her zeal in education continued to the last. 
 
 In her sixty-first year she united with the Episcopal church 
 by confirmation, in company with three of her young nieces. 
 Her reason for the step she gave in her belief that the religious 
 educational theory of the Episcopal church was superior to 
 
 * At the request of the writer the Messrs. Harpers have furnished the fol 
 lowing list of her published works: 
 
 Duty of American Women to their Country, 1845; A Treatise on Domestic 
 Economy for the Use of Ladies at Home and in School, 1845; Miss Beecher s 
 Domestic Receipt Book, 1846; Miss Beecher s Address, 1846; Letters to the 
 People, 1855; Physiology and Calisthenics, 1856; Common Sense Applied to 
 Religion, 1857; An Appeal to the People, 1860; The Religious Training of 
 Children, 1864 ; The Housekeeper and Healthkeeper, 1873. 
 
92 CATHERINE E. BEECHER, 
 
 that of any other, and ever after that she was an attendant 
 on the services of that church. 
 
 Her death at last was sudden. She was visiting a brother 
 at Elmira, N. Y., but intending shortly to journey eastward. 
 On the llth of May, 1878, she arranged everything for her 
 departure, made cheerful farewell calls on all her friends, and 
 retired to rest at night at her usual hour. The next morning, 
 as she did not appear, her brother entered her room and found 
 her in a heavy stupor, from which it was impossible to rouso 
 her, and in the course of a few hours, on Sunday, May 12, 
 1878, she quietly passed from the pain and weakness of 
 earth to the everlasting rest of heaven. 
 
 In many respects the manner of her death seemed merci- 
 full}- ordered. She had a great shrinking from physical pain 
 and all that usually precedes death, and there was none of 
 this in her last hours. Death came to her as a tranquil sleep. 
 We cannot more fittingly close this memoir than by quoting 
 her " Hymn for the Bed of Death." 
 
 It was written for a lovely and much afflicted friend of her 
 early days, who, after a life of peculiar suffering, was lying 
 on her deathbed. When Miss Beecher received a few 
 trembling lines from this friend, expressing her feeling that 
 the final hour was near, she composed and sent to her this 
 hymn : 
 
 "And is there One who knows each grief, 
 And counts the tears His children shed, 
 
 Whose soothing hand can bring relief, 
 And smooth and cheer their painful bed ? 
 
 Saviour ! invisible, ye t t dear 
 
 Friend of the helpless, art Thou near ? 
 
 " Forgive the faltering faith and fears 
 
 Of this weak heart that seeks Thine aid ; 
 
 Forgive these often flowing tears, 
 
 Thou who hast fainted, wept, and prayed. 
 
 Ah, who so well our wants can know 
 
 As He who felt each human woe ? 
 
CATHERINE E. BEECHER. 93 
 
 " Yes, Thou hast felt the withering power 
 
 Of mortal weakness and distress ; 
 And Thou hast known the bitter hour 
 
 Of desolating loneliness, 
 Ilnst mourned Thy friends so faithless fled, 
 And wept in anguish o er the dead. 
 
 " Thou, too, hast tried the tempter s power, 
 And felt his false and palsying breath ; 
 And known the gloomy fears that wait 
 
 Along the shadowy vale of death, 
 And what the dreaded pang must be, 
 Of life s last parting agony. 
 
 " My only hope, my stay, my shield, 
 
 Thy fainting creature looks to Thee ; 
 Thy gracious love, Thy guidance yield, 
 
 In this my last extremity. 
 With Thy dear guardian hand to save, 
 Lord, I can venture to the grave." 
 
CHAPTER IY. 
 CLAEA BAKTOK. 
 
 BY LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 Clara Barton s Early Life A Faithful Little Nurse at Eleven Devotion 
 to Her Sick Brother Breaking Out of the Civil War Her Loyalty and 
 Devotion to the Union The Old Sixth Massachusetts Regiment First 
 Blood Shed for the Union Miss Barton s Timely Services Consecrat 
 ing Her Life to the Soldier s Needs At the Front Army Life and 
 Experiences Undaunted Heroism Terrible Days Errands of Mercy 
 "The Angel of the Battlefield" Instances of Her Courage and 
 Devotion Narrow Escapes Her Labors for Union Prisoners Record 
 of the Soldier Dead Dorrance Atwater Work After the War Visit 
 to Europe The Society of the Red Cross The Franco-Prussian War 
 At the Front Again Unfurling the Banner of the Red Cross Record of 
 a Noble Life. 
 
 HE women \vho have lived nobly are far more 
 \vorthy of honor than those who have only 
 written or spoken well. Great inspirations, 
 whether sudden as lightning or slow as the 
 steady unfolding of dawn, find their perfect 
 end only through embodiment in action. 
 
 The every-day life of woman is full of difficult 
 demands, grandly met ; and these are none the 
 less heroisms because they often occur in some 
 obscure corner, where they are not looked upon as 
 anything remarkable. But when an unusual occa 
 sion reveals a duty which must be done in the face of the 
 whole world, the true woman does not shrink back into her 
 beloved seclusion, and let the opportunity pass. She may 
 dread notoriety with all the strength of her womanly nature, 
 but the voice of God within her is imperative ; she cannot be 
 disobedient unto the heavenly vision ; and the really heroic 
 soul forgets herself and everything except the high demand 
 94 
 
CLARA BARTON. 95 
 
 of the hour, and undertakes the difficult public labor as sim 
 ply as she would any humble fireside service. 
 
 Clara Barton s life is before the world, not through any 
 effort or wish of her own, but only through her having taken 
 hold, with all her heart and with all her strength, of work 
 that she saw needed to be done. Her labors have been 
 almost unique in the annals of womanly endeavor, for their 
 steady perseverance, for the wisdom, the courage, and the 
 self-forgetfulness which has animated them. Quick to see 
 the exigencies of a situation, and prompt and wise to meet 
 them ; understanding both how to direct and how to obey ; 
 her bravery and self-reliance balanced by her generosity and 
 warm-heartedness, there is much in her character that 
 reminds us of Wordsworth s description of "The Happy 
 Warrior," while it would be unjust to her not to add that 
 she is one of the most womanly of women. 
 
 She is a daughter of New England. Her birthplace was 
 North Oxford, among the hills of Worcester County, Massa 
 chusetts ; and the fact that she was born on Christmas day 
 is not without significance in her history. Her childhood 
 was blessed with outdoor freedom and indoor comfort and 
 peace, such as are known to the healthy, well-cared-for coun 
 try children of our Commonwealth. The youngest of a large 
 family, with many years intervening between her and her 
 brothers and sisters, she was left a good deal to herself for 
 amusement and occupation, both of which she readily found, 
 going through wild snow-drifts or summer sunshine two 
 miles to school, playing on the hillsides, wading in the brooks, 
 or scampering across her father s fields on any untamed pony 
 she could find. 
 
 So it went on until she was eleven years old, when more 
 care fell upon her than often comes to so young a child. One 
 of her brothers, an athletic young man, had a fall from the 
 top of a building he was helping to raise. He seemed not at 
 all hurt at the time, but the shock resulted in a long period 
 of utter prostration, during which his little sister became his 
 nurse, for two years scarcely leaving his bedside, day or night. 
 
96 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 It may seem strange that this wearing task should have 
 been given to the youngest of the family ; but it was charac 
 teristic of Clara Barton from the first to assume the most 
 self-denying work as her own especial right. Moreover, she 
 grew into her position through a natural fitness for it. 
 Placed beside the sick man, as the little girl of the household, 
 to fan him or bring him a glass of water at need, he became 
 accustomed to her deft ways and fresh sympathies, and could 
 not well do without them. And the child-nurse, for love of 
 the sufferer and of the work of ministering, took only a half 
 day s respite for herself during that long period. 
 
 After the invalid s recovery, when Clara was about sixteen 
 years old, having prepared herself in the studies ordinarily 
 required, she began to teach in the district-schools of her own 
 home-neighborhood, not shrinking from those where rough 
 boys had been in the habit of forcibly ejecting the master. 
 She had no trouble with her pupils, winning at once their 
 hearts and their obedience. Her services were in constant 
 demand, and she pursued the occupation for several years, 
 during intervals of leisure assisting her brothers, who had 
 become prominent business men of their native place, in their 
 counting-house labors. 
 
 Later, she went through a thorough course of study in Clin 
 ton, N. Y., and then resumed teaching in the State of New 
 Jersey. 
 
 In 1853 we find her doing a remarkable work at Borden- 
 town, where there had been a strong prejudice against the 
 establishment of free schools. She had been told that such 
 an undertaking would certainly be unsuccessful ; but she 
 agreed to assume the entire responsibility for three months 
 at her own expense. She took a tumble-doAvn building, and 
 began with six scholars, making it understood that the chil 
 dren of rich and poor were alike welcome. In four or five 
 weeks the building proved too small for the number who 
 came, and the one school grew into two. The result in one 
 year was the erection of a fine edifice, and the establishment 
 of a free school at Bordentown, with a roll of five hundred 
 
CLARA BARTON. 
 
CLARA BARTON. 99 
 
 pupils. It is but just to the authorities of the town to say 
 that they insisted upon Miss Barton s receiving the salary she 
 had agreed to do without. 
 
 Her exertions here, added to the fatigues of previous years, 
 began to tell upon her health, and she was obliged to rest. 
 She went to Washington, where she had relatives, for change 
 of scene and a more favorable climate. 
 
 Just at this time, through the treachery of clerks, troubles 
 had arisen in the Patent Office. Secrets had been betrayed, 
 and great annoyance caused to inventors who had applied for 
 patents. The Commissioner was at a loss what to do, when 
 Miss Barton was recommended to him as a person who could 
 be trusted, and whose clear chirography and aptitude for busi 
 ness affairs well fitted her for the situation. 
 
 Her services were at once secured. But although her new 
 employment was less fatiguing than teaching, it was not with 
 out its trials. Hitherto, male clerks only had been employed, 
 and these men did not like to see their province invaded by a 
 woman. They were perhaps the more displeased because they 
 had brought her there by their own unfaithfulness, which could 
 no longer profit them. They adopted the chivalrous course of 
 making her position as uncomfortable as they could, hoping 
 to drive her from it by personal annoyance. They ranged 
 themselves every morning, in two rows, against the walls of 
 the long corridor through which she had to pass on her way 
 to her desk, staring hard at her, and whistling softly as she 
 went by. 
 
 Miss Barton felt the insult keenly, but she determined to 
 bear it, for the sake of the principle involved. Day after 
 day she passed through this ordeal, with her eyes upon the 
 floor, seeing nothing of those two lines of indignant masculines 
 but their boots. 
 
 Failing to oust her in this way, they tried slander, but 
 signally failed, her accusers instead of herself receiving 
 their discharge. She suffered no further indignities of the 
 kind, and remained in the Patent Office three years, doing 
 her work so well that her books are still exhibited as models. 
 
100 CLARA BARTOX. 
 
 In the Buchanan administration, her acknowledged anti- 
 slavery sentiments drew upon her the charge of " Black Re 
 publicanism," and she was removed ; but, being urgently 
 recalled again by the same administration, she yielded to her 
 father s advice and returned. 
 
 When the civil war broke out, and the Government found 
 itself involved in serious pecuniary troubles, Miss Barton 
 looked about to see what relief she could bring to the situa 
 tion. There were clerks of known disloyalty in the Patent 
 Office, and she offered to do with her own hands, and without 
 additional pay, the work of two of these, if they might be dis 
 missed. The offer, though warmly appreciated, could not 
 legally be accepted. But she decided that she could at least 
 save her own salary to the impoverished Treasury, and she 
 resigned her position, determining to find some other way of 
 serving her country in its need. 
 
 And ways were opening before her in which none could 
 walk but with bleeding feet and a martyr s fortitude. Every 
 energy was to be tested, every fibre of her loyal heart 
 strained to its utmost tension. 
 
 Many of us can remember the inspiring thrill of patriotism 
 to which we awoke after the first sharp pang of sorrow and 
 surprise at finding our country drawn into the horrors of civil 
 war. We knew now to our heart s depths that we belonged 
 to a Nation ; that our separate interests were nothing, except 
 as they were identified with the Republic, which was to us 
 fireside and home. No sacrifices seemed too great for us to 
 make that the Union we loved might be preserved. Women 
 felt all this as deeply at least as men. We were all lifted 
 out of ourselves upon the tide of patriotic enthusiasm, and 
 were grateful indeed, if we might in any Avay be permitted 
 to take part in the struggle which we felt sure was for hu 
 manity s sake no less than for our own. 
 
 The departure of the Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts 
 Volunteers from Boston was a scene which the women who 
 witnessed it can never forget ; and there were naturally more 
 women than men among the spectators. A look of solemn 
 
CLARA BARTON. 101 
 
 consecration was upon the eager faces of those who went, 
 and in the tearful eyes of those who said farewell. The 
 very air seemed to breathe the joy of heroic, self-forgetting 
 purpose. 
 
 Clara Barton was in Washington when these soldiers of her 
 own State arrived there from Baltimore, where the first blood 
 of the war had been shed. She was among those who met 
 them at the station ; she saw the forty wounded men taken 
 to the Infirmary, and the rest quartered at the Capitol ; and 
 she visited both with such help as she could command. On ac 
 count of the suddenness of the call, little provision had been 
 made, in a regular way, for the hungry crowd at the Capitol, 
 and she caused food to be brought in great baskets, and dis 
 tributed among the men, Avhile she read to them from the 
 Speaker s desk an account of their own progress from Boston 
 to Washington, as it had been recorded in the daity papers. 
 From that hour she identified herself with the soldiers in 
 their risks and sufferings. 
 
 During the campaign of the Peninsula, her custom was to 
 go down the Potomac on the boats which carried provisions 
 to the army and returned loaded with wounded men, taking 
 with her such things as would give them relief and refresh 
 ment until they could be cared for in the hospitals. In this 
 way she became a medium of communication between the 
 soldiers and their friends at home, she writing letters for 
 the men, and receiving such comforts and delicacies as were 
 intrusted to her care for them. Not only was her own room 
 soon filled with these contributions ; she hired several spa 
 cious storerooms, which continually overflowed. 
 
 It became a serious problem how to get these things the 
 offerings of individuals, of churches or of town societies to 
 the persons for whom they were intended. As regiments 
 were ordered further away from Washington, the difficulty 
 increased. But Miss Barton determined that if she could 
 compass it, they should at least reach the rank and file of the 
 army. Meanwhile, other matters perplexed and troubled her 
 yet more. 
 
 7 
 
102 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 On her errands of mercy down the river, she was con 
 stantly distressed at the sight of sufferings which might havo 
 been avoided, could the wounded men have been attended to 
 on the battle-field where they fell. They were sent up from 
 the swamps of the Chickahominy, covered with mud and gore, 
 in which they had lain for days. There was no relief for 
 them, except of the voluntary kind Miss Barton gave, until 
 they were landed at Washington. 
 
 While saddened beyond measure at this state of things, 
 she was called home to her father s sick-bed. It was late in 
 the year 1861. He had attained the ripe age of eighty-six 
 years, and this was his last illness, although his death did 
 not occur until the following March. 
 
 Sitting beside the beloved old man, who had himself in 
 his youth been an officer under General Wayne, she talked 
 with him of what she was doing, and of what more she 
 might do for the soldiers. She told him of her desire to go 
 to the front, of her feeling that she ought to be there to 
 relieve suffering, and perhaps to save lives. It was a new 
 thing for a woman to undertake, and among other dangers 
 the possibility of exposure to insult was discussed, as what 
 she most dreaded. But her father said: 
 
 " Go, if you feel it your duty to go ! I know what sol 
 diers are, and I know that every true soldier will respect you 
 and your errand." 
 
 And comforted by the good man s blessing, she returned 
 to her post with little anxiety about herself, but with a con 
 firmed resolution to persevere in the labor of love which she 
 had chosen. 
 
 It was not easy to carry out her purpose. At first she 
 waited, hoping that influential ladies of the capital would 
 take steps that she might follow. But they only touched the 
 matter slightly. Things remained much in the same sorrow 
 ful condition. 
 
 When at last she did apply for a pass beyond the army- 
 lines, she was everywhere rebuffed. Perhaps her youthful 
 looks were against her. Officers could not understand what 
 
CLARA BARTON. 103 
 
 this dark-haired young woman with the keen bright eyes had 
 undertaken to do, and was so earnest about. But she per 
 severed, although so discouraged that when, as her last hope, 
 she stood before Assistant Quartermaster-General Rucker, 
 she could not tell him her wish for tears. 
 
 This kind-hearted man listened to her, sympathized with 
 her, and befriended her in her work, then and ever after. To 
 his warning suggestions and inquiries, she replied that she was 
 the daughter of a soldier, and that she had no fears of the 
 battle-field, or of being under the enemy s fire. She told 
 him of her large storerooms filled with supplies which she. 
 could not get to the soldiers, and she asked of him means 
 of transportation for herself and for them. 
 
 Everything she requested, and more, was cheerfully given ; 
 for the good Quartermaster had that in his own nature which 
 enabled him to look into the large heart and strong character 
 of the woman who stood before him. Abundant means of 
 transportation were furnished, and she was free to go to the 
 relief of soldiers in battle whenever and wherever she would. 
 In the quartermaster s department of the army, at whatever 
 point she appeared, her errand was at once understood and its 
 purposes forwarded. 
 
 The record of the good she accomplished during the war 
 could never be fully written out, even by herself; and in 
 this brief sketch only a hint of it can be given. 
 
 We may catch a glimpse of her at Chantilly, in the 
 darkness of the rainy midnight bending over a dying boy 
 who took her supporting arm and soothing voice for his 
 sister s, or falling into a brief sleep on the wet ground in 
 her tent, almost under the feet of flying cavalry ; or riding 
 in one of her tram of army-wagons towards another field, 
 subduing by the way a band of mutinous teamsters into her 
 firm friends and allies ; or at the terrible battle of Antie- 
 tam (where the regular army-supplies did not arrive until 
 three days afterward), furnishing from her wagons cordials 
 and bandages for the wounded, making gruel for the faint 
 ing men from the meal in which her medicines had been 
 
104 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 packed, extracting with her own hand a Iwllct from the 
 cheek of a wounded soldier, tending the fallen all day, 
 with her throat parched and her face blackened by sulphurous 
 smoke, and at night, when the surgeons were dismayed at 
 finding themselves left with only one half-burnt candle amid 
 thousands of bleeding, dying men, illumining the field with 
 candles and lanterns her forethought had supplied. No won 
 der they called her the "Angel of the Battlefield ! " 
 
 We may see her at Fredericksburg, attending to the 
 wounded who were brought to her, whether they wore the 
 blue or the gray. One rebel officer, whose death-agonies 
 she soothed, besought her with his last breath not to cross 
 the river, in his gratitude betraying to her that the movements 
 of the rebels were only a ruse to draw the Union troops on to 
 destruction. It is needless to say that she followed the sol 
 diers across the Rappahannoek, undaunted by the dying man s 
 warning. And we may watch her after the defeat, when the 
 half-starved, half-frozen soldiers were brought to her, having 
 great fires built to lay them around, administering cordials, 
 and causing an old chimney to be pulled down for bricks to 
 warm them with, while she herself had but the shelter of a 
 tattered tent between her and the piercing winds. Or we 
 may follow her to Morris Island, to the attack upon Fort 
 Wagner, where no one but herself was prepared for repulse, 
 and see her ministering to the men who dragged themselves 
 back over the burning sands that the sea-winds blew like 
 needle-points into their wounds. When asked by a friend 
 how she dared risk in midsummer the climate of Morris 
 Island, with its sickly swamps and shadeless sand-hills, 
 the unconscious heroism of her answer was characteristic : 
 ff Why, somebody had to go and take care of the soldiers, so 
 I went." 
 
 It was the same story of courage, and helpfulness, and 
 endurance, all through the war. She was in many battles, 
 often directly under fire, but she bore a charmed life ; for, 
 although her clothing was frequently grazed or pierced, she 
 was never wounded. At the battle of Antietam, as she 
 
CLARA BARTON. 105 
 
 stooped to lift the head of a wounded man, a ball passed 
 between her arm and her body, entering the soldier s breast, 
 and instantly killing him. 
 
 As the conflict drew to a close, and prisoners were ex 
 changed, Miss Barton received numerous letters from the 
 
 O 7 
 
 mothers of soldiers, who had willingly given their sons to 
 their country, but who felt that they ought at least to be told 
 what had become of them. She conferred with President 
 Lincoln, whose great heart felt the necessities of the case, but 
 who could not decide at once how to meet them. Meanwhile 
 she was called home to Massachusetts by family afflictions. 
 While there, she saw it announced in the daily papers that 
 Miss Clara Barton had been appointed by the President to 
 correspond with the friends of missing prisoners, and that she 
 might be addressed at Annapolis/where the survivors of An- 
 dersonvillo were received. 
 
 Leaving her own sorrow behind her, she went at once to 
 Annapolis, finding there that during the three days since the 
 announcement, about four bushels of letters had arrived, 
 every one of them full of heart-breaking appeal. These let 
 ters continued to accumulate after the discharge of the Ander- 
 sonville prisoners, and Miss Barton went to Washington to go 
 on with the work, which, in her hands, was sure to be meth 
 odical and thorough. She established at her own expense, 
 a Bureau of Records of missing men of the United States 
 armies, employing several clerks to assist her. These records, 
 compiled from hospital and prison rolls and from burial lists, 
 came to be of great value to the government in the settle 
 ment of bounties, back pay, and pensions, no less than to the 
 friends of the soldiers; to whom, indeed, they brought often 
 but a mournful satisfaction the confirmation of dreaded loss. 
 
 Miss Barton went to Andersonville, and, with the aid of 
 Dorrance Atwater, a Union prisoner who had been employed 
 in hospital service there, and had preserved the prison rolls, 
 identified all but about four hundred of the thirteen thousand 
 graves of buried soldiers. She had a suitable headboard 
 placed at each grave, and a fence built around the cemetery. 
 
106 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 In all that she had done through the war she had never 
 asked for money. She had used her own income freely, say 
 ing, when friends demurred : 
 
 " What is money to me if I have no country ? " 
 
 But the work of this Bureau could not be carried on with 
 out large expenditures. She had already used several thou 
 sand dollars of her own, and there were five or six thousand 
 letters yet awaiting examination. This came to the knoAvledge 
 of some members of Congress, and it was voted that Miss 
 Barton be reimbursed, and the means for going on furnished 
 her, an appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars being made 
 for that purpose. For he r services, then, as always before 
 and after, she neither desired nor received pay ; they were a 
 free-will offering to her country and to humanity. It may be 
 added that her income is almost entirely the result of her own 
 patient earnings and wise investments. Her remarkable busi 
 ness faculty might easily have won her great wealth ; but sho 
 has preferred to be rich in the most royal way, that of 
 doing good. 
 
 At this Bureau she continued four years, giving meanwhile 
 to large audiences East and West her thrilling war reminis 
 cences. But her army labors were not yet ended. There 
 was service for humanity awaiting her in another hemisphere. 
 
 There is nothing in the divine ordering of human lives 
 more beautiful than the way in which opportunities to do 
 noble work grow out of similar work which has already been 
 faithfully done. Life is no longer fragmentary, every part 
 has meaning and unity, and the toiler goes thankfully on 
 through the broader activities, and into the deeper consecra 
 tion, developing always a less self-conscious personality, but 
 one everywhere more definitely recognized and honored. 
 
 Even a careless observer cannot fail to see in Clara Barton s 
 work a unity peculiar to itself, a work which has grown 
 out of her own character, and which no one but herself could 
 have done. Her labors have been going on in mind and heart 
 and will, even while she has been still in the helplessness of 
 prostration ; for she has more than once been obliged to yield 
 
CLARA BARTON. 107 
 
 to che physical reaction resulting from her unsparing strain 
 upon her powers. But new work has always been awaiting 
 her recovery ; new, and yet invariably a widening and deep 
 ening of the old, as a stream, however impeded, swells to a 
 river, its fulness flowing from the freshness of its own dis 
 tinctive source. 
 
 The autumn of 1809 found her seeking renewal of her 
 strength under the shadow of the Alps at Geneva. There 
 she was waited upon by leading members of the International 
 Committee of Geneva for the relief of the wounded in war, 
 who had for several years been doing, as an organization, 
 what she had attempted personally and alone. The most 
 striking feature of their plan was its wide humanity, which 
 recognized in the wounded soldier the man only, not asking 
 on which side he fought. On this principle Miss Barton had 
 persistently worked in our civil war, although subject often 
 to official reproof, and sometimes even accused of disloyalty 
 to the national cause. 
 
 The society these gentlemen represented had ministered to 
 the wounded on many battle-fields, under a treaty of neutral 
 ity for all who wore its badge, and were doing its humane 
 work. This treaty had been signed by nearly all civilized 
 nations, and also by some not commonly regarded as such. 
 It had twice been offered to the United States for signature, 
 but no response had been received. Knowing something of 
 what Miss Barton had done for wounded soldiers in her own 
 country, these gentlemen naturally turned to her as one who 
 might be able to explain the reticence of our government. 
 
 She could only say to them that she had never even heard 
 of the treaty, nor of the society organized under it ; that the 
 documents relating to it, being in a foreign language, had 
 probably been passed on from one official to another, pos 
 sibly unread ; and that the fact of its existence was doubtless 
 quite forgotten. 
 
 The silence and seeming apathy on the part of the United 
 States must have seemed the more strange to these philan 
 thropic men, since the idea of their work had partly been 
 
108 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 suggested by the methods of the Sanitary Commission, and of 
 other humane efforts on our battle-fields, during the rebellion. 
 
 The object of the Society as set forth in the articles of the 
 Geneva Convention of August, 18G4, was the exemption from 
 capture, and the protection, under treaty, of those who were 
 taking care of the wounded on battle-fields, and also of such 
 inhabitants of invaded territories as gave them shelter and 
 assistance. It undertook to care for wounded men where 
 they fell, no matter to which of the belligerent armies they 
 belonged. 
 
 The Society had agreed to adopt a uniform flag, which was 
 to be recognized and protected by all belligerents ; and also 
 an arm-badge corresponding to the Hag, to be worn by mem 
 bers in active service. The design chosen for the flag and 
 badge was a red cross on a white ground, simply the 
 colors of the national flag of Switzerland reversed, that bear 
 ing a white cross on a red ground. The association took its 
 
 O fj 
 
 name from its flag, the Society of the lied Cross. 
 
 It was not a secret or knightly order; it was just what 
 its name purported, a society for the relief of sufferings 
 inseparable from war ; a society in whose benevolent en 
 deavors all nations were invited to participate, and which had 
 no more official machinery than was necessary for efficient 
 working. 
 
 Geneva was the international centre, through which all 
 national committees might confer with each other. Every 
 national society was to be responsible for the work in its 
 own country, all local societies being under the direction of 
 their own national head. Simpler organization than this 
 was scarcely possible ; with it, great good had already been 
 accomplished. 
 
 Miss Barton, with her clear-headedness and natural execu 
 tive talent, saw at once what a long step forward in her own 
 direction this society had taken. She examined the matter 
 carefully, and became ever, as she says, "more deeply im 
 pressed with the Avisdom of its principles, the good practical 
 sense of its details, and its extreme usefulness in practice." 
 
CLARA BARTON. 109 
 
 With local societies of this kind scattered over every 
 country, all bound together for national and international 
 work in a world-encircling bond, a world-weight of suffering 
 might be lifted. It became possible, by these means, " to 
 oppose the arms of charity to the arms of violence, and to 
 make a kind of war upon war itself." For if nations could 
 forget their separate causes of quarrel in trying to alleviate 
 the sufferings which that quarrel had caused, would they not 
 soon come to see the inhumanity of settling any dispute by 
 bloodshed ? It was a glimpse of the millennium. Miss Barton 
 says, in one of her addresses on this subject : 
 
 " There is not a peace society on the" face of the earth 
 so potent, so effectual against war, as the Red Cross of 
 Geneva." 
 
 Europe was then at peace, and Miss Barton was travelling 
 on the continent in the hope of regaining her health. She 
 was unequal to any serious exertion ; but if we know what 
 sympathy with a great cause and a generous resolution once 
 formed mean to a nature like hers, practical, decisive, 
 loyal, and steadfast, we can easily understand that sho was 
 thoroughly a member of the Society of the Red Cross long 
 before she served under its banner ; and we shall not err in 
 predicting that if one woman s efforts availed, her own country 
 would before long enter into the treaty by which other nations 
 had bound themselves together for the mitigation of the 
 horrors of war. 
 
 In the summer of 1870 she was at Berne, still a slowly- 
 recovering invalid. In July of that year, the continent was 
 startled by a declaration of war France against Prussia. 
 
 The summons to the field was the signal for the unfolding 
 of the Red Cross flag. Within three days after war had been 
 declared, Miss Barton was waited upon at her villa by a 
 party, with Dr. Appia, one of the founders of the Society, at 
 their head, who invited her to go with them to the place of 
 conflict, and assist them in whatever way she could. Not 
 feeling able to set out at once, she followed them in a few 
 days, taking with her only one companion, a young French 
 
110 CLARA BARTOK. 
 
 girl, the "fair-haired Antoinette," who hud offered herself to 
 the Red Cross Society for active service. 
 
 They passed down from Berne to Basle, thence across the 
 frontier country toward Strasburg, meeting everywhere fly 
 ing, frightened people, who believed that they had left their 
 native villages sacked behind them, as in the barbarous war 
 fare of the Middle Ages. The two women were implored to 
 return. The people could not believe that they were actually 
 bound to the battle-field of their own free will and purpose. 
 Pressing on, they at last reached the German army, and were 
 admitted within its lines. There they remained several weeks 
 during Avhich time the battle of Hagenau was fought 
 assisting in the Red Cross work. 
 
 Miss Barton had now opportunity to study the practical 
 operation of this beneficent organization. Everything was 
 done systematically and quietly ; surgeons, nurses, assistants 
 trained for the emergency promptly at work, supplies abun 
 dant, the wounded and the dead removed from the battle-lield 
 at once, so that the next day none of the dreadful debris of 
 the conflict remained. 
 
 The terrible scenes of our own war came back to her in 
 vivid contrast. She says : " I thought of the Peninsula in 
 McCIellan s campaign, of Petersburg Landing, Cedar Moun 
 tain, and second Bull Run, Antietam, old Fredericksburg, with 
 its acres of snow-covered and gun-covered glacis and its 
 fourth day flag of truce, of its dead, and starving wounded, 
 frozen to the ground, and our commissions and their supplies 
 in Washington with no effective organization or power to go 
 beyond ; of the Petersburg mine with its four thousand dead 
 and wounded and no flag of truce, the wounded broiling in a 
 July sun, the dead bodies putrefying where they fell. As I 
 saw the work of these Red Cross societies in the field, ac 
 complishing in four months under their systematic organiza 
 tion what we failed to accomplish in four years without it, no 
 mistakes, no needless suffering, no waste, no confusion, but 
 order, plenty, cleanliness, and comfort wherever that little 
 flag made its way, it whole continent marshalled under the 
 
CLARA BARTON. Ill 
 
 banner of the Red Cross, as I saw all this, and joined and 
 worked in it, you will not wonder that I said to myself, If I 
 live to return to my country, I will try to make my people 
 understand the Red Cross and that treaty. But I did more 
 than to resolve ; I promised other nations I would do it, and 
 other reasons pressed me to remember my promise." 
 
 Chief among these reasons was the futility of attempts 
 made by charitable persons in the United States to relieve 
 sufferings caused by the devastations of this Franco-Prussian 
 war. Ships were sent over, freighted with supplies, but when 
 these things arrived, no one was authorized to receive them, and 
 for the most part they went to utter waste. Had they borne 
 the stamp of the Red Cross Society, they would have been for 
 warded, and through them a vast amount of misery might 
 have been saved. It was indeed a pity that so much generous 
 effort should have failed of its end. 
 
 On reaching her summer retreat at Berne, Miss Barton 
 learned that the Grand Duchess of Baden had been making 
 
 c5 
 
 inquiries for her through the legations, desiring her presence 
 at her court at Carlsruhe. Acceding to the request, she found 
 the Grand Duchess Louise, the only daughter of the Em 
 peror of Germany, a noble lady in the noblest sense of the 
 word, whose warm heart was deeply moved by the distresses 
 of the conflicts in which her nearest relatives were involved, 
 anxious to understand more clearly the peculiarities of the 
 field-hospital service in our civil war. There were features 
 of it new to her, which she felt might be made available to 
 relieve suffering in the German armies. The women of her 
 country and court, with herself at their head, were already 
 doing their utmost under the Red Cross flag on the battle-field, 
 the " Frauenverein," or Woman s Union of Baden, which had 
 grown up under her patronage, having constituted itself a 
 Society of the Red Cross. She asked Miss Barton to stay 
 with her, that they might each become acquainted with the 
 other s methods, and for an exchange of suggestions. 
 
 The long, weary weeks of the siege of Strasburg had be 
 gun, and Miss Barton agreed to remain at Carlsruhe until that 
 
112 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 was ended. As soon as it was possible to enter the city, she 
 must go there, and help relieve the distresses the besieging 
 armies had caused. 
 
 During this visit she was enabled to see how generously 
 the Grand Duchess had devoted herself to the aid of wounded 
 men, whether foes or friends. Miss Barton says: "Her 
 many and beautiful castles, with their magnificent grounds, 
 throughout all Baden, were at^once transformed into military 
 hospitals, and her entire court, with herself at its head, 
 formed into a committee of superintendence and organization 
 for relief. I have seen a wounded Arab from the French 
 armies, who knew no word of any language but his own, 
 stretch out his arms to her in adoration and blessing as she 
 passed his bed." 
 
 No wonder that two workers like these, so earnestly unsel 
 fish, found themselves one in a friendship which has remained 
 undimmed through the flight of busy years. Miss Barton 
 still has frequent letters from the Grand Duchess, and she 
 cherishes among her treasured mementos a beautiful gold-and- 
 enamel Red Cross brooch, presented to her before they parted 
 by that lady ; who also, with her husband, the Grand Duke, 
 decorated her with the Gold Cross of Remembrance, attached 
 to the colors of the Grand Duchy of Baden. 
 
 The Empress Augusta, Avith the Emperor, conferred upon 
 her the Iron Cross of Merit, accompanied by the colors of 
 Germany and the Red Cross the Iron Cross being only 
 bestowed upon those who have earned it by deeds of heroism 
 on the battle-field. 
 
 Those were anxious weeks that Miss Barton passed with 
 her noble hostess at Carlsruhe, for the sufferers within the 
 besieged city could neither be heard from nor approached. 
 But at last Strasburg yielded. The gates were thrown open, 
 and the German army entered ; and with it, Miss Barton 
 made her way across the Rhine, and into the city unattended, 
 for so she alvvays chose to go to her army work. 
 
 She found sad havoc there, but the wounded by shot and 
 shell were well cared for by the Sisters of Mercy. The con- 
 
CLARA BARTON. 113 
 
 dition of the poorer people, whose employments had been 
 stopped, and who were degenerating into rags and pauperism, 
 she saw required immediate attention. Squalid and half- 
 starved, huddled into cellars where they had gone for shelter 
 during the bombardment, their destitution was painful beyond 
 description. Having looked into their wants, and returned 
 for a brief conference with the Grand Duchess, she estab 
 lished herself among these poor women with only one assist 
 ant ; this time the faithful, devoted Anna Zimmerman. 
 
 The details of the work these two did cannot be given 
 here, but they are intensely interesting. All that can be said 
 is that the raising of hundreds of women from utterly de 
 moralized poverty to a well-clad, self-helpful condition, 
 seems to us, as it seemed to the leading men of Strasburg, 
 who watched its progress and lent it their aid, well nigh 
 miraculous. 
 
 A similar work of relief was carried on by Miss Barton in 
 other cities which had suffered from sie<je. We hear of her 
 
 o 
 
 aiding the starving inhabitants of Metz, ministering to the 
 wounded returning from Sedan, and distributing at Belfort, 
 Montbeliard, and in Paris, the large contributions of the Bos 
 ton Relief Fund, which its agent had intrusted to her care. 
 She reached Paris in the closing days of the Commune, bring 
 ing with her large supplies of clothing from Strasburg the 
 work of the women she had helped as the gift of the poor 
 of that city to the poor of Paris. 
 
 Here she remained several weeks, acting under the direc 
 tion of the Prefect, whose house she had been invited to make 
 her headquarters for the distribution of supplies. She gave 
 with her own hands, into the hands of every needy person 
 sent to her, money or clothing, as the case required, taking 
 the name of every one who was assisted, and rendering an 
 account of the same, exact to a franc. 
 
 This has always been Miss Barton s method. She has done 
 nothing irresponsibly ; and through her careful business hab 
 its, and direct sympathetic contact with the people she has 
 served, she has come into those personal relations by which 
 
114 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 the lies of human fraternity are made real and strong. Her 
 image is, beyond doubt, enshrined in the memory of a great 
 multitude of the European poor, with gratitude that borders 
 upon adoration. 
 
 Such labors are not carried on without drawing upon 
 one s treasury of vital power to the last farthing. Miss 
 Barton was far from well when she began them, not having 
 
 O 7 O 
 
 recovered from the strain of service during our own war, 
 and when she crossed over from the continent to London 
 she fell ill, and lay there a long time, unable to return to 
 America. 
 
 She came back in 1873, but through extreme physical pros 
 tration, she was for several years debarred from all exertion. 
 As soon as she was able, she went to Washington, to urge 
 the acceptance of the Geneva treaty, under which the phil 
 anthropic work of the Red Cross might be efficiently or 
 ganized. 
 
 The matter was delayed, apparently for no other reason 
 than that it had always been delayed. No satisfactory re 
 sponse was received until the inauguration of President Gar- 
 field. From him it met with prompt approval, and only the 
 assassin s hand stayed his from signing the treaty. It re 
 ceived the signature of his successor, President Arthur, in 
 March, 1882 ; and our country may know that one of its 
 wisest, most humane treaties exists through the unwearying 
 perseverance of a woman. 
 
 In 1877 a few ladies and gentlemen had formed themselves, 
 at Washington, into an "American National Committee of the 
 Red Cross," which, on President Garfield s accession, reorgan 
 ized, and was incorporated under the title of the ff American 
 Association of the Red Cross." Miss Barton was appointed 
 to the presidency of this society by the martyred Garficld 
 himself, and since that time she has devoted herself to carry 
 ing out its benevolent purposes. 
 
 It is to be hoped that we shall have no more wars of our 
 own ; and, knowing that we are less exposed to that scourge 
 than the more crowded nations of Europe, the provisions of 
 
CLARA BARTON. 
 
 the American Society have been extended so as to cover the 
 calamities to which we are peculiarly liable by fire, flood, and 
 pestilence. 
 
 Great help has already been rendered in various disasters. 
 The Red Cross Society of Western New York at once sent 
 relief to the sufferers by the terrible fires in Michigan ; and 
 from Mississippi, and from Louisiana, where there is a State 
 organization earnestly at work, come back words of overflow 
 ing gratitude for aid from the National Association during the 
 recent devastating floods. It is easy to see, now that Clara 
 Barton shows it to us, that this work is one that belongs to 
 every city and town in the country ; and the people are see 
 ing it, and are everywhere gathering themselves together 
 under the banner of the Red Cross. 
 
 It is scarcely possible to know Miss Barton and not catch 
 from her a contagion of enthusiasm for her work for her 
 work is herself. Under her quiet demeanor, one feels the 
 stirring of irresistible energies, centred and steady as the 
 forces of the universe. And these energies all move forward 
 to beneficent ends, warmed and impelled by a heart over 
 flowing with sympathy. How little she has thought of her 
 self, how willingly she has given all she has, time, thought, 
 strength, money, to carry out her generous plans, one sees 
 incidentally only in reviewing her life, for by no hint of hers 
 would it appear that she has done what she has, except as the 
 simplest matter of course, because it fell into her hands to 
 be done. 
 
 " I have no mission," she says. "I have never had a mis 
 sion. But I have always had more work than I could do 
 lying around my feet, and I try hard to get it out of the way, 
 so as to go on and do the next." 
 
 Large in her comprehensions, and of penetrative insight, 
 careful, just, systematic, her work has to be done well, or not 
 at all. There is nothing of the visionary in her composition. 
 Life presents itself to her in its practical issues, which she 
 meets with the grand calmness of a nature thoroughly disci 
 plined. A woman of simple manners, carrying with her no 
 
116 CLARA BARTON. 
 
 air of superiority, she is one of the very few whose life illus 
 trates to the world the heroic womanly ideal. 
 
 Miss Barton, having accepted the supcrintendency of the 
 Reformatory Prison for Women at Sherburne, Mass., entered 
 upon her duties there in May, 1883. The work is different 
 from any in which she has hitherto been engaged ; but it 
 seems not unsuitable that she who has done so much to re 
 lieve sufferers in other conflicts, should devote herself to the 
 fallen on moral battle-fields. For this work, she may wear 
 her Red Cross badge with an added meaning, the cross of 
 sacrifice, whereby souls are to be won back to purity and 
 peace. 
 
 But she resigns nothing of the larger responsibility she had 
 already assumed. She is pledged to the American Associa 
 tion of the Red Cross as its President, to carry on its work 
 until the men and women of her country shall take it into 
 their hearts and hands, where she feels that it belongs. So 
 entirely is she wedded to her grand purpose, it does not seem 
 strange to hear her say, "Until this work is done, I cannot 
 go to heaven." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 MAKY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 A Woman of Rare Intellect Childhood of Mary Louise Booth An Inde 
 fatigable Little Student Beginning of Her Literary Life A Great 
 Historical Work Breaking Out of the Civil War Miss Booth s Sym 
 pathy with the North Her Anxiety to Help the Cause How She did 
 It A Prodigious Task " It Shall be Done" Her Marvellous Industry 
 and Perseverance Charles Sumner s Friendship A Letter of Thanks 
 from Abraham Lincoln Assuming the Management of "Harper s 
 Bazaar" A Signal Success A Model Paper Miss Booth s Home 
 True Hospitality Pen-portrait of a Gifted Woman. 
 
 EW women in America have wielded the influence, 
 both in public and in domestic matters, that has 
 been exercised by Mary Louise Booth, or have 
 performed their part so quietly ; for her work 
 in the civil war was great as ever woman was 
 called to do, and her editorial work since that 
 time has given the keynote to life in a hundred 
 thousand homes, and penetrated them with that 
 spirit of innocence, dignity, poetry, and industry 
 which actuates all her endeavors. 
 
 The subject of this sketch was a precocious child, so 
 much so that, on being asked, she once confessed she had no 
 more recollection of learning to read either French or English 
 
 o o 
 
 than of learning to talk. As soon as she could walk, her 
 mother says, she was following her about, book in hand, beg 
 ging to be taught to read stories for herself. She read them 
 soon to so much purpose that before she was five years old 
 she had finished the Bible, being rewarded by a polyglot 
 Testament for the feat, and had also read Plutarch, which at 
 every subsequent reading has given her an equal pleasure, 
 8 in 
 
118 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 and at seven had mastered Racine in the original, upon which 
 she began the study of Latin with her father. 
 
 From that time she was an indefatigable reader, troubling 
 her parents only by her devotion to books rather than to the 
 play natural to her age. Her father had a considerable 
 library, the contents of every book in which she made her 
 own, always preferring history, before she had finished her 
 tenth year being acquainted with Hume, Gibbon, Alison, and 
 kindred writers. 
 
 At this point she was sent away to school. Her father and 
 mother, seeing the intellect for which they were responsible, 
 took all possible pains with her education, and fortunately her 
 physical strength was sufficient to carry her through an unin 
 terrupted course in different academies and a series of lessons 
 with masters at home. She cared more for languages and 
 natural sciences, in which she was very proficient, than for 
 most other studies, and took no especial pleasure in mathe 
 matics. 
 
 When she was about thirteen years of age her father 
 moved his family from the quiet and pretty little village in 
 Suffolk County, New York, with the quaint Indian name of 
 Yaphank, in which she was born, to Brooklyn, E.D., and 
 there Mr. Booth organized the first public school that was 
 established in that city. 
 
 Mr. William Chatfield Booth was a man well qualified both 
 by education and by native character for the guidance of such 
 an intelligence as that developed by his daughter. Deeply 
 interested in scholarly matters, a man of great directness of 
 purpose and of fearless integrity, he and his daughter were in 
 perfect sympathy, and he .watched her growth with tender 
 solicitude, and in subsequent years cherished with pride every 
 word of her writing. But he could never quite bring him 
 self to believe, even after she had won a handsome independ 
 ence by her exertions, that she was really altogether capable 
 of her own support, and always insisted upon making her the 
 most generous gifts. As the President of the United States 
 lately said of him, " A kinder and more honorable gentleman 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 119 
 
 it would be hard to find." Another daughter and two sons 
 comprised the remainder of his family, the younger of the 
 sons, Colonel Charles A. Booth, who has seen some twenty 
 years service in the army, having been born so much later 
 than herself that he was naturally his sister s idol from his 
 infancy. 
 
 Mr. Booth was descended from one of our earliest settlers, 
 John Booth, who came to this country in 1649, a kinsman of 
 the Sir George Booth, afterwards Baron Delamere and Earl 
 of Warrington, who, as the faithful friend and companion of 
 Charles II. in his exile and wanderings, only showed that 
 trait of fidelity to friendship which still marks his race. 
 In 1052 Ensign John Booth purchased Shelter Island from 
 the Indians, and the original deed is yet in possession of the 
 family who, for two hundred years and over, have not 
 wandered n great way from the region where their ancestor 
 made his first home on these shores. 
 
 Miss Booth s mother, who is still living, nt the age of 
 eighty, active and vigorous in body and in mind, shows her 
 origin so plainly in her sparkling black eyes, her vivacity, 
 her picturesqueness, and her gentle manners that it is hardly 
 necessary to sny one of her grandparents was a French 
 emiyrt of the Revolution. 
 
 Miss Booth s literary career began, ns might bo expected, t 
 an early age. She had the foundation of long and hard study, 
 and extensive reading, aided by an immense memory, an in 
 tense enthusiasm and faculty of appreciation, and a poetic soul. 
 Her writing at first consisted chiefly of sketches, essays, 
 and poems. But after compiling the "Marble-Worker s 
 Manual," and the "Clock and Watchmaker s Manual," both 
 successful and standard works in request by artisans, and 
 rendering French and German with such ease and freedom as 
 she did, she by degrees drifted into translation more than 
 she had intended, the field being almost entirely unoccupied. 
 She translated and published Mdry s " Andre Chdnier," 
 Victor Cousin s " Life and Times of Madame de Chcvreuse," 
 Marmier s " Russian Talcs," and Sue s " Mysteries of the 
 
120 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 People," connecting her name inseparably with all these 
 works, and with Edinond About s exquisite creation of 
 " Germaine," and "King of the Mountain" the latter of 
 which remains an inimitable burlesque of modern Greek 
 government to this day as the epigrammatic brilliancy and 
 beauty of the style of which she has rendered as an object is 
 reflected in a mirror. 
 
 Miss Booth was still scarcely more than a young girl when 
 a friend suggested to her that no complete history of the city 
 of New York had ever been written, and that it might 
 be well to prepare such a one for the use of schools. 
 Although without ambition to attempt the impossible, yet 
 never daunted by the possible, she has that patience and 
 perseverance which is as much a second description of genius 
 as of valor, and she at once busied herself in the under 
 taking, and, after some years spent in preparation, finished 
 one that became, on the request of a publisher, the basis of 
 a more important work upon the same subject, her material 
 having far outgrown the limits proposed, and her experience 
 having taught her the best way of using it. 
 
 This task was thoroughly delightful and congenial to her 
 taste and capacity. She knew, moreover, that it was no 
 petty work, as many of the most stirring events of colonial 
 and national history were connected with its story, and she 
 loved the city of her adoption as if it had been the place of 
 her birth. 
 
 "It is certain," she says, "that New York is rich in 
 memories, which are worthy of the most reverent respect, 
 and which belong alike to all its inhabitants, but which are 
 too often unheeded. Throngs of busy citizens pass and 
 repass the grave of Stuy vesant and the tomb of Montgomery, 
 ignorant of their locality, and look with indifference on the 
 Battery, and Bowling Green, teeming with reminiscences of 
 the old Dutch Colony days, and on that cradle of liberty, the 
 Park, where still may be seen one of the old prison-houses 
 of the Revolution. In these things we are far more remiss 
 than our neighbors. Boston never forgets to celebrate her 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 121 
 
 tea-party ; few New Yorkers even know that a similar one 
 was once held in their own harbor. Boston proudly commem 
 orates her " Massacre ; " how many New Yorkers are aware 
 that two months previous to this brief affray, the earliest 
 battle of the Revolution, lasting two days, was fought in the 
 streets of New York, on Golden Hill, where the first blood was 
 shed in the cause of freedom ? " 
 
 During the course of her historical work, Miss Booth met 
 with great and spontaneous kindness on all sides. She had 
 the fullest access to libraries and archives, accessible to but 
 few, and received from everybody the most considerate 
 courtesy ; especially did the older historians seem pleased that 
 a young girl should exhibit such powers and such inclina 
 tions, and they admitted her to the guild with the ceremony 
 of every kindness at their command. Washington Irving 
 sent her a letter of cordial encouragement, and D. T. Valen 
 tine, Henry B. Dawson, W. J. Davis, E. B. O Callaghan, 
 and numerous others showered her with documents and every 
 assistance. " My Dear Miss Booth," writes Benson G. 
 Lossing, " the citizens of New York owe you a debt of grati 
 tude for this popular story of the life of the great metropolis, 
 containing so many important facts in its history, and 
 included in one volume accessible to all. I congratulate you 
 on the completeness of the task and the admirable manner in 
 which it has been performed." 
 
 The history appeared in one large volume, and met at once 
 with a generous welcome, whose pecuniary results were very 
 considerable. So satisfactory, indeed, was its reception, that 
 the publisher proposed to her to go abroad and write popular 
 histories of the great European capitals, London, Paris, 
 Berlin, and Vienna. It was a bright vision for the young 
 writer, but the approach of war and other fortuitous circum 
 stances prevented its becoming a reality. 
 
 A second edition of the history was published in 1867, and 
 a third edition, revised and brought down to date, appeared 
 in 1880. A large paper edition of the work was taken by 
 well-known book-collectors, extended and illustrated by them 
 
122 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 with supplementary prints, portraits, and autographs on Ihe 
 interleaved pages. One copy, enlarged to folio and extended 
 to nine volumes by several thousand maps, letters, and other 
 illustrations, is owned in the city of Now York, and is an 
 unequalled treasure-house of interest ; Miss Booth herself 
 owns a copy that was presented to her by an eminent bib- 
 liopolist, enriched by more than two thousand of those illus 
 trations on inserted leaves ; and a collector in Chicago is so 
 in love with the great city and with the work recounting its 
 part in the drama of civilization, that he has extended his 
 own copy to twenty-two volumes. 
 
 The first sentences of the book enlist the attention of the 
 reader, as they present a picture of the wilderness of Man 
 hattan Island in vivid contrast to the peopled and cultured 
 city of to-day. "At this time, the Dutch were the richest 
 commercial nation on the globe. Having conquered their 
 independence from Spain, and their country from the sea, 
 they turned their attention to commerce, and with such 
 success that it was not long before their sails whitened the 
 waters of every clime. A thousand vessels were built annually 
 in Holland, and an extensive trade was carried on with all the 
 European nations. But their richest commerce was with the 
 East Indies ; and the better to secure themselves against 
 all competition, the merchants engaged in this traffic had, 
 in 1G02, obtained a charter of incorporation for twenty-one 
 years from the States General, under the name of the East 
 India Company, granting them the exclusive monopoly of 
 the trade in th.3 Eastern seas beyond the Cape of Good 
 Hope on one side and the Straits of Magellan on the other, 
 with other valuable privileges. 
 
 "This obtained, it next became desirable to shorten the 
 passage thither, and thus to render the commerce more 
 lucrative. The voyage to China by the only known route, 
 that by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, consumed two 
 years, and the time seemed long to the impatient merchants. 
 It was thought that a more expeditious passage might be dis 
 covered by the way of the Polar seas, and three expeditions, 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 123 
 
 under the command of Barentsen, Cornelissen, and Ileems- 
 kerck, were despatched, one after the other, in search of it. 
 But they found nothing but snow and ice, where they had 
 hoped to find a clear sea, and they returned after having 
 endured unheard-of hardships and earned a lasting fame as 
 the earliest Polar navigators." 
 
 With this she tells the story of Henry Hudson, sailing in 
 his yacht, the " Half-Moon," up w the beautiful river with its 
 lofty palisades, its broad bays, its picturesque bends, its 
 romantic highlands, and its rocky shores covered with luxu 
 riant forests." 
 
 As the tale proceeds, the origin of the Patroon system is 
 explained ; vigorous outlines are drawn of the robust ad 
 venturers and of the various early governors ; the exploits of 
 the renowned Wouter Van Twiller are recounted with as 
 much quiet humor as the stories of the Indian troubles, the 
 Leisler affair, and the relation of the Colony to the revolu 
 tion of 1689, are given with dramatic vividness, and a com 
 plete Dutch painting is made of New Amsterdam in the old 
 Dutch Colony days, making an invaluable record. 
 
 "The province thus passed away forever from the hands of 
 its Dutch rulers," says the author, at the conclusion of this 
 epoch, "but many years elapsed before the Holland manners 
 and customs were uprooted, and New York became in truth 
 an English city. Indeed, some of them linger still, and New 
 York yet retains a marked individuality which distinguishes 
 it from the eastern cities and savors strongly of its Dutch 
 origin. The memorials of the Dutch dynasty have fallen one 
 by one ; the Stuy vesant pear-tree was long the last token in 
 being of the flourishing nation which so long possessed the 
 city of New Amsterdam, the last link that connected the 
 present with the traditional past, and this fell in 1867, 
 before the slow decay of age. But the broad and liberal 
 nature of the early settlers is stilt perpetuated in the cosmo 
 politan character of the city, in its freedom from exclusive- 
 ness, in its religious tolerance, and in its extended views of 
 men and things. . . . The Dutch language has disappeared, 
 
124 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 the Dutch signs have passed away from the streets, and the 
 Dutch manners and customs are forgotten save in a few 
 strongholds of the ancient Knickerbocker. But the Dutch 
 spirit has not yet died out, enough of it is still remaining 
 to enable New York to trace its lineage in a direct line to its 
 parent, New Amsterdam." 
 
 As we continue to turn these enchaining pages, we find the 
 true story of Captain Kidd recited for the first time, the great 
 negro plot, whose atrocities far outdid those of the Salem 
 witchcraft, rehearsed with judicial impartiality, the era of 
 the Revolution set before us in burning words, and all the 
 events of the life of the great city, so intertwined with 
 the national life, are swiftly and strongly told, doAvn to 
 the times of the cruel draft riots and the robberies of the 
 ring, which are yet unnoted by any other historian. 
 Here and there a lively anecdote brightens the text ; a 
 character is limned in black and white so sharply that one 
 sees why the traits of the old Stuyvesants, Van Ilensselaers, 
 and Rapclyes, should still mark their descendants, or a bit of 
 forcible word-painting is given, as in the sketch of the foun 
 dation of the fur-trade which made the beginning of so many 
 colossal fortunes. "This opening of a new path in commerce 
 wrought a revolution in the aims and lives of the young men 
 
 o */ o 
 
 of the city. These youths, instead of remaining, as formerly, 
 behind their fathers counters, or entering the beaten track 
 of the West India trade, now provided themselves with a 
 stock of guns and blankets, and set out with a trusty servant 
 in a bark canoe to explore the pathless wilderness. Here 
 the} roamed for months in the primeval forests, forced at 
 every step to turn aside to avoid some deadly reptile or fierce 
 beast of prey, or to guard against the wiles of an insidious 
 foe, ever on the alert to entrap them in some snare, and to 
 purchase their goods at the expense of their lives. Forced 
 to depend for their subsistence on the quickness of their eye 
 and the sureness of their aim, to journey by day through 
 thicket and marsh, over cataract and rapid, to sleep at night 
 with no other canopy than the stars and sky, and to be con- 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 125 
 
 stantly on their guard against the unseen danger which was 
 lurking everywhere about them this forest education called 
 forth all their resources of courage and sagacity, and they 
 came from the trial with muscles of iron, nerves of steel, and 
 a head and eye that never flinched before the most deadly 
 peril. No fiction of romance can surpass the adventurous 
 career of those daring travellers who thus pursued the golden 
 fleece in the wilds of America ; and those who came forth 
 from this school of danger were well fitted to play their part 
 in the approaching tragedies of the French and Indian war 
 and the drama of the coining Revolution." 
 
 To linger a moment on a subject where there is still so 
 much to be said, perhaps no better example can be seen of 
 the facile grace of the author s style and the calm and well- 
 balanced power of presenting a case than in the following 
 extract from this work, which has the interest of a romance 
 and the value of an encyclopedia of reference : " The truth is 
 that Great Britain contemptuously regarded the colonists as 
 rich barbarians, the chief end of whose existence was to fur 
 nish an ample revenue to the mother-country. Their interests 
 were wholly disregarded in the government councils, and the 
 restrictions imposed on them were rigorous in the extreme. 
 The English parliament claimed the right of regulating the 
 trade of the colonies, and, under cover of this pretext, levied 
 heavy duties upon imports, ostensibly for the purpose of de 
 fraying custom-house expenses, and at the same time sedu 
 lously suppressed all attempts at home manufactures. By a 
 series of navigation acts, the colonists were forbidden to trade 
 with any foreign country, or to export to England merchan 
 dise of their own in any but English vessels. The country 
 was full of iron, but not an axe or a hammer could be manu 
 factured by the inhabitants without violating the law. Beaver 
 was abundant, but to limit its manufacture no hatter was per 
 mitted to have more than two apprentices, and not a hat could 
 be sold from one colony to another. Of the wool which was 
 sheared in such abundance from the flocks, not a yard of 
 cloth could be manufactured except for private use, nor a 
 
126 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 pound exported from one town to another ; but the raw mate 
 rial must all be sent to England to be manufactured there, 
 then to come back as imported cloths, laden with heavy 
 duties. Imposts were also levied upon sugar, molasses, and 
 all articles of foreign luxury imported into the colonies, and 
 America was, in fact, regarded only as a place from which to 
 raise money. 
 
 "Notwithstanding, the colonists had patiently submitted to 
 this manifest injustice. They had evaded the payment of the 
 duties by living frugally and dispensing with the luxuries 
 which could only be obtained at such a cost. They had 
 accepted the royal governors, profligate and imbecile as they 
 often were, and had contented themselves with opposing their 
 unjust exactions. In the French and Indian wars they had 
 acted nobly, and by lavish expenditure of their blood and 
 treasure had secured to England the possession of a rich and 
 long-coveted territory. These wars, which had added such 
 lustre to the crown of Great Britain, and had secured the 
 broad lands of Canada to her domain, had cost the colonies 
 thirt} thousand of their bravest soldiers and left them bur 
 dened with a debt of thirteen million pounds. But, in 
 satiable in her desires, in return for this she required still 
 more. The country which had been able to contribute so 
 largely in the intercolonial wars had not, she thought; been 
 taxed to the utmost, and, in order to wring from it a still 
 larger revenue, new means were proposed by the British 
 ministry for establishing a system of parliamentary taxation, 
 a right Avhich the colonists had ever persistently denied." 
 
 Shortly after the publication of the first edition of this 
 invaluable work, the civil war broke out. Miss Booth had 
 always been a warm anti-slavery partisan and a sympathizer 
 with movements for what she considered true progress, 
 although directed by that calm judgment which never lets 
 the heart run away with the head. But here heart and 
 head were in accord, the country was aflame with fervor to 
 prevent the destruction of the noblest government ever given 
 to man ; and all hoped that a certain result of the struggle 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 127 
 
 would be that universal freedom without which the freedom 
 already vaunted was a lie. 
 
 Miss Booth was, of course, enlisted on the side of the 
 Union, and longing to do something to help the cause in 
 which she so ardently believed. She did not feel herself 
 qualified to act as a nurse in the military hospitals, not only 
 having that inherent antipathy to the sight of sickness and 
 suffering common to many poetic natures, although willing 
 to endure all that such sight and association could bring, but 
 being, through her life among books, too inexperienced in such 
 work to venture assuming its tasks with their consequent risk 
 of life. Still something she must do. That she had sent her 
 brother to the front, scarcely more than a boy, as he was, 
 seemed not half enough ; and, when, while burning with eager 
 ness she received an advance copy of Count Agenor de Gas- 
 parin s " Uprising of a Great People," she at once saw her 
 opportunity in bringing heartening words to those in the 
 terrible struggle. 
 
 She took the work, without loss of time, to Mr. Scribner, 
 proposing he should publish it. He demurred a little, saying 
 he would gladly do so if the translation were ready, but that 
 the war would be over before the book was out, Mr . Sew- 
 ard having authoritatively limited its duration to a small 
 number not of weeks but of days. Mr. Scribner finally said, 
 perhaps but half believing in the possibility, that if it could 
 be ready in a week he would publish it. " It shall be done," 
 was her reply, and she went home and went to work, work 
 ing twenty hours of every twenty-four, receiving the proof- 
 sheets at night and returning them with fresh copy in the 
 morning. The week lacked several hours of its completion 
 when the work was finished, and in a fortnight the book was 
 out, and its message rang from Maine to California. 
 
 Nothing published during the war made half the sensation 
 that did this prophetic volume, whose predictions were so 
 wonderfully accurate that very few of them were found to 
 have proved false at the end of the dark contest, dark not 
 only because beginning to be so doubtful, and laden with sor- 
 
128 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 row, and suffering, and loss, but because, although the North 
 shone in the light of a glorious resolve, and the South con 
 tended for principle, the struggle was still one between broth 
 ers. The newspapers of the day were full of reviews and 
 notices, eulogistic and otherwise, according to the [/arty repre 
 sented. The book revived courage and rekindled hope. ff It 
 is worth a whole phalanx in the cause of human freedom," 
 wrote Charles Sumner ; and Abraham Lincoln paused in the 
 midst of his mighty work to send her a letter of thanks and 
 lofty cheer. 
 
 The publication of the book was the means of putting Miss 
 Booth at once into communication with the author and his 
 wife, who begged her to visit them in Switzerland ; and it 
 subsequently brought about a correspondence with most of 
 those European sympathizers with the North who handled a 
 pen, such as Augustin Cochin, Edouard Laboulaye, Henri 
 Martin, Edmond de Pressense, Conte du Montalembert, 
 Monseigneur Dupanloup, and others, men of all shades of 
 religious and political belief at home, but united in the hatred 
 of slavery, and in sympathy for the cause in whose success 
 its extinction was involved. 
 
 These gentlemen vied with each other in sending her 
 advance-sheets of their books, and numerous articles, letters, 
 and pamphlets to meet the question of the day, which she 
 swiftly translated, publishing them without money and with 
 out price, in the daily journals, and through the avenues 
 afforded by the Union League Club. In return, she kept these 
 noble Frenchmen accurately informed of the progress of events, 
 and sent them such publications as could be of service. 
 
 The " Uprising of a Great People " was followed rapidly by 
 Gasparin s "America Before Europe," by Laboulaye s " Paris 
 in America," and two volumes by Augustin Cochin, " Results 
 of Emancipation" and "Results of Slavery." Cochin s work 
 attracted even more attention than Gasparin s had done. She 
 received hundreds of appreciative letters from the leading 
 Republican statesman Henry Winter Davis, Senator Doo- 
 little, Galusha A. Grow, Dr. Lieber, Dr. Bell, the president 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 129 
 
 of the Sanitary Commission, and a host of others, among 
 them George Simmer, Cassius M. Clay, and Attorney-Gen 
 eral Speed, Charles Sumner writing her that Cochin s work 
 had been of more value to the cause " than the Numidian 
 cavalry to Hannibal." 
 
 It will easily be seen from this brief and condensed recital 
 how important was Miss Booth s share in the great national 
 work, a share in firing and sustaining the public heart second 
 only to that of Mrs. Stowe s, before the war, when "Uncle 
 Tom s Cabin went through the land like the Fiery Cross 
 that, seared in fire and dipped in blood, flashed from hand to 
 hand for the rousing of the clans. " As I went over some of 
 those letters last night," she wrote once, concerning this 
 "Sturm and Drang" period of her life, " it was like opening 
 the grave of the past. My present life seemed thin and 
 frivolous compared with those glowing hours so full of earn 
 est work, in which the fate of a nation was involved ; and I 
 could not sleep for thinking of the days that are no more." 
 
 In the meantime she pursued her translations as before, 
 adding to her list Laboulaye s " Fairy Tales," and Jean 
 Mace s " Fairy Book," and several of the religious works of 
 the Count and Countess do Gasparin, " Happiness " by the 
 former, and "Camille," " Vesper," and " Human Sorrows " by 
 the latter. Her translations in all number nearly forty vol 
 umes. She had thought of adding to this number, at the 
 request of Mr. James T. Fields, an abridgment of Madame 
 Sand s voluminous " Histoire de ma Vie," and, with her 
 customary delicacy, not liking to undertake a task of that 
 nature without permission, she wrote the author, giving her 
 proposed plan, and receiving the following reply : 
 
 "MADAME, J ai etc" absente de chez moi, et je recois vos deux 
 lettres ^ la fois. Votre maniere & dire et de penser, et la delica- 
 tesse de vos scrupules, me donnent une confiance entiere dans 
 votre discernement et dans votre conscience. Je vous autorise 
 done a faire Ics coupures quo vous jugiez ne cessaires, et vous prie 
 de me croire toute a vous, GEORGE SAND. 
 
 Nohant, 22 Mai, 63, 
 Par la CMtre, Indre. 
 
130 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 Circumstances, however, prevented the completion of the 
 work. 
 
 Her pleasant correspondence with people of interest still 
 continued, and, among others, with Mr. Sumner, passages 
 from which I have begged, and with difficulty obtained per 
 mission to transcribe for the sake of their value to those who 
 love his name. 
 
 " I cannot express to you all the gratitude I feel for your 
 kindness to the memory of my late brother. His death was a 
 release to him, but it has been a trial to us. It leaves me more 
 than ever alone." Afterwards, acknowledging a message, he 
 says, " I am touched and gratified by those beautiful words 
 of Madame de Gasparin. When you write to her, be good 
 enough to let her know how constantly my brother cherished 
 the recollection of his visit to her family, and that he often 
 went over its incidents. I had not the good fortune of know 
 ing personally any of this remarkable familj r , but I am familiar 
 with their history and with their labors. Madame de Gasparin 
 is not the least remarkable of this distinguished connection." 
 Still later he writes her in touching words that seem to cry 
 for the rest that never came, " It is hard to contend always. - 
 I long for repose. But there is no rest for me so long as the 
 freedmen are denied their rights, and the only chance of 
 placing them beyond assault is through the national gov 
 ernment." 
 
 Miss Booth did not cease her labors after her work in con 
 nection with the war was over, but at once began the trans 
 lation of Henri Martin s "Unabridged History of France," 
 six of whose volumes she translated. Since then, in connection 
 with Miss Alger, she has translated Martin s abridgement of 
 the " History of France," in six volumes, now in course of 
 publication. She has been in friendly communication with 
 most of the authors to whose writings she has turned her 
 attention, and all without exception have taken warm interest 
 in her work, and commended it in flattering terms. 
 
 In the year 1867 Miss Booth undertook another enter 
 prise of an entirely opposite but no less important nature, 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 131 
 
 in assuming the management of " Harper s Bazar," a weekly 
 journal devoted to the pleasure and improvement of the 
 domestic circle. She had long been in pleasant relations 
 with the Messrs. Harper, the four brothers who founded the 
 great house which bears their name, and who conducted 
 its business to such splendid results ; and when they resolved 
 upon issuing a family newspaper of this description they 
 immediately asked her to take its editorial control. 
 
 Diffident concerning her abilities in this untried direc 
 tion, she accepted with hesitation. But the correctness of 
 their judgment was soon displayed ; for under her editorial 
 management it proved the swiftest journalistic success on 
 record, numbering its subscribers by the hundred thousand, 
 and while other papers take a loss for granted in the begin 
 ning, putting itself upon a paying basis at the outset. While 
 she has assistants in every department, among their names 
 those of some most distinguished in our literature, she is her 
 self the inspiration of the whole corps, and under the advice 
 and suggestion of its proprietors she has held it on an even 
 course, whatever winds of doctrine blew outside. There is 
 scarcely a poet, or a story-writer, or novelist of any rank in 
 America or England who is not a contributor to its pages, 
 and its purity, its self-respect, its high standard, and its lite 
 rary excellence, are unrivalled among periodical publications. 
 The influence of such a paper within American homes is 
 something hardly to be computed. It has always been on 
 the side of good and sweet things ; it has made the right 
 seem the best and pleasantest ; it has taught while it has 
 amused ; it has had the happiness, well-being, and virtue of 
 women and the family for its first consideration, and it has 
 created a wholesome atmosphere wherever it is constantly 
 read. Through its columns its editor has made her hand felt 
 
 O 
 
 in countless families for nearly sixteen years, and has helped 
 to shape the domestic ends of a generation to peace and 
 righteousness. 
 
 Perhaps Miss Booth could not have accomplished so much 
 if she had been hampered, as many women are, by conditions 
 
132 MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 
 
 demanding exertion in other than her chosen path, and with 
 out the comfort about her of a perfect home. She lives 
 in the city of New York, in the neighborhood of Central 
 Park, in a house which she owns, with her sister by adopt 
 ion, Mrs. Anne W. Wright, between whom and herself there 
 exists one of those lifelong and tender affections which are 
 too intimate and delicate for public mention, but which are 
 among the friendships of history, a friendship that was 
 begun in childhood and that cannot cease in death. To Mrs. 
 Wright, more than to any other woman I have known, do 
 Wordsworth s lines apply : 
 
 "A countenance in which did meet 
 Sweet records, promises as sweet. 
 
 The reason firm, the temperate will, 
 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill, 
 A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
 To warn, to comfort, and command." 
 
 Their house is one particularly adapted to entertaining, 
 with its light and lovely parlors and connecting rooms ; there 
 are always guests within its hospitable walls, and if there is 
 such a thing in this country as a salon, it is to be found here, 
 where every Saturday night may be met an assemblage of the 
 beauty and wit and wisdom, resident or transient, in the city 
 authors of note, great singers, players, musicians, statesmen, 
 travellers, publishers, journalists, and pretty women, making 
 the time fly on wings of enchantment. A few years ago 
 these friends of the house took the occasion of a birthday to 
 present Miss Booth with a magnificent album full of portraits 
 and autographs of great value. 
 
 Miss Booth is a person who has been singularly blest 
 with steadfast friends ; one has only to look at the benig- 
 nancy of her habitual expression to see the reason why. 
 She forgets herself in serving others, and is happy in their 
 happiness. Exquisitely sensitive herself, sympathetic and 
 delicate, she is further characterized by a lofty nobility and 
 honor. Many-sided as a faceted jewel, to the man of busi- 
 
MARY LOUISE BOOTH. 133 
 
 ness she is merely a woman of business ; but to the poet she 
 is full of answering vibrations. She values beauty in every 
 form, betraying the fact in a deep and intelligent love of 
 nature, in a passion for flowers, gems, and perfumes, and in 
 an intense delight and thorough knowledge of music. Warm 
 in her affections, quick in her feelings, cool in her judg 
 ments, untiring in her energies, imperious in her will, and 
 almost timid in her self-distrust in spite of her achievement, 
 her character is a singular combination of the strength on 
 which you can rely, and the tenderness you would protect, 
 while there is a certain bounteousness of nature about her, 
 like the overflowing sweetness and spice of a full-blown rose. 
 All these qualities are held within bounds by a shy and suf 
 fering modesty that will make it impossible for her to read 
 these words ! 
 
 In person Miss Booth is majestic and commanding, being 
 taller and larger than women usually are. Her dress is sim 
 ple to plainness when about her business, but rich and becom 
 ing otherwhere, for she has the weakness of other women 
 about rare old lace, and cashmeres that are drawn through a 
 bracelet. Her hands are as perfect as sculpture, and sparkle 
 with quaint and costly rings ; and her skin of infantile deli 
 cacy and rose-leaf color, her dimples, her straight, short nose, 
 her soft brown eyes, and her prematurely silvered hair, worn 
 rolled over cushions, give her a striking appearance that 
 approaches beauty. 
 
 But there is a beauty of the soul more precious than any 
 other ; it shines in the purity of the countenance, in the quiet 
 independence of movement, in the sincerity nd straightfor 
 wardness of utterance, in the care and concern for others, 
 and in the glance that seeks their sympathy ; and this beauty 
 is still more pre-eminently hers. Strong for troublous times 
 and sweet for gentle ones, she is one woman in a myriad, and 
 the world is better because she has lived in it. 
 9 
 
CHAPTER YI. 
 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 Early Home of the Blackwell Sisters "Little Shy" Her Indomitable 
 Pluck and Wonderful Physique A Feat Showing Her Strength Death 
 of Her Father Struggle of the Family with Misfortune and Poverty 
 Elizabeth Begins the Study of Medicine How She Acquired Her Profes 
 sional Education Surmounting Great Difficulties Some of Her Experi 
 ences as a Medical Student Graduates with High Honor First Medical 
 Diploma Ever Granted to a Woman A Proud Moment in Her Life 
 Her Sister, Emily Blackwell Her College Life Battling Against Oppo 
 sition Final Success Her Studies Abroad The Two Sisters establish 
 Themselves in Practice in New York Founding the Women s Hospital 
 and College Recognition and Success at Last. 
 
 MAZARIN said to Don Luis de Haro, 
 at the time of the Peace of the Pyrenees : 
 " How lucky you are, in Spain ! There, women 
 are satisfied with being coquettish or devout ; 
 they obey their lover or their confessor, and 
 interfere with nothing else." His eminence 
 held, in common with the public opinion of his 
 time, that the political and social troubles of less 
 well-regulated countries proceeded from the failure 
 of the meddlesome sex to mind its own business. 
 Cut as women came more frequently to be heard upon the 
 subject, it appeared that a respectable minority disagreed 
 with the majority as to the nature and limits of that business. 
 Presently a clear-eyed woman wrote : " History jeers at 
 the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by 
 the forms which flow from them. They make a rule : they 
 say, from observation, what can and cannot be. In vain ! 
 Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women 
 to battle, and sets Hercules spinning ; she enables women to 
 bear immense burdens, cold, and frost ; she enables the man, 
 
 134 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 135 
 
 who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother. 
 . . . Presently she will make a female Newton, and a male 
 siren. . . . But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I 
 reply any. I do not care what case you put ; let them be 
 sea-captains, if you will. I do not doubt there arc women 
 well-fitted for such an office, and if so, I should be as glad 
 to soe them in it as to welcome the Maid of Saragossa, or 
 the Maid of Missolonghi, or the Suliote heroine, or Countess 
 Colonel Emily Plater." 
 
 The female Newton is yet to come, but in the very year 
 that saw the publication of Margaret Fuller s brave plea for 
 her sex, a young woman in the West, alone, unaided, and 
 poor, began those studies which have made her name eminent 
 in medical science, and freed a new domain of labor to the 
 occupation of women. That America, however grudgingly, 
 afforded Elizabeth Black well, and, afterward, her sister, 
 Emily, that opportunity for professional instruction and prac 
 tice which their native England withheld, constitutes her 
 claim to reckon them among her noble women. 
 
 Their father, Mr. Samuel Black well, a rich sugar-refiner of 
 Bristol, was a man of singular high-mindedness, catholicity, 
 energy, honesty, and benevolence. Their home offered a 
 fruitful soil for virtues to take root in, which throve the better, 
 as it seemed, for the overrunning tangle of innocent wild- 
 oats that grew up with them. Winters were given to hard 
 work in the school-room, summers to equally hard play at 
 the seaside. Long walks in all weathers kept heads clear 
 and complexions bright. The wise mother was not frightened 
 at the name of torn-boy, nor disturbed by the cheerful din of 
 the host of children who "rampaged" through the passages 
 between lesson-hours. Birthdays, which seemed to have a 
 jovial trick of recurring oftcner than in other families of like 
 spaciousness, were celebrated with a frenzy of affectionate 
 zeal. Holidays brought "sport that wrinkled care derides, 
 and laughter holding both his sides." 
 
 The sunshine and fresh air of this hearty, sensible, hilarious 
 household developed a sturdy growth of juvenile character. 
 
136 THE DOCTOKS BLACKWELL. 
 
 Elizabeth, the third daughter, was a tiny creature, fair, with 
 blonde hair, beautiful hands, and a voice of extraordinary 
 sweetness. As a child, she was so unusually reserved and 
 silent that her father, to whom she was devoted, nicknamed 
 her " Little Shy." But this singularly delicate and shrinking 
 exterior hid a tenacity of purpose and muscular strength 
 almost incredible. 
 
 An elder sister relates that before the little maid was five 
 years old, her father was once obliged to go to Dublin on 
 business. This necessity was made the occasion of a frolic 
 for the children, who went in force to the Hotwells to see him 
 Off. Elizabeth, bent on being useful, persisted in holding his 
 heavy portmanteau in her lap all the way to the anchorage. 
 As the steamer swung off and moved slowly down the river, 
 the children ran along the bank, shouting their good-bys. 
 But when the rest were ready to turn homeward, " Little Shy " 
 only quickened her pace. She had made up her small mind 
 that since she was forbidden to accompany her father, as she 
 had entreated, she would make the journey on foot, and rejoin 
 him in Ireland ! Coaxing and remonstrance were vain. The 
 tiny pilgrim, bound on her filial errand, had already the con 
 stancy of a devotee. At last it was made plain to her that 
 her father had taken the ship because it was impossible to 
 reach Ireland by land, and that should she walk to Holy- 
 head she must there be turned back by the Channel. Even 
 her indomitable little spirit saw the futility of contending with 
 the natural divisions of the earth, however arbitrary and 
 senseless they might appear to her, and she turned home 
 ward with injured and resentful countenance, too indignant 
 with Circumstance to utter a word. 
 
 In earliest girlhood she read Foster s Essay on Decision 
 of Character," which became an inspiration to her. All her 
 ideals were heroic, Elizabeth, the huntress Diana, the 
 Valkyries, with their lofty self-dependence and undaunted 
 courage, Boadicea, Lady Russell, Madame Roland. She 
 herself had the perfect physique of the mythical maids of 
 Valhalla. Her muscles were corded steel, her delicate hands 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 137 
 
 had a grip of iron. She would pick up the other children 
 and carry them about the house, till, tired out with laughter 
 and struggling, they consented to her terms of release. 
 While still in the school-room her feats of strength were 
 astonishing. 
 
 It is related of her that she once used the argumentum ad 
 hominem in a peculiarly convincing way. Some intimate 
 friends having called one evening at her father s house, the 
 conversation happened to turn on the feeble muscular develop 
 ment of women. A certain gentleman maintained that the 
 weakest man, putting forth his full strength, could overcome 
 the strongest woman. 
 
 " But that must be a mistake," declared her brother, " for 
 when Elizabeth chooses she is more than a match for the 
 best of us at wrestling or at lifting, and carries us about as 
 she likes." 
 
 " She could not lift me! No woman living could lift me ! " 
 exclaimed the champion of his sex. "Try it, Miss Eliza 
 beth," he continued, settling himself for resistance ; " do your 
 utmost ! I defy you to move me out of this chair." 
 
 Deliberately the new Brimhilda approached, deliberately 
 lifted the scoffer, deliberately settled him on her left arm, 
 and holding him firmly with the other, despite his desperate 
 struggles to escape, bore him three times round the room, 
 with the slow statcliness of a triumphal march. 
 
 Commercial disorders following on the political crisis of 
 1830-31 crippled the prosperous house of Black well, whose 
 head resolved to emigrate with his family to the United 
 States, where the sugar business was then lucrative. In 
 August, 1832, the new settlers landed in New York. A 
 sugar-refinery was soon established, which was immediately 
 prosperous. But the financial ruin t)f 1837 spared no in 
 dustry. Though avoiding personal bankruptcy, Mr. Black- 
 well found his fortune again swept away by the failure of 
 weaker houses. But he was a man incapable of defeat. 
 Even then he saw the great opportunities which the widening 
 West offered, and in 1838 removed with his family to 
 
138 THE DOCTORS BLACK WELL. 
 
 Cincinnati. The summer proved hot and pestilential. His 
 health, already impaired by anxiety and the severe strain of 
 the American climate, gave way under the change from sea 
 air to the humid heats of a Western river-town. While 
 working with characteristic energy to establish a new sugar- 
 refinery, he was smitten by fever, and died, after a brief 
 illness, at the early age of forty-five. 
 
 In a strange city the family now found themselves penni 
 less and unknown. The wreck of their fortune had been in 
 vested in the new business. Debts due the estate were 
 disregarded. An agent in New York sold the valuable house 
 hold furniture which had been left in his charge, and kept the 
 proceeds. Rent was owing on the house they occupied and 
 on the business premises. Protested notes were to be paid. 
 Doctors and undertakers bills demanded settlement, two 
 more deaths having occurred in the family during that terrible 
 autumn. Every day brought its tale of expenses, however 
 narrowly the schedule of necessities was made up. But the 
 scrupulous honesty of the father was a characteristic of the 
 rest. No one dreamed of evading one just claim upon his 
 name, and in the end every penny of indebtedness was paid. 
 
 The three elder daughters, of whom Dr. Elizabeth, just 
 seventeen years old, was the third, at once assumed the sup 
 port of the younger children and their mother. With ready 
 self-denial the two boys, next in age, left their studies to 
 take clerkships. Four little ones, of whom Dr. Emily 
 was the eldest, were still in the nursery. But one way of 
 support offered itself to these needy gentlewomen, and the 
 Misses Blackwell opened a boarding-school for young ladies. 
 They were thoroughly and liberally educated. They were 
 full of the family courage and energy. Respect for their 
 abilities and interest in their misfortunes soon filled the 
 school. 
 
 The assurance that the family could be kept together, and 
 the younger children educated, was worth almost any cost to 
 these devoted sisters. But the old household ways had been 
 those of comfortable ease and rare good-fellowship. The toil, 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACK WELL. 139 
 
 confinement, and incessant responsibility of a boarding-school ; 
 the inevitable formality and rigidity of the daily routine ; 
 more than all, the irksome need of a thrift approaching parsi 
 mony, weighed heavily on young shoulders hitherto exempt 
 from burdens. Pay was small, compared with the endless 
 labor and self-denial of the work. The fact that they were 
 shut in to this one weary way of bread-winning was, in itself, 
 harassing. A sort of gentle Jacobin club grew up among 
 them, whose entire membership they constituted, and at 
 whos6 irregular meetings, in the insecure privacy of their bed 
 rooms, they arraigned society for its unfairness to their sex. 
 Had they been men, or, being women, had they received a 
 thorough business and professional training, they saw how 
 much easier and more honorable their struggle for existence 
 would have been. Each year deepened their conviction that 
 an enlargement of woman s opportunities was the necessary 
 condition of a higher social w r ell-being. But hard necessity 
 kept them to their familiar treadmill. By night they might 
 plan new achievements and rewards for their sex. By day 
 they must conjugate French verbs, listen to blundering 
 scales, or vainly strive to impose habits of conscientious 
 study on the spoiled young tyrants of the class-room. 
 
 Six years of this patient grind placed the younger children 
 in self-supporting positions, and the school was given up. 
 Already Elizabeth had resolved to devote her future to the 
 science of medicine. Shrinking with the strong instinct of 
 perfect health from nil contact with disease, loathing the 
 atmosphere of the sick-room, and naturally intolerant of the 
 moral weakness of invalidism, she yet believed women to be 
 specially fitted by nature for the medical profession. Of the 
 many fields of honorable labor then closed against them it 
 seemed to her that this might most easily be won. And she 
 saw clearly that if prejudice could be made to yield a single 
 outpost, the taking of the citadel was but a question of time. 
 Examples were not wanting of women who had enriched 
 medical science. She remembered Marie Catherine Biheron, 
 the Paris apothecary s little daughter, who, working eagerly 
 
140 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 over dead bodies, by night, in her attic chamber, perfected 
 the common manikin, and was the first to unfold, by the aid 
 of prepared wax, the inner mysteries of the human frame. 
 She remembered Elizabeth Nihell, contending with calm good 
 sense and steady judgment against the obstetrical quackeries 
 of the fashionable London doctors of the last age. She re 
 membered that noble Elizabeth Blackwell of the eighteenth 
 century, Scotch and sturdy, who, studying midwifery to sup 
 port her sick husband, himself a physician of repute, found 
 her means of livelihood taken away by the tradcs -union of 
 the faculty, and turned to the preparation of the first medical 
 botany. She remembered the nurses and healers of the 
 middle ages, a great cloud of witnesses to the fitness of 
 women for the profession of her choice. The very need of 
 conquering her personal dislike of the task she had set herself 
 whetted her courage. But that task was herculean, and the 
 money required was yet to be earned. 
 
 In 1844 she took charge of a large country school in Ken 
 tucky, hoarding every penny of pay for professional uses, and 
 every moment of leisure for professional studies. The next 
 year a higher salary was offered her as music teacher in a 
 fashionable boarding-school at Charleston, South Carolina. 
 There, while working hard at medicine, she began the study 
 of Latin, being already a good French and German scholar. 
 There, too, it was her good fortune to meet the distinguished 
 Doctor Samuel Henry Dickson, w r ho took a generous interest 
 in her plans, admitted her among his office students, and gave 
 her invaluable help and encouragement. 
 
 In May, 1847, after three years of indefatigable prepara 
 tion, she sought admission to the Philadelphia Medical 
 School. The physicians in charge, without exception, re 
 jected her, professing to be shocked at the indelicacy of her 
 application. College and hospital were closed against her, 
 and she was forced to take private courses of anatomy and 
 dissection with one physician, and of midwifery with another. 
 But however able the teacher or zealous the pupil, no private 
 certificate of capacity could equal the guarantee of a diploma. 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 141 
 
 And Miss Blackwell was not more anxious to obtain a 
 thorough training for herself than to make straight the path 
 for other women who should follow her. Besides, there 
 already flourished a guild of ignorant or half-educated female 
 doctors, whose code was immoral, and whose practice was em 
 pirical. It was plain that only qualified women, bearing the 
 diploma of a reputable college, could bar out these pretenders 
 from practice, or hinder their misuse of the professional name. 
 
 The young student s next step was to obtain a list of all the 
 medical schools of the country, and send her dignified appli 
 cation to each in turn. Twelve of these institutions promptly 
 rejected her, most of them rebuking either her immodest 
 desire to understand the laws of physical nature, or her pre 
 sumptuous invasion of those high intellectual regions habitable 
 only by man. Only the faculties of the college at Geneva, 
 New York, and of that at Castleton, Vermont, courteously 
 consented to consider her application. At Geneva, the ques 
 tion of her admission was referred to the students themselves, 
 These young men, to their honor be it said, unanimously 
 decided in her favor, and voluntarily pledged themselves 
 " individually and collectively," that, should she enter the 
 college, " no word or act of theirs should ever cause her to 
 regret the step." 
 
 In November, 1847, she was entered on the college register 
 as "No. 417," and saw herself at the beginning of the end. 
 In a brief monograph published twenty-five years ago, to 
 which this sketch is much indebted, Miss Anna Blackwell 
 says : " Aware that the possibility of her going through the 
 course depended on her being able, by her unmoved deport 
 ment, to cause her presence there to be regarded by those 
 around her, not as that of a woman among men, but of one 
 student among five hundred, confronted only with the truth 
 and dignity of natural law, she restricted herself for some time 
 after her entrance into the college to a diet so rigid as almost 
 to trench upon starvation, in order that no involuntary change 
 of color might betray the feeling of embarrassment occa 
 sionally created by the necessary plain-speaking of scientific 
 
142 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 analysis. How far the attainment of a self-command which 
 rendered her countenance as impassible as that of a statue 
 can be attributed to the effect of such a diet may be doubtful ; 
 but her adoption of such an expedient is too characteristic to 
 be omitted here. 
 
 " From her admission into the college until she left it she 
 also made it an invariable rule to pass in and out without 
 taking any notice of the students ; going straight to her seat, 
 and never looking in any other direction than to the professor 
 and on her note-book. How necessary was this circumspection 
 may be inferred from something which occurred in the lecture- 
 room a short time after her admission. The subject of the 
 lecture happened to be a very trying one ; and while the 
 lecturer was proceeding with his demonstration, a folded 
 paper, evidently a note, was thrown down by some one in 
 one of the upper tiers behind her, and fell upon her arm, 
 where it lay, conspicuously white, upon the sleeve of her 
 black dress. She felt, instinctively, that this note contained 
 some gross impertinence, that every eye in the building was 
 upon her ; and that, if she meant to remain in the college, she 
 must repel the insult, then and there, in such a way as to 
 preclude the occurrence of any similar act. Without mov 
 ing or raising her eyes from her note-book, she continued to 
 write, as though she had not perceived the paper ; and when 
 she had finished her notes she slowly lifted the arm on which 
 it lay, until she had brought it clearly within view of every 
 one in the building, and then, with the slightest possible turn 
 of the wrist, she caused the offensive missile to drop upon 
 the floor. Her action, at once a protest and an appeal, was 
 perfectly understood by the students ; and in an instant the 
 amphitheatre rang with their energetic applause, mingled 
 with hisses directed against her cowardly assailant. Through 
 out this scene she kept her eyes constantly fixed upon her 
 note-book ; taking no more apparent notice of this welcome 
 demonstration than she had done of the unwelcome aggression 
 which had called it forth. But her position in the college was 
 made from that moment, and not the slightest annoyance of 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 143 
 
 any kind was ever again attempted throughout her stay. On 
 the contrary, a sincere regard, at once kindly and respectful, 
 was thenceforward evinced toward her by her fellow-students ; 
 and though, for obvious reasons, she still continued to hold 
 herself aloof from social intercourse with them, yet, when 
 ever the opportunity of so doing presented itself, in the 
 course of their common studies, they always showed them 
 selves ready and anxious to render her any good offices in 
 their power, and some of them are of her truest friends at 
 this day." 
 
 By degrees the embarrassment of her position was for 
 gotten in her devotion to her work. The wonderful and 
 beautiful mechanism of the human body filled her with a 
 reverence which cast out self-consciousness. But the pain 
 she had already endured convinced her of the imperative need 
 of a separate medical school for women. 
 
 Never was Little Peddlington more distracted by a question 
 of social etiquette than Geneva by the coming of the " lady 
 student." Boarding-house keepers were warned that their 
 lodgers would leave them if asked to sit at table with so 
 doubtful a character. Boys followed her about the streets, 
 with audible and unflattering comments on her personal 
 appearance and supposed intentions. Well-dressed men and 
 women felt at liberty to stop on the sidewalk and stare openly 
 at the prodigy. But the dignity of the quiet little figure, 
 dressed always in black, and intent upon its own business, 
 soon conquered civility. And when it was known that the 
 professors wives had called upon her, the boarding-houses 
 capitulated. 
 
 An incredible self-denial and industry marked Miss Black- 
 well s college course. Even the hot summer vacation was 
 spent in study and active practice in one of the outlying 
 hospitals of Philadelphia. Like all finely-organized women, 
 she had an intense liking for flowers, odors, beautiful 
 surroundings, and dainty apparel. But she contented herself 
 with a cheap room, plain garments, and the rarest necessaries. 
 Years afterwards she used to smile at the recollection of the 
 
144 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 struggle it cost her to deny herself a ten-cent bottle of cologne. 
 She remembered its exact place on the chemist s shelf, and 
 the pang she felt in leaving it there. 
 
 The price of her graduation gown seriously encroached on 
 the little hoard so carefully kept for future study. But as 
 always, she faced the inevitable with serenity. In a letter 
 written at that time she says : " I am working hard for the 
 parchment which I suppose will come in good time ; but I 
 have still an immense amount of dry reading to get through 
 with and to beat into my memory. I have been obliged to 
 have a dress made for the graduation ceremony, and mean 
 while it lies quietly in my trunk biding its time. It is a rich 
 black silk, with a cape, trimmed with black silk fringe, 
 and some narrow white lace round the neck and eufFs. I 
 could not avoid the expense, \hough a grievous one fora poor 
 student ; for the a flair will take place in a crowded church. 
 I shall have to mount to a platform on which sits the presi 
 dent of the University, in gown and triangular hat, surrounded 
 by rows of reverend professors ; and of course I can neither 
 disgrace womankind, the college, nor the Blackwells by 
 presenting myself in a shabby gown." 
 
 On a bright January day of 1849 the largest church in 
 Geneva was packed with spectators eager to see the presenta 
 tion of the first medical diploma ever granted to a woman. 
 Whatever marvel they may have expected, the reality was 
 simple enough. A slender, black-robed girl ascended the 
 steps, with a group of her brother students, and standing 
 undismayed, the focus of a thousand eyes, received from 
 the venerable president of the college the blue-ribboned 
 parchment which converted "No. 417" into Doctor Eliza 
 beth Black well. A door hitherto closed against women 
 stood open. A whole world of fresh interests and aspir 
 ations invited them to possess it. The old order had 
 changed, giving place to new. And never was revolution 
 so quietly accomplished. 
 
 When it came to Dr. Elizabeth s turn to return thanks, she 
 said, in a low voice, which the utter stillness made audible in 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 145 
 
 the remotest corner, "I thank you, Mr. President, fbr the 
 sanction given to my studies by the institution of which you 
 jrre the head. With the help of the Most High, it shall be 
 the endeavor of my life to do honor to the diploma you have 
 conferred upon me." 
 
 No change could well be greater than that from rural 
 Geneva to cosmopolitan Paris. But the indomitable Dr. 
 Elizabeth next besieged the doors of that ancient city s 
 Schools. An unwritten Salic law excluded women from 
 inheritance in their unrivalled opportunities. The most emi 
 nent physicians, to whom she had brought letters of intro 
 duction, declared her quest hopeless, and advised her to assume 
 a. man s dress and register a man s name. But like that great 
 reformer who said : " I will be as uncompromising as justice. 
 I am in earnest ; I will not equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I 
 will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard," she held 
 to her purpose with dogged tenacity. After months of weary 
 ing delay, the great lying-in hospital of the Mat&rnitS admitted 
 her as a resident-pupil, and some others consented to tolerate 
 her visits. These concessions demanded a heavy return of 
 application and labor. But Dr. Elizabeth was a very Hotspur 
 of young doctors, vanquishing difficulties as Percy his Scots, 
 and finding time for exacting private studies under the ablest 
 professors in Paris. Returning to London, she obtained ad 
 mission to St. Bartholomew s and the Women s Hospital, and 
 again took private instruction. 
 
 She had always intended to practise in America, partly be 
 cause it offered a better field than England ; partly because 
 she was anxious to help and encourage the many women 
 whom her example had stimulated to attempt the study of 
 medicine. 
 
 In 1851, after seven years of the hardest study, she arrived 
 in New York to enter on her profession. But her Hill of 
 Difficulty stretched high and steep before her. Prejudice 
 and ignorance are tough combatants who too often push large- 
 minded ability into the ditch. The sensible young doctor 
 knew how slowly a good practice must grow. But it seemed, 
 
146 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 at first, as if she would not bo permitted oven to plant the 
 germ. The mere mention of her profession closed the doors 
 of reputable boarding-houses against her. And when sub 
 mission to an exorbitant rent finally secured tolerable office 
 room, the suspicions or neglect of her landladies sent away 
 patients, or failed to deliver messages. Intelligent women of 
 the class she had hoped to benefit sneered at " female doc 
 tors." Reputable physicians ignored her claims as a fellow- 
 practitioner. But the quiet, steadfast, indomitable woman 
 refused to be dismayed. As in Charleston, Philadelphia, 
 Paris, and London, a few able pli3 r sicians recognized her high 
 character and capacity, and treated her with profound profes 
 sional and personal respect. Without this encouragement her 
 attempt would have been impracticable from the outset. 
 With it, she could say, like Walter Scott, "Time and I 
 against any two." 
 
 In 1852 she delivered a series of lectures to ladies, on 
 hygiene and physical development. Health had not yet come 
 into fashion, but these talks attracted many listeners, partly 
 drawn by curiosity to hear one of the ff strong-minded," 
 parity by worthier motives. Even those who came to scoff, 
 however, remained to praise, while not a few became eager 
 patrons and patients of this learned and high-minded teacher. 
 
 The next year she published an excellent treatise called, 
 " The Laws of Life, considered with reference to the Physi 
 cal Education of Girls," and, with an increasing practice, 
 found time to establish a Dispensary for Women and Chil 
 dren. This long-needed charity began its work in a single 
 room, with the free furnishing of advice and medicine to out 
 door applicants. But Dr. Blackwell saw in it the germ of a 
 beneficent and wide-spreading growth. As its funds in 
 creased it was to receive indoor patients, providing indigent 
 women with able physicians of their own sex. It was to 
 give this class of patients, beside needed advice and medL 
 cine, plain and kind counsel concerning the care of health, 
 rearing and education of children, household management, 
 and personal habits. It was to educate an efficient body of 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 147 
 
 nurses for the community, a service of benefit not only to 
 the sick, but to those deserving and competent women who 
 would gladly earn their bread as nurses, could they command 
 the necessary training. 
 
 So steady was the success of Dr. Elizabeth s dispensary, 
 that in May, 1857, she was enabled to add to it that Hospital 
 for Women which, both as relief-agency and as training- 
 school, had been the hope of so many years. This Infirm 
 ary was the first medical charity established by female 
 physicians, as well as the first hospital organized for the in 
 struction of women in practical medicine. In ten years over 
 fifty thousand patients were relieved by its means. Thirty- 
 one students had been received, who resided from one to two 
 years in the house, and nineteen nurses had been trained and 
 established in the city. The record of the seven subsequent 
 years has been even more satisfactory. 
 
 Meantime Dr. Elizabeth had welcomed a coadjutor, able, 
 wise, and zealous as herself. In 1848 her younger sister, 
 Emily, began a course of medical reading and dissection with 
 Dr. Davis, demonstrator of anatomy in the Cincinnati Col 
 lege. Like Dr. Elizabeth, she brought perfect health and in 
 domitable energy to her work. Like her, she possessed 
 quick perception, and an exceptional memory. Latin, 
 French, and German she knew well. In Greek and mathe 
 matics her standing was fair. Earning as teacher the funds 
 required as student, she worked hard in both capacities till 
 1851, when she applied for admission to the Medical School 
 at Geneva. To her surprise she was refused, the same fac 
 ulty which had testified that the presence of her sister " had 
 exercised a beneficial influence upon her fellow-students in all 
 respects," and that " the average attainments and general con 
 duct of the students during the period she had passed among 
 them, were of a higher character than those of any class which 
 had been assembled in the college since the connection of the 
 president with the institution," now declaring that they were 
 not prepared to consider the case of Dr. Elizabeth a precedent. 
 Ten other colleges in succession refused her application. 
 
148 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 Meanwhile the Free Hospital of Bellevue, in New York, 
 gave her admission to study, and, after more than a year of 
 waiting, the young Medical College of Chicago accepted her 
 as a student. Her summer vacation she passed in hospital 
 work at Bellevue and in the chemical laboratory of Dr. 
 Doremus. Returning to Chicago for the next term, to her 
 surprise and dismay she found the doors closed against her. 
 The State Medical Association had censured the college for 
 having admitted a woman. The woman was therefore left 
 to shift for herself. After much delay she was received by 
 the college of Cleveland, where she completed her course, 
 triumphantly passing the examinations. From Cleveland to 
 Edinburgh, studying in the Lying-in Hospital and under the 
 eminent Dr. Simpson; from Edinburgh to Paris, follow 
 ing the clinical lectures of the great masters of their art 
 through the Hotel Dieu, Beaujou, St. Louis, the Ilopital des 
 Enfans Malades, living and working in the vast establish 
 ment of the Maternit^ ; from Paris to London, walking the 
 wards of St. Bartholomew and other hospitals, Dr. Emily 
 toiled along her conscientious way, bringing back to America 
 in the autumn of 1856 the highest testimonials of capacity 
 and acquirement from the men most competent to bestov/ 
 them. 
 
 A curious ebb-tide of feeling concerning the fitness of pro 
 fessional life for women seemed, at that time, to be bearing 
 away all that had been gained. After the graduation of the 
 Doctors Blackwell, and two or three of their immediate suc 
 cessors, the schools which had received them closed their 
 doors upon subsequent applicants. It was as if the Faculties, 
 on the impulse of the moment, had said, " Anything so simple 
 and natural as medical attendance upon women by women 
 must be right," but, having time to think about it, had 
 amended their formula to " Anything so simple and natural as 
 medical attendance upon women by women must be wrong." 
 
 Separate schools for female students of course sprang up. 
 But small means and small classes necessaiily confined the 
 teaching of these schools to lectures, unaccompanied by prac- 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 149 
 
 tical study and observation, while all existing hospitals and 
 dispensaries were closed against women, whether as physicians 
 or students. 
 
 It was this meagreness of opportunity which led Dr. Black- 
 well to conclude that hospital experience would be more 
 immediately valuable to female medical students than college 
 study, and perhaps more readily sustained by public opinion. 
 But even to so humane and necessary an experiment as 
 that of the hospital objection waxed loud. The projectors 
 were assured that no one would let a house for the purpose ; 
 that the plan would invite suspicion and the interference of 
 the law ; that if deaths occurred, their death certificates would 
 not l>e recognized ; that improper persons would apply for 
 treatment ; that, without resident male physicians, discipline 
 could not be maintained ; and, finally, that they would never 
 be able to collect money for so unpopular an undertaking. 
 
 The Doctors Blackwell had the courage of their opinions. 
 They held nothing which was right to be impossible. They 
 found the house. They prepared the sick wards. Through 
 discouragement and distrust they held their serene way. The 
 practice was conducted entirely by women, but a board of 
 consulting physicians, men of the highest standing, gave it 
 sanction and reputation. Necessary operations were per 
 formed by its attending female physicians, and performed 
 with adequate skill and nerve. In a year or two the govern 
 ment of a hospital by women for women was a proved 
 success. 
 
 In 1865 the trustees obtained from the Legislature a char 
 ter conferring college powers upon the institution. The new 
 college began with certain amendments of established customs, 
 which the profession at large had vainly urged upon the older 
 schools ; namely, the extension of the college course through 
 three years, the lengthening of the college year, the grading 
 the course, so that each year s study was not a repetition of 
 the preceding one. A chair of hygiene was established, 
 which, surprising as is the statement, for the first time mnde 
 hygiene a branch of instruction in any medical college in this. 
 10 
 
150 THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 
 
 country. " Of the forty-six students who had passed through 
 the Infirmary prior to 1878, nine were married women, five 
 of them the wives of physicians, all now engaged in practice 
 with their husbands. Three graduates were daughters of 
 physicians, now in practice with their fathers. Four had 
 gone abroad as missionaries, it having been found that women 
 physicians obtain access to Eastern women as no other mis 
 sionaries can. One of these has succeeded in establishing in 
 China a hospital for women, through which she is exerting 
 a widespread influence. Sixteen graduates have engaged in 
 hospital work as resident physicians, or as physicians to 
 women s colleges, as Vassar and Mount Ilolyoke. Seven 
 have pursued their studies at European universities. One of 
 these in connection with one of the professors at Zurich has 
 published a paper of original research on some points of 
 physiology. The thesis of another has been republishod by 
 an English medical journal as one of the most important 
 papers contributed to the subject. Two graduates have ap 
 plied for hospital positions given by competitive examina 
 tions, these being the first instances in which women have 
 been allowed to compete. Both candidates passed honorably. 
 One obtained the desired position at Mount Sinai Hospital, 
 and filled it well. The other was refused the post of Interne 
 at the Charity Hospital, because no arrangement had been 
 made for giving it to a woman." 
 
 Almost invariably the pupils of the Infirmary have remained 
 in the practice of their profession, supported themselves by 
 it, and in many instances acquired a competence. 
 
 From the beginning, all the professional work of the insti 
 tution has been done by women. Daily prescribing in the 
 dispensary, charge of patients in the wards, visiting the poor 
 in their own homes, exposure to wet, fatigue, bad air, con 
 tact with every form of disease, all the hardships and horrors 
 known to the city practitioner, have not discouraged the 
 ardor or impaired the health of these physicians. On the 
 contrary, their roused mental activities vivify and strengthen 
 the physical nature. 
 
THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL. 151 
 
 "When the institution she had founded was strong enough 
 to do without her, when the scores of women whom she had 
 helped to help themselves were able to help others, when 
 the public sentiment which her example had created was ready 
 to release new fields of labor to her sex, Dr. Elizabeth felt 
 that she could do more useful work in England than in 
 America. For some years she has lived in London, writing, 
 lecturing, advising, organizing, saying the fit word in the fit 
 place, helping the efforts of women towards self-support and 
 higher culture. Dr. Emily has remained in New York, busy, 
 useful, and honored. The Women s Hospital and College profit 
 by her attendance and instruction, her private practice is large, 
 the best physicians of the city acknowledge her remarkable 
 attainments, and willingly meet her in consultation. 
 
 Other women are making a high professional name. Other 
 women have toiled faithfully for high professional education. 
 But in their undertaking the Black well sisters stood not more 
 for personal success than for woman s right to labor. They 
 chose an interdicted and uncongenial calling, pursuing it in the 
 face of poverty, suspicion, misrepresentation, and the preju 
 dice which denies opportunity, not more to vindicate their 
 conscious capacity than to justify woman s right to learning. 
 And if paid industry is coming into fashion for their sex, the 
 new mode owes no little of its vogue to the discussion of 
 woman s work and wage which their brave experiment 
 excited. 
 
 The moral of biography, said a great man, is, that by heroic 
 encouragements, it holds us to our task. Lives like these 
 make toil and self-denial seem easy, kindle new hopes and 
 aspirations, lift those who ponder them above their old selves 
 and their old lot, and take the sting from that bitter curse of 
 Timon of Athens, " If there sit twelve women at the table, 
 let a dozen of them be as they are." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH BRYANT JOHNSTON. 
 
 Mrs. Burnett s English Home Tales of Her Childhood Emigration to 
 America A Helpless Family in a Strange Land The Struggle for Sub 
 sistence Incidents of Her Girlhood Her Sympathy for the Poor 
 How She Acquired Her Knowledge of English Dialect The Original 
 "Lasso Lowrie s" First Literary Efforts Seeking a Publisher De 
 vising Ways and Means Diplomacy A Day of Triumph and Happi 
 ness "Who is She?" Life at Mt. Ararat Revisiting England 
 Her Washington Home A Thrilling Incident at Long Branch A 
 Heroine in Real Life Mrs. Burnett s Personal Appearance. 
 
 T is as difficult to write a faithful biography as to 
 paint a true portrait. The artist gives form, 
 line, color, and a phase of life or expression ; 
 the biographer gives country, lineage, personal 
 appearance, deeds ; but the better part of a 
 life, the incentive, is as hard to catch, as delicate 
 to transcribe, as the soul is to imprison on 
 canvas. Indeed, a perfect biography may only 
 be written when it is possible to divest the 
 mind of the conviction that in writing it a privilege 
 is being taken with individual rights. 
 
 It will be conceded that the few incidents usually scattered 
 through the years of a woman s life are enclosed by two 
 words "opportunity," "duty." Men make their oppor 
 tunities ; women accept the appointment of destiny ; therefore, 
 their lines in life are more dependent on the accident of birth, 
 and are longer under the governance of another will. Woman s 
 duty is her own, not limited by station, but may rather be 
 called limitless, knowing only such bounds as mental and 
 physical strength have set. In writing the life of a woman, 
 
 152 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 153 
 
 these obstinate facts are encountered at the beginning first, 
 the scarcity of event, and second, the ever present realization 
 that whatever is best, strongest, loveliest, and most worthy 
 to be admired and imitated, is so delicately interwoven with 
 the sacredness of domestic ties that the world may never know 
 that life s full beauty. Therefore the drawing, tone, and 
 color of a woman s pen-portrait must be found in incidents 
 rather than in important events. 
 
 Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in the thrifty old 
 manufacturing city of Manchester, Lancashire, England. 
 She is the daughter of Edwin Hodgson, a merchant who 
 lived near the suburbs of the city, in a commodious house 
 facing Islington Square, and near the well-known Isling 
 ton House, a mansion quite pretentious within this gen 
 eration. Her father, having died when she was about four 
 years old, was little more than a memory to her. Her 
 mother was Miss Eliza Boond, daughter of William Boond, a 
 heavy cotton manufacturer. He was an heroic character, 
 such as would have delighted Mrs. Gaskell or Charles Reado 
 as a model in that crisis when the ill-feeling between manufac 
 turer and operative was most bitter, consequent upon the 
 introduction of machinery into the mills. In these periods of 
 excitement his personal danger was not small, and on their way 
 to and from church his daughters were often hooted at by the 
 angry weavers. 
 
 The description given by her mother of the coolness and 
 hauteur of one of these aunts under circumstances so embar 
 rassing used to delight Frances. She had no recollection of 
 her grandfather, but one of the pleasures of her childhood was 
 an intimate association with her grandmother, a beautiful old 
 lady of fourscore, with stately carriage, placid brow, and 
 snowy hair. Her maiden name was Hannah Clegg, and her 
 family was of gentry, which had intermarried with wealthy 
 manufacturers. 
 
 In the home circle Frances was thought to have inherited 
 the characteristics of her maternal grandmother, and it may 
 have been this similarity that made her a chosen companion 
 
154 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 of the old lady. She would often ask Frances to remain 
 through the night with her, and the little maiden, before 
 breakfast was served, would read aloud from a well-marked 
 copy of Young s "Night Thoughts," always a welcome author 
 to the listener. Sometimes the aged mother would interest 
 the child with family legends, several of which she recalled 
 years after. One was of a certain Lady Alice Clegg, of 
 Ordsall Hall, who was privately married to a mysterious 
 stranger, with whom she soon removed to the Continent, and 
 never returned. The country folk started the rumor that the 
 deserted hall was haunted, as strange, fitful lights were seen 
 moving to and fro at the " wee sma hours ; " but the sudden 
 advent of London detectives, who arrested a band of counter 
 feiters established there, laid the ghosts. 
 
 Another story was of a beautiful girl, the eldest of seven 
 Misses Clegg, who, from an unhappy love-affair, resolved 
 to become dumb, and for seven years no persuasion nor arti 
 fice could induce her to speak, or hold communication in any 
 manner with man, woman, or child. There was no paralysis 
 only a very firm will, and it was conjectured that she 
 had made a vow. One afternoon she astonished the maids 
 by walking into the kitchen, and with her own hands prepar 
 ing tea ; then calling her sisters to the table, took her rightful 
 seat at the head ; and this particularly composed maiden lady 
 led the conversation on the current events of the neighborhood, 
 but could in no way be induced to explain her self-imposed 
 silence. During these seven years her only occupation was 
 writing, and she always destroyed her manuscript when it 
 seemed to be completed. 
 
 The intimacy of Frances and her grandmother continued as 
 long as the aged lady lived, who often said, " No one knows 
 what a comfort that dear child has been to me." 
 
 At the time of Mr. Hodgson s death his business was in 
 flourishing condition, and he left it to the management of an 
 experienced business man, to be turned over to his sons when 
 they were of suitable age to accept the responsibility. Affairs 
 were badly managed, and the civil war in America gave the 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 155 
 
 final blow to their fortunes. In a few years Mrs. Hodgson 
 discovered that she was utterly without means to rear and 
 educate her five children Herbert, John, Frances, Edith, 
 and the baby, Edwina, who was born after her husband s 
 death. She was a woman of refinement, accustomed to ease 
 and luxury, and the situation was one that demanded imme 
 diate action. A brother had some time previously removed 
 to the United States, and was established in prosperous busi 
 ness in Knoxville, Tenn. He wrote to her to come to 
 America, holding out as an inducement the promise of imme 
 diate employment for the two boys. She ventured into a 
 strange land with her helpless family, but about the time of 
 her arrival her brother became involved in ruinous litigation, 
 and was powerless to fulfil his kind intentions. 
 
 They left their home cheerfully, and no one of them had 
 finer spirits than the eldest daughter, Frances. To this pre 
 cocious girl, life in the New World had great fascination. It 
 altogether assumed the form of charming adventures in search 
 of fortune, where every change was not only sure to bring 
 success, but in addition to present interesting studies of a 
 strange people. The reality was very different. From the 
 date of their arrival the struggle began a hand-to-hand 
 fight for subsistence, in which the willing hands, the an 
 swering genius of her daughter came to the rescue. The 
 civil war gave Frances Hodgson Burnett to America pov 
 erty called forth her strength and gave her work to the world. 
 
 Frances was the eldest daughter and third child, and her 
 remarkable mind had always been a matter of pride to the 
 family. At the early age of three she stood by the side of 
 her aunt and read one of the parables out of a large Bible.* 
 The little one had apparently absorbed the art of reading, 
 as no one had taken any special care in teaching her. Her 
 childhood was marked by a passionate fondness for books ; 
 reading, when permitted, or by stealth, was her daily 
 avocation. Finally books became her crime, and "that child 
 
 * In a recent biographical sketch of Madame Henri Greville, it is stated 
 that she read fluently at the same age. 
 
156 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 has a book again," was the signal for new prohibitory resolu 
 tions made by the mother, and persistently disregarded by 
 the child ; until the sorrow and disobedience of her young 
 life was "a book, always a book." Nooks and closets were 
 utilized by her to secrete favorite volumes, until one day 
 she offended beyond endurance. She had been hurriedly des 
 patched to the domestic realm with a message of importance, 
 when she sat down on the broad stairway, and, beginning to 
 read, forgot all about the order. There was a commotion, 
 and the hitherto indulgent mother made laws, the breaking of 
 which would have been unprecedented in any well-regulated 
 English household. 
 
 The little maiden s hunger for romance had, for a time, to 
 be satisfied by her own creations. Her dolls had always 
 lived in her mind, each china-baby and wax-darling assuming 
 roles; and she loved to play alone with them, weaving for 
 each a romantic destiny. In the wide range of her reading, 
 this girl, now seven, had found great attractions in Stevens 
 "Central America/ She therefore immediately equipped an 
 exploring expedition, and the daily report of the doll voj^agers 
 was indeed unique. "Uncle Tom s Cabin" was among her 
 favorite works, and she was not contented until a black doll 
 was purchased, which she dressed and invested with all the 
 woes and virtues of Topsy. That gentle lady, her mother, 
 was distressed one day upon entering the nursery to discover 
 her little daughter, whom she thought an amiable child, 
 vigorously whipping poor Topsy. She had improvised a 
 whipping-post, and assumed the character of "Legree." 
 
 One of the happiest incidents of her childhood AV.IS dis 
 covering in a collection of books left by her father, a complete 
 set of " Blackwood s Magazine." These books were in a hand 
 some mahogany bookcase or secretary that then stood in her 
 mother s bedroom. She had never thought those dark, 
 heavy-looking volumes could contain anything except legal 
 lore, until her eye was accidentally arrested by the word 
 Magazine. She clambered up and opened a volume. Here 
 were stories short and stories long, a literary bonanza. 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 157 
 
 Seating herself upon the ledge of the secretary, with her 
 littlo logs dangling over, she daily road, until from sheer 
 weariness she almost fell from her perch. In this small 
 library were many good books, and her mother becoming 
 each season more absorbed and perplexed with business 
 entanglements allowed greater liberty to tho reader, so 
 docile in other ways. Sitting thus, in the room seldom 
 entered during the day, she read Shakspeare, Scott, Byron, 
 Burns Aikin s "British Poets" complete. It was here she 
 read " The Fair Maid of Perth," which opened a new world 
 to her, and it would have been impossible to convince her, 
 as she hung with delight over this beautiful romance, that 
 the world held in reserve for her another joy so entrancing. 
 Byron was, from seven to twelve, the poet of her idolatry. 
 When only eight she startled a dignified Scotch gentleman by 
 expressing the opinion that " the travels of Don Juan was a 
 very pleasing book of adventures," quoting the description 
 of Iluidee as one of its gems : 
 
 "Her hair s long auburn waves down to her heels 
 
 Flowed like an Alpine torrent which the sun 
 
 Dyes with his morning light;" 
 
 The young man was so surprised that he satisfied himself as 
 to the correctness of the quotation, and suggested that he 
 should select books more suited to her age, whereupon 
 the little lady decided him to be " deficient in literary taste." 
 
 From this incident arose a firm friendship between the 
 precocious reader and the cultivated man of business ; 
 one of many pleasant relations which it was a sorrow to 
 break, upon removing to the United States. Her compan 
 ionship with maturer minds was somewhat peculiar. She 
 had many grown-up friends, whose conversation on books and 
 authors, though a delight to her, did not appear to arouse her 
 vanity. 
 
 The fondness Frances evinced for history, a year or two 
 later, would seem somewhat paradoxical ; yet she read such 
 works with no less eagerness than she had shown in perusing 
 the wildest romance, and at a remarkably early age, she was 
 
158 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 quite -well versed in the histories of Greece, Rome, France, 
 England, and America. History had a special charm to her 
 creative mind. The most momentous national event was to 
 her a splendid romance, bristling with situations, her vivid 
 imagination supplying all that the conscientious historian had 
 not found. 
 
 Her education was given into the hands of the Misses 
 Hadfield, who had a small private school. They were the 
 daughters of an artist, and enjoyed good social relations. 
 With them she had a careful English course with music, in 
 which she became quite proficient. Her mother preferred 
 that she should not study the languages in England ; she 
 intended to take her to France and Germany. The school 
 had the advantage of a fine art atmosphere. Books and 
 magazines on art were at her command, and at an early age 
 she had read much on the subject, and had also seen a great 
 many fine pictures, for the City of Spindles could boast its 
 public exhibitions and private collections. 
 
 She was the " star " of domestic troupes, and their fre 
 quent entertainments presented to her occasions of great 
 enjoyment as well as improvement. Her three friends and 
 schoolmates were also sisters of her teachers, Suzette, Annie, 
 and Hetty Hadfield. 
 
 After school hours they used to wander into the neigh 
 borhood Avhere the operatives lived. They were first 
 attracted by the charm of the broad Lancashire dialect, 
 which they attempted to imitate. The effect of indulgence 
 in this was soon observed by their teachers, and a penalty 
 imposed for using it. They had, however, acquired con 
 siderable knowledge of the provincial phrases, and often 
 were offenders in their use. Their childish sympathy had 
 been awakened by the scenes of poverty which they wit 
 nessed, and the family of Mrs. Hodgson were soon able 
 to recognize the humble friends, who had been encour 
 aged by Frances to solicit alms at the back-door. These 
 came to be distinguished as " Frances pin-and-needle- 
 woman," "Frances fitty woman," "Frances dumb 
 man," etc. 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT.; 159 
 
 As a small child, she began the study of character, and 
 especially such as she met among the operatives. Their house 
 faced Islington Square, and the rear yard extended to a nar 
 row street where the long, low rows of workmen s houses 
 had been built. In these adjacent homes there was fine 
 opportunity for observation, and Frances was frequently 
 awakened by the reflection on the nursery ceiling of a single 
 candle in the hand of a woman, who groped about before 
 the daylight in her little kitchen, preparing breakfast for 
 her sulky "man." The child would spring out of her bed, 
 and softly creeping to the window, lest the nurse should be 
 aroused, would watch each stage in the progress of the morn 
 ing meal. She closely observed the various types found in 
 these humble homes, the besotted and often brutal husband, 
 the hopeless wife-drudge, the children, hungry, prema 
 turely old, and preternaturally wise. 
 
 Islington Square was entered by a large iron gate, and 
 through this she was wont to watch the operatives, home 
 ward-bound women and girls, with their clogs heavily 
 clanking on the paved walks, and their brooding faces en 
 shrouded in the indispensable woollen shawl. Through the 
 bars of this gate, when nine years of age, she first saw the 
 girl whom she afterwards draped in romance and sent out to 
 the world as "That Lass o Lowrie s," a tall, handsome 
 figure, clothed, according to the custom of mill-girls, with a 
 long, coarse linen apron over the dress, and tied close down 
 the back with strong tapes to guard against accidents from 
 machinery. She stood in a group of children playmates 
 all, save her for in the midst of their romps her fingers 
 busily knitted on a dark, rough sock. She was so different 
 from the others strong, massive frame, large, luminous 
 gray eyes, pale, clear-cut face, and head rivalling in pose the 
 Venus of Milo, she instantly riveted the attention of the 
 maiden at the gate ; but not till long years after did Frances 
 realize her to have been so wondrously beautiful, for at that 
 period of the young romancer s life her type of female loveli 
 ness demanded rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes. The refined 
 
160 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 strength of the girl had a fascination she could not then 
 analyze, but she has since looked in vain for a face so fair, a 
 form so majestic. The boisterous children apparently recog 
 nized her superiority, as appeals were made to her in the 
 adjustment of all differences, and her voice answered the 
 expectation of the listener at the gate, as the replies fell upon 
 her ears in broad, yet musical Lancashire. Frances saw her 
 only once more in the square as before, not at play, but 
 friend and adviser of the children. This time a brutal-looking 
 
 o 
 
 man, whose face was swollen from drink, came and drove 
 her out with angry words and threatening gestures. She 
 obeyed silently, proudly, yet without defiance or apparent 
 fear. For many afternoons Frances watched at the gate for 
 her, but in vain ; that noble form was never again seen 
 amid the group in the sunny square. 
 
 What is known as the "Lancashire distress" 1863-64 
 will be remembered as having elicited universal sympathy. 
 The pathetic poem by Miss Muloch "A Lancashire Dox- 
 ology " was written upon reading the following : " Some 
 cotton has been imported into Farrington, where the mills 
 have been closed for a considerable time. The people, 
 who were previously in deepest distress, went down to 
 meet the cotton ; the women wept over the bales, kissed 
 them, and finally sang the Doxology over them." Such 
 great suffering called upon the active offices of both young 
 and old, and Frances improved the opportunity of being 
 permitted to be the dispenser of modest charity. Per 
 haps the calamitous effects of the civil war were nowhere, 
 save in the South, so much felt as in the good old cotton- 
 weaving city of Manchester. As before stated, the Hodgson 
 family were financially ruined by it. For four years, in 
 reply to every coveted indulgence, Frances received the 
 unwelcome answer, " "Wait until the war is over in America, 
 then we shall have more money." 
 
 An incident illustrating the precocious development of 
 Frances Hodgson occurred when she had just entered her 
 thirteenth year. A friend of Mrs. Hodgson s, who had been 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BUHNET.T. 161 
 
 reduced from affluence, had opened a school, and her daughter 
 was her assistant as teacher of music and other higher 
 branches. She was suddenly called away, and the good lady 
 being sorely distressed to supply the place sent to Mrs. 
 Hodgson, asking if Frances might be loaned to her for a few 
 days. It was an important period, just before the close of 
 the session, but the request seemed ridiculous, as some of the 
 scholars were nearly grown. However, the emergency had 
 to be met, and the happy thought of putting her in long 
 dresses immediately set all doubt at rest. Her auburn hair 
 was twisted into an awe-inspiring club, and with fearless heart 
 she entered the hall and taught to the close of the term. 
 
 Her first literary effort was written at the age of seven, and 
 was a poem "Church Bells," which was immediately 
 destroyed. Her second, also a poem, in the same year, was 
 shown to her mother. One Sunday evening when the family 
 had all gone to church she began a dolorous poem entitled, 
 " Alone." Suddenly striking another key, she launched into 
 a humorous description of the woes of old bachelorhood. 
 When Mrs. Hodgson returned, Frances followed her to her 
 room, and read the effusion. The reader was interrupted 
 with exclamations of " How clever I " w How very funny ! " 
 " Where did you find this ? " the mother said when it was 
 ended. Learning that Frances had written it, she stooped 
 down and kissed her, saying, " My child, I believe you have 
 the gift of ten talents." " No, mamma," replied Frances, 
 with calm conviction, " I am not clever ; you think so because 
 you love me. A little girl who is clever would love arith 
 metic better than I do." 
 
 A story immediately followed the poem, the title of which 
 was "Frank Ellsworth, or Bachelors Buttons." It was the 
 history of a woman-hater, ending in his total and abject 
 enslavement by some dazzling daughter of Eve. This was 
 read in sections to her mother, and then destroyed ; for 
 her brothers, discovering her delight in scribbling, insti 
 tuted a system of bantering and teasing, holding her efforts in 
 utter contempt as "girl s romance," "silly stuff," and treating 
 
102 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 it all with undisguised disdain. So the little girl hid her 
 manuscript with trembling anxiety from these audacious 
 critics, who voted her n jolly playfellow if they could only 
 get books and pens out of her hands. 
 
 Every English girl keeps a small book of personal expenses, 
 and in her earlier efforts in romance Frances would fre 
 quently utilize her account-book. Once, when visiting an 
 aunt in the county, the good lady looked through the 
 bureau in Frances room to satisfy herself as to the orderly 
 habits of her charge. She opened the little book, and 
 supplementary to the modest rows of figures was a story, 
 entitled " Millicent s Romance." " What is this?" sternly 
 demanded the lady of the culprit, who stood near. " Only a 
 little scribbling of mine," said the abashed girl. "Do not 
 waste your time in that foolish way," was the discouraging 
 advice. 
 
 Her second story was rather more pretentious, and was 
 read to the dear mother as before. Its title was " Celeste, or 
 Fortune s Wheel," and the manuscript was kept until the 
 family left England, when it was burned, with an accumula 
 tion of like nature. Before she came to the United States 
 she had made notes for a story, which was finished in 
 Tennessee, and sent to " Ballou s Magazine." It was the first 
 story for which she attempted to find a publisher, and the 
 trial was made the third year after their removal to America. 
 In the privations of their new life it occurred to Frances, 
 who was then teaching a country school in New Market, that 
 she would make this venture. The school-room was in their 
 own home, an old log-house; which they had dubbed 
 " Noah s Ark." The payment for her services was almost 
 entirely in vegetable currency, potatoes, cornmeal, flour, 
 and occasionally bacon. Frances did not have the nerve to 
 submit to her mother, nor yet to her brothers, the daring pro 
 posal to send her manuscript to a publisher, but of her sister 
 Edith, who was the " Dame Durden " of the establishment, she 
 took counsel. From the first suggestion Edith was sanguine, 
 and the manuscript of " Miss Carruthers Engagement " was 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 163 
 
 revised, but at the outset the two girls had to meet a very 
 embarrassing question ; " Where were they to get the money 
 for postage ? " It would not do to ask Herbert, for he would 
 demand to know what they intended doing with such an 
 amount. It never occurred to them to ask a favor a loan. 
 " Dame Durden " at last proposed that they should spend a 
 morning gathering blackberries, which they could dispose of 
 in town. The possible return of the manuscript was another 
 perplexity which must be guarded against ; for that it should 
 fall into the hands of the family was a mortification that could 
 not be endured. It was finally determined to ask permis 
 sion of a gentleman friend to have some letters or pack 
 ages enclosed to him. He was only too glad to oblige the 
 young English girls ; and besides this the request had a flavor 
 of romance, as visions of returned love-letters flitted across 
 his mind. "But how can I distinguish your letters or 
 packages from my own?" "I will have The Second put 
 on mine," replied Frances. The story was despatched, and 
 the editor replied that he was pleased with it, and would 
 publish it, but did not propose to pay for it. This was 
 stoutly opposed by Edith, who maintained that " if it was 
 worth publishing, it was worth paying for" which sound 
 position the young author approved. So they wrote for the 
 story to be returned, and then sent it to Mr. Godey, who 
 promptly replied, inquiring if it was an original story, as it 
 seemed strange that a tale of English life should emanate 
 from Eastern Tennessee. He also requested her to write 
 another, and Frances at once wrote "Hearts and Diamonds," 
 by "The Second." This was published in "Godey s Maga 
 zine," in June, 1868, and "Miss Carruthers Engagement" 
 folloAved in October of the same year ; the editor paying 
 thirty-five dollars for the two short stories. 
 
 It need not be said that this was a far larger amount than 
 had been anticipated by the girls ; and it was a day of tri 
 umph and happiness when Herbert took the young author in 
 his arms and kissed her. From that day until this, work 
 with her pen has been the first duty of this gifted woman, 
 
164 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 She had not anticipated or cared for a literary career ; nor 
 does she appear, even at the present moment, to have de 
 veloped, in the great pressure of her busy life, an ambition 
 comparable with her rich endowments. Urgent need has 
 been the spur ; but there is little doubt if she had continued in 
 the sphere of ease and luxury to which she was born some 
 crisis in life would have called for her aid or work. 
 
 When she had once begun, she wrote with amazing rapidity. 
 Her contributions were accepted by Ballou, Frank Leslie, 
 Peterson, Harper, and Scribner. "Dolly " appeared in 1872, 
 in "The Ladies Friend," edited by Mrs. Henry Peterson, 
 and was the first novel which was afterwards published in 
 book form. To the timely and unselfish encouragement of 
 Charles J. Peterson, more than to any other person, does 
 Mrs. Burnett attribute her success. For this she never fails 
 to give him due meed of praise, speaking with affectionate 
 gratitude. " But for that man s honest consideration, I 
 might early have become discouraged, as I never for a moment 
 contemplated writing without remuneration ; the need was 
 too urgent." She contributed to his magazine for years, and 
 from time to time, without a suggestion from the modest 
 writer, he would increase the pay, writing, " You are growing 
 more and more valuable to my magazine." Later, he said 
 to her husband, "I know Mrs. Burnett will rapidly advance 
 in popularity, and I may not be able to pay her such prices 
 as she can command. When that time comes I do not want 
 her to hesitate to write for others, or to feel that she is under 
 obligations to me. I am more her friend than her pub 
 lisher" He liberally advanced money for the trip to Europe, 
 and when she wrote "Louisiana " to meet this indebtedness, 
 he gave ready consent that it should be sent to Scribner, and 
 waited until she could write " A Fair Barbarian." 
 
 The first story sent to the Scribners was in 1872, and was 
 entitled " The Woman who Saved Me." This was returned, 
 with the comment that it was too long; but the real reason, 
 as was afterwards admitted, was that they feared it was not 
 original, because of the finished style and English manner 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 165 
 
 of writing, they thought it might have been taken from 
 some trans- Atlantic magazine. However, they requested her 
 to send a shorter story, and sho wrote " Surly Tim s Troubles." 
 The following note, upon the receipt of the second MSS., 
 left no doubt as to its acceptance : 
 
 " NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 1872. 
 
 "DEAR Miss HODGSON, Dr. Holland and Dr. Holland s 
 daughter (Miss Annie) and Dr. Holland s right-hand man (myself) 
 have all wept soro over Surly Tim. Hope to weep again over 
 MSS. from you. Very sincerely and tearfully, 
 
 "WATSON GILDER." 
 
 Both of these stories "by Miss Fannie E. Hodgson," ap 
 peared in " Scribner," and from that time, a period of eleven 
 years, she has been a regular contributor. 
 
 The profit of this young girl s pen soon began to lift the 
 family from indigence to comparative comfort. The gentle 
 mother lost some of the deep lines furrowed by anxiety, and 
 the household, having abundant capacity for enjoyment, 
 was a very happy one. It was an unequal fight with poverty, 
 as they had no training for such a struggle. They removed 
 as early as 1868 to Knoxville, finding a house that pleased 
 them, on the banks of the Tennessee, in the suburbs of the 
 town. They chose this house because its tiers of wide 
 verandas made it resemble a boat ; and Herbert had a boat, 
 though many other important things were not purchased. 
 
 The gay young people named this home " Mt. Ararat ; " 
 and it was a home from which care was banished, and indul 
 gence in fun and frolic was encouraged by the loving mother, 
 who assented to any suggestion within the bounds of pro 
 priety. Entirely emancipated from conventional austerity, 
 they were amiable, talented, and contented, and by their 
 varied gifts some new interest was continually afforded. One 
 could paint, another play or sing, while the third could write 
 or improvise a story. It is true they had no carpets on the 
 floor, no lace curtains at the windows, but they had a 
 piano, a harp, an organ, a guitar, a violin, a piccolo, and a 
 hanjo, so that a concert could be given impromptu at any 
 11 
 
166 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 hour. Frequently there was no pudding for dinner, but there 
 was a painting on the easel, a new book to be road, or a manu 
 script by Frances, over which they might laugh or cry. 
 
 In the dawning of this more prosperous future the beloved 
 mother died. Frances, as eldest daughter, was burdened 
 with increased care, which, with the sudden bereavement, was 
 very hard to bear. A year later the household presented a 
 group of engaged young people ; all five, every member 
 of the family, except their cousin, Frederick Boond, were 
 determined to face the perils of matrimony. Those were 
 halcyon days. Fun and frolic were succeeded by a summer 
 of poetry and happy dreams. Herbert married Miss Burnett, 
 the sister of Dr. Swan M. Burnett, to whom Frances had 
 become engaged ; and when the brother brought home his 
 bride, "Mt. Ararat" became the model of "Vagahondia." 
 
 Soon after the marriage of her brother, Miss Hodgson, 
 being released from the responsible care of her sisters, went 
 to England, intending also to visit the Vienna Exposition. 
 Being taken ill at her relative s in Manchester, she remained 
 there, and wrote "Dolly." During this long visit she read a 
 series of articles in the " Manchester Guardian," which 
 directed her sympathies anew to the lives of miners and 
 weavers. This resulted in the production, after her return to 
 Tennessee, of "That Lass o Lowrie s " "the flower and 
 crown of all recent fiction." 
 
 She remained abroad about fifteen months, returned 
 September 16, 1873, and was married to Dr. Burnett on the 
 17th. Dr. Burnett was practising in Knoxville, and for a 
 year pursued this uneventful, unpromising, and laborious life. 
 His wife, never ambitious for herself, saw not only that 
 her husband was unappreciated, but, with the example of so 
 many physicians around her, that he was in danger of falling 
 into a rut, and with the care of a family, of accepting the 
 situation. She knew his ability, and his desire to devote 
 himself to the specialty for which he had already spent one 
 winter in New York, and she determined he should have 
 every advantage. But anxious as he was to complete his 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 167 
 
 studies as an oculist, he very naturally inquired where the 
 means could be found. The reply was "My pen." Nothing 
 else was thought of by the wife and .mother for a brown- 
 eyed boy Lionel had been born to them. It was deter 
 mined to start in quest of fortune, and they began pre 
 parations for their forlorn venture. Friends remonstrated in 
 vain, pleading that they were leaving a certainty in a land 
 where any good doctor (if he did not die in the trying) was 
 sure to make a respectable competency. Mrs. Burnett, who 
 had firmly resolved not to accept such drudgery for either 
 her husband or herself, worked through that one year with 
 a will and concentration that, had she not been blessed with 
 a splendid constitution, would doubtless have cost her life. 
 
 While the doctor was on his long, weary rides to see his 
 poor patients his wife was weaving with her pen the pathetic 
 stories that made the readers weep, and the world begin to 
 inquire " Who is she ?" With hands often burning with fever, 
 and head throbbing with excitement, she daily sat by her 
 table. Under such circumstances she wrote in about fifteen 
 months " That Lass o Lowrie s," " Pretty Polly Pemberton," 
 " The Fire at Grantley Mills," and " The Fortunes of Philippa 
 Fairfax." 
 
 Effecting a favorable engagement with her considerate 
 
 O ~ ~ 
 
 friend, Mr. Peterson, the little family, husband, wife, baby 
 and black "Mammy," started on their tour; and in this 
 crisis our brave woman, our admired writer, rivals in heroism 
 the knights of old, made famous in song and story. They 
 were armed cap-a-pi ; she, with fearless exaltation born of 
 love and hope, dared more than they in all their fine, vaulting 
 bravado. First they went to Manchester, then to London, 
 Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Dusseldorf the last two cities 
 being selected with a view to the advantages afforded the 
 doctor in his studies. 
 
 They spent the autumn in Rome, going to Paris in the 
 winter, and in both cities the studies of the husband and the 
 writing of the wife were continued. In Paris, she wrote 
 " Smethurstses," " Seth," and other stories. In this city, in 
 
168 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 the spring, a second son, Vivian, was horn to them. In the 
 summer of 1876 they returned to the home of the doctor s 
 father, in New Market, and Doctor Burnett determined to 
 establish himself in Washington. It was six months before 
 affairs financial justified the removal of the rest of the family. 
 Mrs. Burnett, with her two children, spent the interim in the 
 quiet Tennessee village of New Market ; but she was not 
 idle. She wrote " Lodusky," " Esmeralda," " Mere Giraud s 
 Little Daughter," etc., etc. 
 
 For nearly a year after joining her husband in Washington 
 they lived quite obscurely and plainly in the West End. Her 
 children were a great care, and through months of weakness, 
 she lived a life of almost utter hopelessness in this city, 
 where soon her name was known in every household. 
 
 In a short time she began her work with renewed deter 
 mination, sending " Louisiana " to "Scribner s," and "A Fair 
 Barbarian" to "Peterson s Magazine," and writing "Ha- 
 worths," a work which, though it never attained the popu 
 larity of " That Lass o Lowrie s," is undoubtedly, as an ex 
 ample of literary art, the finest she ever produced, and the 
 rival of any romantic creation in the New World. In 1878 
 the family removed to the pleasant house which they now 
 occupy, 1215 I street, and Mrs. Burnett has a large circle of 
 devoted personal friends. Nor is her accomplished husband 
 less popular. Their homo is one of luxury, though not ex 
 travagance, filled with works of art, handsome hangings, and 
 interesting bric-a-brac. Upon entering the hall the fact ap 
 pears that it is the abode of refinement and culture. Here 
 the visitor at the Capital seeks to know the writer whose pen 
 has furnished so many hours of pleasure ; and* here they are 
 met with such a genial welcome and such hospitality that 
 even the most shy are placed at perfect ease. The doctor, 
 who delights in art, has collected old engravings and fine 
 etchings ; and he often surprises his wife with a vase of roses, 
 or a bunch of field-flowers, painted, as he says, by an unknown 
 artist, in whom she is quick to recognize himself. It is a 
 home free from the iron rule of conventionality, and though 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 169 
 
 not " Vagabond ia," is the outgrowth, as far as the environ 
 ments of a city allow, of such freedom. Each Tuesday 
 evening in the season the parlor is filled with visitors, a large 
 proportion being strangers. For a year or so Mrs. Burnett, 
 with her genial nature, essayed to take up the burden of 
 social life in Washington, but it was too great a burden, es 
 pecially as the demands of the busy pen were not less exact 
 ing ; indeed, rather more, now that the boys grew rapidly, 
 and luxuries were added to necessities. Mrs. Burnett s work 
 room is known as the "Den, "and to the favored few who 
 are received into its privacy the very mention will recall the 
 delightful home circle and agreeable friends met there. 
 Early each morning Mrs. Burnett seats herself at her table 
 and Avrites until noon. Mood, not even health is con 
 sulted. If she is in happy mental frame, the hours are not 
 heeded, and the sentences flow freely from her pen ; if not, 
 the afternoon is given to recreation, walks, drives, and visit 
 ing. The evenings, except those of the more formal Tues 
 days, are spent in the "Den," and "the children s hour" 
 there is one to be remembered. There, to amuse two rest 
 less boys, were improvised "The Proud Little Grain of 
 Wheat," "Editha s Burglar," "Behind the White Brick," and 
 other stories that have delighted the juvenile readers of " St. 
 Nicholas." Here, too, she has recently completed " Through 
 One Administration." 
 
 The world has set its critical seal upon the productions 
 of this woman of genius, and should she never write an 
 other word of fiction, the fame of Frances Hodgson Burnett 
 will rest secure upon " That Lass o Lowrie s," " Haworths," 
 " Smethurstses," and " Louisiana." Having written these, 
 she must remain her own rival. 
 
 Of poetry Mrs. Burnett has published but little ; occa 
 sionally a short poem appears from her hand such as "Yes 
 terday and To-day," so exquisite as to make us ask for 
 more. At the Garfield Memorial of the "Literary Society," 
 Washington, D.C., she read a poem that will never be for 
 gotten by those who were present. As neighbor and friend, 
 
170 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 President Garfield had been much beloved, and this was a 
 heart utterance which, indeed, rose to the heroic: 
 
 " We cry, but he who suffers lies 
 Meeting sharp-weaponed pain with steadfast eyes, 
 .And makes no plaint; while on the threshold Death 
 Half draws his keen sword from its glittering sheath, 
 And looking inward, pauses lingering long 
 Faltering himself the weak before the strong." 
 
 "A Woman s Reason," which appeared in the " Century n 
 January, 1883, gives a happy portrayal of a woman s heart 
 by a woman s hand : 
 
 " And now my hand clings closer to your breast ; 
 Bend your head lower, while I say the rest 
 The greatest change of all is this, that I 
 Who used to be so cold, so fierce, so shy, 
 In the sweet moment that I feel you near, 
 Forget to be ashamed and know no fear 
 Forget that life is sad and death is drear 
 Because because I love you." 
 
 If called upon to discriminate as to the characteristics of 
 this eminent woman I should call her personal courage tho 
 most distinguishing. She is delicate in her womanly instincts, 
 modest in valuing her literary achievements, socially not 
 ambitious of display, and right feminine in all her pleasures 
 and avocations, yet possessing a coolness and courage in an 
 emergency which is not generally a female attribute. 
 
 A paragraph which appeared two years since in the daily 
 papers describing her rescue at Long Beach of Mr. Larz 
 Anderson of Cincinnati, was not overstated. Mrs. Burnett, 
 with jV lr. and Mrs. Anderson, were walking on the beach 
 ready to have an early morning swim in the Inlet. Mr. 
 Anderson declared his intention of diving from the bridge 
 a purpose he had several times declared. His wife had 
 doubts as to its safety ; but he was determined to try it. 
 The two ladies saw the plunge, and in an instant a white 
 face appeared on the surface of the water, then went down. 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 171 
 
 The frightened wife run for assistance, and Mrs. Burnett, who 
 was that summer learning to swim, dashed into the waves 
 and swam rapidly to him. The helpless form, for, as may 
 be surmised, his head had struck a rock, was going under 
 for the third time. She clutched him, and putting forth all 
 her strength reached the beach with her still insensible bur- 
 
 O 
 
 den, and, with a power almost superhuman, bore him across 
 the stretch of sand to a grass-plot, where Mrs. Anderson 
 had brought assistance and restoratives. The friendship 
 based on this incident has grown to be one of the pleasantest 
 associations of this heroic woman. 
 
 Dress has abundant attraction for her. She enjoys it artis 
 tically, and has an honest delight in a new gown. This is not 
 really an individual consideration, but a part of the love she 
 has for all that is beautiful in art or nature. She fancies 
 working in dainty lace, adjusting bows on robe or hat, and 
 is apt to give all such detail as far as possible her personal 
 attention. She is {esthetic in all her belongings, and in her 
 own boudoir every nook and corner indicates the fancies of 
 its occupant, or the thought of her husband, who, with pic 
 ture or bric-a-brac, adds frequently to her collection of 
 novelties. 
 
 Mrs. Burnett is modest in her estimate of her achievements ; 
 while she listens to words of praise, she is not embariassed, 
 but pleasantly surprised, and often says that when met with 
 more than ordinary effusiveness she accepts it as absolutely 
 impersonal, as though it was some other writer of whom they 
 are speaking. 
 
 Although she is certainly not indifferent to criticism, she is 
 philosophical, accepting the abuse and the approval with 
 equanimity; freely discussing reviews in her homo circle, 
 yet I feel at liberty to say that nothing yields her greater 
 happiness than a realization that she has given solace or 
 enjoyment to so many. I remember one evening just at 
 twilight I went in to sit an hour with her. As soon as she 
 Baw me she called to her husband, "Please light the gas, 
 doctor , I want to show my beautiful present." The 
 
172 PRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 
 
 revealed thrown across her on the lounge a rare India shawl, 
 a gem full a hundred years old, as was told by the delicate color 
 and antique pattern ; " Made when men loved art for art s sake," 
 wrote the donor, an elderly gentleman, an entire stranger, 
 who begged its acceptance as some recognition of the pleas 
 ure he had received in reading "Louisiana." When I read 
 aloud his beautiful letter, in which he modestly claimed some 
 soul kinship with the pathetic old father in the mountains of 
 North Carolina, " Tho a little more polish had been given me 
 some forty years ago," she was deeply touched, and said, 
 "That repays me many times for. days of labor and hours of 
 discouragement." 
 
 Graceful recognition of pleasure received and much grate 
 ful expression come to the successful story-teller, yet I 
 doubt if ever an offering went more directly to her heart. She 
 receives countless confidences, particularly from young women 
 who indulge in literary aspirations, with enclosed manuscript 
 for criticism. Daily applications for autographs come, and 
 letters of inquiry and approval. To all this, as far as time or 
 strength permit, she has conscientiously endeavored to send 
 answers ; not failing to encourage, if it be possible, young 
 writers well remembering the worth of such kindness. 
 Her capacity for work must be illustrated by a plain state 
 ment. In little more than seven years she has given the 
 world five novels, a large number of short stories, several 
 children s stories, and the dramatization of " Esmeralda." 
 During this time there were often months in which she was 
 seriously indisposed with nervous prostration. Meantime 
 domestic and social duties were not disregarded. There is 
 nothing, by the way, in which she can accomplish so much as 
 working, unless it be playing upon which she enters with a 
 zest that is charming. This, a happy heritage, is often the 
 blessing given to true genius, a blessing which renews the 
 strength and keeps the heart young. 
 
 Although of English birth, the work of Mrs. Burnett has 
 so identified her with and endeared her to the country of 
 her adoption that she may be proudly claimed by the New 
 
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 173 
 
 World. In physique she is decidedly of English type, 
 well-formed, graceful usually she rejoices in excellent 
 health. She is a blonde of rich tint, with dark bluish-gray 
 eyes, that are full of varying expression, so intense do 
 they sometimes become that they have been described as 
 black. Her head is shapely and well poised ; nose straight 
 and finely cut, nostrils thin and sensitive, while the firm chin 
 and decisive mouth arc full of character. In manner she is 
 utterly free from affectation, though sometimes forgetful and 
 abstracted. She has a fund of small talk for an idle hour, 
 and of humor an abundant supply, with most happy apprecia 
 tion of it in others. While in writing her pathos is so touch 
 ing as to overshadow the vein of humor threading her pages, 
 in conversation humor predominates. She is endowed Avith 
 a large degree of magnetism, and above all she has charms for 
 her own sex. The highest eulogy that may be pronounced on 
 a woman is when it can be said " Women love her," and this 
 can with truth be said of Mrs. Burnett. Those who know her 
 well have much reason to love her. In temper she is delight 
 fully amiable and ready in sympathy. I have endeavored not 
 needlessly to intrude upon the sacred precincts of home, but 
 if I had yielded to the temptation and related incidents 
 known to me, this brave-hearted woman of genius would 
 indeed appear what she is a heroine in real life. A life so 
 loving in all its ties, so exalted in duty, so full of good work, 
 so responsive to every call, so replete in wide-reaching 
 sympathy, she with all her power of characterization has 
 never presented in romance. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 EOSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke s Ancestry Her Description of an Old-Fashioned Thanks 
 giving Scenes in Her Childliood A Picture of Old New England 
 Life Her Deep Love of Nature Passion for Flowers School-life 
 
 Reading at the Age of Three Inimitable Skill in Depicting New- 
 England Life and Character Her Bright Humor and Keen Sense of 
 the Ridiculous Beginning Her Literary Career Opening of Her Genius 
 
 A Novel Incident in Plymouth Church The Story of an Opal Ring 
 How a Little Slave-Child was made Free A Romantic Story Odd 
 Experiences with Impostors and Counterfeiters Mrs. Cooke s Power of 
 Mimicry Her Home and Domestic Life A Woman of Rare Genius. 
 
 QUARTER of a century ago, most of us can 
 ~ recall the joyous pride with which the birth of 
 the "Atlantic Monthly" was hailed, and the 
 eagerness with which each number was antici 
 pated. Into what charming company it took 
 us ! There the Autocrat of the Breakfast-table 
 held his genial sway ; Motley fought over tho 
 " Battle of Lepanto " ; Colonel Higginson led us 
 into the woods of "April Days" and among tho 
 " Water-Lilies " of August in his series of wondrous 
 out-door studies ; Anne Whitney came with poems of a 
 loftier reach and fuller grasp than any other w r oman has ever 
 given the world ; the " Minister s Wooing " took up its placid 
 way ; that brilliant tale, the " Queen of the Red Chessmen," 
 delighted the fancy and promised a new type of fiction ; the 
 "Man without a Country" deceived a wilderness of readers 
 into tears ; Emerson sang of " Brahma," Longfellow of "San- 
 dalphon," and Whittier sang the " Swan-song of Parson 
 Avery " ; Frank Underwood stretched his kind hand to the 
 unknown ; and James Russell Lowell s genius welded the 
 varying elements into a harmonious whole. 
 174 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 175 
 
 In this gracious company, too, came Rose Terry, with the 
 loading story of the first number ; and as story followed 
 story, each better than the other, she kindled the ambition 
 and had the felicitation of every other young woman who 
 turned the pages throughout the country, for most of us 
 felt as if all jrirlhood were honored in her who carried her 
 
 c? 
 
 light before men with such proud strength and beauty. 
 
 AVe knew but little about her in those days, for personal 
 ities had not grown to rule us. We only knew that she lived 
 in Connecticut, and had already published a story, in the 
 palmy days of "Putnam s Monthly," called " The Mormon s 
 Wife," which dealt powerfully with the leprosy of Mormon- 
 ism, and wrung from the heart tears dried only by the heat of 
 indignation. Any one who now reads that old story will be 
 as much moved by it as its first readers were, will com 
 prehend that stronger yet more delicate argument was never 
 made against the iniquity which would undermine that whole 
 foundation of civilization, the family, tearing the hearts of 
 women and debasing the souls of men, and must needs ask 
 how so young a person knew the deep springs of feeling that 
 play there, unless it is true that the experience of years 
 teaches less than the intuitions of genius. 
 
 It is genius that informs every line Rose Terry has ever 
 written, a pure and lofty genius that burned with a white 
 flame in such subtle metaphysical reveries as " My Tenants," 
 and " Did I?" and showed its many-colored light in brief bits 
 of poetic romance, and in a succession of stories of New 
 England life. One marvels how such a genius became the 
 ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry, 
 as one marvels to see after silent flowerless years some dry 
 and prickly cactus-stern burst out into its sudden flaming 
 flower. 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke came of undoubted and undiluted Puritan 
 blood, which is to be found nowhere bluer than in Connec 
 ticut. Her mother was Anne Wright Ilurlbut, the daughter 
 of John Hurlbut of Wethersfield, Connecticut, the first New 
 England shipmaster who sailed round the world, and a man 
 
176 KOSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 who subsequently lost his life caring for the sick during an 
 epidemic. He left his daughter an orphan in her ninth year; 
 and she grew up beautiful, tender, delicate, shrinking, unde 
 monstrative from principle, and with a morbid conscience. 
 She married Henry Wads worth Terry, the son of Nathaniel 
 Terry, president of a Hartford Bank, and for some time a 
 member of Congress. 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Terry was a man of great information, 
 a social favorite, sensitive, generous, and open-hearted. On 
 his mother s side he belonged to the old Wadsworlh stock, 
 from which the poet Longfellow descended, his immediate 
 ancestor in this country having been the Hon. William Wads- 
 worth, dated at Cambridge, 1G32, and at Hartford, 1G36; 
 and his uncle, several times removed, having been that Joseph 
 Wadsworth who stole the Charter and ennobled the oak-tree 
 for all time to come, and who had a descendant of his own 
 spirit in General Terry of Fort Fisher and Pulaski fame, the 
 cousin of Rose. 
 
 Rose was born on the 17th of February, 1827, on a 
 farm, where her father and mother then lived, a half-dozen 
 miles from Hartford, to which city, when the child had 
 reached her sixth year, they removed, taking up their resi 
 dence in a large brick mansion built in 1799 by ColonelJere- 
 miah Wadsworth for his daughter, and at that time the best 
 house in Hartford, except another just like it which he built 
 for his son. 
 
 It is of the life and manners in this house that she speaks 
 in a little sketch, faithful as a Flemish picture, in which she 
 narrates to a child of the family the old-fashioned Thanks 
 giving doings in her grandmother s kitchen, with the green 
 knotty glass of its window-panes through which she watched 
 the pigeons and the cats, and with its immense fireplace : 
 
 " It was very wide indeed, so wide you could sit in each 
 corner and look up the chimney to the sky. The fire was in 
 the middle, and was made of big logs piled up on great iron 
 andirons. Over it was an iron thing called a crane, a flat, 
 strong bar that swung off and on, so you could put on the 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 179 
 
 kettles without burning your arms in the flame, and then 
 swing them back to their place. They were hung on hooks, 
 and those hooks put into short chains that had other hooks 
 which held them on the crane, so the pot-hooks could be put 
 in higher or lower, just as was needed. There was a bakc- 
 kettlo stood in one corner of the chimney, and a charcoal 
 furnace in the other, so that you could cook a great many 
 things at once. 
 
 " What fun we children did have at., that fireplace when the 
 cook was good-natured. We used to tie apples to strings, 
 and then fasten the strings to the shelf above and see the 
 apples twirl and roast and drip into saucers. W r e used to 
 molt loaf-sugar into little wire-baskets tied to just such 
 strings, and see it drop into buttered pans, making cakes of 
 clear amber candy. We thawed frozen apples in the dish- 
 kettle, and roasted ears of corn by leaning them against the 
 andirons. We always begged the pigs tails at killing-time, 
 and, rolling them in brown paper, baked them in the hot 
 ashes. They never were good, nobody ever ate them ; but 
 we persisted in doing it year after year." 
 
 Then she tells us what Monday was in this great kitchen on 
 the week in question, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, when, 
 " if I was good, I was allowed to tuck myself into a corner, 
 and look on, and run of errands. I went for nutmegs, for 
 cinnamon, for pie-dishes ; for more sugar, for milk, and 
 spoons, and spices ; but I was more than paid if I could 
 only watch grandmother roll the thin crust out, lay it neatly 
 over the dishes, shave off the edge close, and then, after 
 filling it with the red, or yellow, or creamy mixture before 
 her in big bowls, cut strips of paste with the dough-spur, and 
 ornament their surfaces. W r hat a work of skill it was to set 
 those pies in the oven and never spill a drop or slop the 
 broad edges of crust and leave a smear ! How dcliciously they 
 smelt when they came out glazed and crisp and fit to melt in 
 your mouth, like the cream-tarts of Bedreddcn Hassan !" 
 
 It was here that Rose learned how to become the faultless 
 housekeeper and accomplished cook that she is, and to prac- 
 
180 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 tise an abounding hospitality in her own house. "Now the 
 guests might come, and come they did, some from the river- 
 boat where they had spent a long dreary day ; some from 
 the stage that rattled and rumbled up to the door and un 
 loaded there more bundles and babies than it ought to have 
 
 O 
 
 held. And oh, what fun it was to hear the house ring with 
 fresh voices ; to see our dear handsome old grandfather wel 
 coming thorn all so heartily ; to hear fires crackle in the spare 
 rooms and in the drawing-room ; to see the tea-table with an 
 extra leaf for extra guests ; and see them all enjoy the 
 bread and butter, the loaf-cake, the cookies, the dried beef, 
 the pears and cream that nobody ever got so nice anywhere 
 but at grandmother s house ; and then there was the last 
 delight of the day, to see mother, just as I was dropping off 
 into sleep, standing close to the lamp to baste a bit of old 
 lace into the throat of my green merino dress, and pin on the 
 front her own little pin of rough Carolina gold. 
 
 " But the next day is Thanksgiving. Grandfather is down 
 stairs early, and has a big bright fire all ready ; and there 
 is sweet, gentle Aunt Clara with the last baby beside her 
 knee, and a smile and a kiss for all of us ; there are half a 
 dozen cousins and five or six other aunts and uncles ; and 
 I get into a corner silent and shy. I love them all, but I 
 could not say so, possibly. So I get out of sight all I can, 
 swallow my breakfast and am happily at play under the table, 
 with paper boats and handkerchief babies, and my dearest 
 cousin Taf, the best boy in the world, I think, when mother 
 comes for me to be washed and dressed and go to church. 
 Taf is a big man now, and a general. He has taken forts, 
 and conquered rebels, and been trailed about the world from 
 pillar to post, and been praised in the newspapers and hon 
 ored by the country; but I asked him, not long ago, if 
 he remembered how we played boats under the table, and he 
 laughed and said he did. 
 
 " I m sorry to say I didn t like to be washed and dressed 
 and go to church. My nose was always rubbed up, and sonp 
 got into my eyes, and my hair was braided in dreadfully 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 181 
 
 tight pig-tails. I wanted to stay at home, and see the big 
 turkey roasted in the roaster. I should have liked to baste 
 him through the lid behind and turn him on the spit. I 
 wanted to help stick cloves into the cold ham and score the 
 mashed potato before it was put to brown in the reflector ; 
 but I had to go to church for all that, in my plum-colored 
 pelisse and the pea-green silk hood lined with pink and edged 
 with squirrel fur, that was made for us out of a piece of old 
 Aunt Eunice s petticoat. She left two of them, one sky-blue 
 and one pea-green, quilted in flowers and scrolls in the most 
 elegant manner, and they made beautiful hoods. 
 
 "But then there was church. We sat in a square pew close 
 by the pulpit, and when the long prayer came I always got 
 up on the scat and knelt down and looked out of the window 
 into the graveyard. There were two tombstones under the 
 window, very small and brown, with a disagreeable cherub s 
 head on each of them, and letters to tell about Mr. Joseph 
 Ilancox and two little sons, from New Hampshire, lying 
 there. I used to wonder if they liked it to be buried there, 
 and have burdocks grow over them. I never did like bur 
 docks. 
 
 " It seemed to me very hard that we had to go to church 
 on a week-day. But I suppose they wanted us out of the way 
 at home. For when we got back there was the long table all 
 set out with silver, and glass, and china ; the big bunch of 
 celery in the middle in its sparkling glass vase; the moulds 
 of crimson cranberry at the corners ; decanters of bright wine 
 at cither end ; the ham starred with cloves at one side, and 
 a pair of cold tongues at the other ; little dishes of pickled 
 mushrooms, manjjocs. and butternuts standin^ interspersed 
 
 O O A 
 
 about ; and on the sideboard such an array of pie*, and 
 jellies, and nuts, and apples, and almonds, and raisins, as 
 might make four desserts to-day. But then people liked to 
 eat and drink. They had open fires and rattling windows, 
 and so plenty of fresh air. 
 
 "There was grandfather in his kncc-brceches and queer 
 old-fashioned coat, with all the children clustering and clam- 
 
182 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 beririg round him ; there was grandmother, with her brown 
 silk dress and best cap on, ruffles of soft thread-lace about 
 her face and throat, the pretty young aunts dressed for the 
 day, and the married aunts talking to each other about their 
 children, and servants, and clothes, much as married aunts do 
 still ; and there were the uncles looking a little as if they 
 wished the dinner would hurry. And last of all, there was 
 one little table for we children always had a table to our 
 selves with a set of small pics on it. And sometimes I sat 
 at the head, if Kate was not there, for she was older than I ; 
 but Quent always sat at the foot, being always there and the 
 oldest of us all. What fun we had ; and how hard it was to 
 say what we would have to eat, for we could not eat every 
 thing. And by this time the table was loaded with turkcj r , 
 and roast ducks, and chicken pie, and stewed salsify, and 
 celery sauce, and gravies, besides all the cold meats ; and I 
 knew mother s beautiful dark eyes kept good watch over her 
 little daughter s plate, for fear of next day s headache, for 
 even then I had headaches." 
 
 This little transcript is valuable not only as giving scenes 
 in the childhood of Rose, but as a picture that is nowhere 
 else, that I am aware of, given so faithfully and vividly of tho 
 daily life of the period it treats, for there is much of it that I 
 have not quoted. 
 
 How fond she is of those old places and people now long 
 gone, and how she loves to delay and dally with them. 
 
 " A garden full of all old-fashioned blooms lay about (ho 
 wide front door and south of the side entrance. Old pear- 
 trees, knotty and awkward, but veiled always in the spring 
 with snowy blossoms, and hung thereafter with golden fruit, 
 shaded a little the formal flower-beds where grew tulips, 
 lifling scarlet and golden cups, or creamy chalices striped 
 white, and pink, and purple, toward the sun ; peonies round 
 and flaunting; ragged robins; flowering almond that bloomed 
 like Aaron s rod with myriads of tiny roses on a straight 
 stick ; fleur-de-lis with languid and royal banners of blue, 
 white, or gold ; flowering currant, its prim yellow blossoms 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 183 
 
 breathing out spice to the first spring winds ; snowdrops, 
 original and graceful ; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, nar 
 cissus, daffudowndillys ; velvet and parti-colored roses, the 
 rich buds of Provence and moss, the lavish garlands of the 
 old white rose, and the delicate odorous damask. Why 
 should I catalogue them? Yet they all rise crowding on 
 my memory, and the air swims Avith their odors. . . . The 
 smooth-cheeked crisp apricots ripened against the wall ; 
 bell-pears, a fruit passed out of modern reach, a won 
 drous compound of sugar, and wine, and fragrance, 
 dropped in the rank grass ; peaches that are known no more 
 to man, great rose-flushed globes of honey and perfume that 
 set the very wasps crazy, drooped the slight trees to earth 
 with their gracious burden ; cherries and plums strewed the 
 ground, and were wasted from mere profusion ; curculio was 
 a stranger in the land, fire-blight unknown, yellows a myth, 
 black-knot never tied, and the hordes of ravaging insects yet 
 unliatched ; there was enough for men and robins ; the land 
 was full of food." 
 
 How she delights to people this garden and its house with 
 the old figures that belonged there there is something touch- 
 
 O <> O 
 
 ing in the way she lingers about them ; perhaps the figure 
 of the distant uncle to whose inheritance she at last owes that 
 comfort which makes her in a measure independent of pub 
 lishers, perhaps that of the rosy, wilful, sweet, high-spirited 
 maiden whose " very self has come back to earth in the third 
 generation, romping, blooming, blue-eyed, and bewitching as 
 her great-grandmother, with the same wide clear eyes and 
 softly curving lips, the imperious frown, broad white fore 
 head, and careless waving hair, that charmed the eyes of 
 Rochambeau and Washington, and made the gay and gallant 
 French officers clink their glasses for honor of little Molly 
 when she was set on the dining-table with dessert to drink the 
 general s health at a dinner-party. Sitting at her feet on a 
 cricket and looking up at the wrinkled face and ruffled cap 
 above us, it seemed more incredible than any wildest fairy 
 tales that she should ever have been young and beautiful; 
 12 
 
184 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 but her picture, taken in the prime of womanhood, attests 
 with its noble beauty all that tradition tells." 
 
 Here, too, she lingers with Mabel, the old great-great- 
 grandmother, stern, self-reliant, with regular features, set 
 lips, and keen, cold, gray eyes. "That chill and steel," she 
 says, "come out here and there among her descendants, and 
 temper, perhaps desirably, the facile good-nature and bon- 
 hommie that her husband bequeathed also among us." That 
 husband rode, to serve his country, on some emergency, till 
 his legs were so swollen with the fixed position and fatigue 
 that it was necessary to fill his riding-boots with brandy 
 before they could be forced off. 
 
 It is his clothes laid up in the garret, the clothes of the old 
 Wadsworth of the Revolutionary era, worn at the French 
 court and other less regal festivities, that were wont to de 
 light Hose s childish fancy. 
 
 " Plow goodly were those ample suits of Genoa velvet, 
 coats whose skirts would make a modern garment, with silver 
 buttons wherever buttons could be sewed ; breeches with 
 paste buckles at the knees, so bright in their silver setting 
 that my childish soul secretly cherished a hope that they 
 might possibly be diamonds after all ; and waistcoats of white 
 satin, embroidered with gold or silver, tarnished, it is true, by 
 time, but what use is an imagination only eight years old if 
 the mere tarnish of eighty years counts for anything in its 
 sight. These coats were wonderful to me ; how wonderful 
 would they not be in the streets to-day ! One was of scarlet 
 velvet, with a silvery frost on its pile like the down on a 
 peach, velvet so thick that I pricked my fingers painfully 
 attempting to fashion a pincushion out of a fragment thereof; 
 another was purple, with a plum-like bloom on its royal tint, 
 and another sober gray and glittering only with buttons and 
 buckles of cut steel. Think how a goodly and personable 
 man dazzled the eyes of fair ladies in those days, arrayed like 
 a tulip, with shining silk stockings, and low shoes all of a 
 sparkle with steel, or paste, or diamonds ; his shapely hnnds 
 .adorned with ,rieh lace frills, his ample bosom and muscular 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 185 
 
 throat blossoming out with equally soft and costly garni 
 ture ! " 
 
 Between Rose and her mother, with the beautiful dark eyes 
 she spoke of, to return to herself after this glimpse at her 
 ancestry, there existed the most close and tender relation 
 in a tie of unusual intimacy. But to her father she owes 
 much of her love of nature, and of her varied knowledge 
 of its manifestations. It was he that taught her how to 
 study the clouds and the stars, flower and weed, and land 
 scape ; it was he that taught her the names of blossoms 
 and the songs of birds, so that there seems to be small 
 sum of wildwood lore of which she is not mistress. An 
 apt little pupil, a child of the woods in which she lived so 
 much, these studies were after her own heart, she stood 
 once nearly an hour, as silent as a stone, to see if a big, burly 
 bumble-bee, buzzing and humming about, would not mistake 
 her for a flower and alight upon her. She can tell you where 
 to find the partridge s nest, the whippoorwill s eggs hidden in 
 dry leaves, the humming-bird s pearls ; her glance knows all 
 the difference between the basket-nest of the vireo hanging 
 from its twig, the pensile grossbeak s swinging over the 
 stream, and the orchard oriole s. She distinguishes their 
 notes, and as if she understood their meaning ; she knows 
 the " faint songs of blue-birds closing their spring serenades in 
 a more plaintive key, as if the possible accidents of hatching 
 and rearing assailed them now 1 with apprehension ; " an old 
 acquaintance of hers is the cat-bird, "giving his gratuitous 
 concert from the topmost twig of an elm ; " and it is she that 
 describes "the distant passionately mournful lyric of the 
 song-sparrows, reserved for spring alone, as if a soul had 
 merged its life in one love, and in its deepest intensity and 
 most glowing fervor knew through all that the love was 
 wasted and the fervor vain." 
 
 All the wild-flowers and their haunts are pre-eminently hers, 
 too. She knows where the first of the pink moccasin-flowers 
 hang out their banners, in what wet spot the sweet and rare 
 white violets hide their fragrances, the brookside where th 
 
18G ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 cardinals gather the later heats into their hues, the forgotten 
 paths where the shy-fringed gentian may be found, and the field 
 where here and there is to be seen "a vivid fire-lily holding 
 its stately cup of flame right upward to the ardent sun, as if 
 to have it filled with splendor and overflowed with light;" 
 and so true is she to their seasons, as if she felt with them 
 the life that pulses up through the old earth to their blossom 
 ing, that if she said the wild-rose wreathed the snowdrifts of 
 January, I should believe that the rest of the world had 
 always been mistaken regarding that particular blossom. 
 She ought to know about roses, anyway, for none in all the 
 country-side bloom more beautifully than hers do in the little 
 plots where she is a famous gardener to-day. Perhaps it 
 was her mother, on the other hand, again, who taught her 
 the love of man and woman and child, the knowledge of 
 human nature which marks every word she utters, and from 
 whom she inherited that innermost poetiy of being, the emo 
 tional delicacy which gilds and illumines all her thoughts. 
 She was a delicate child, owing to an early illness, so severe 
 an illness that for a space it was thought she had really 
 passed away from life ; and it was possibly for that reason 
 that her out-door habits were encouraged. She was an 
 exceedingly sensitive and imaginative child, too, and her 
 imagination was by no means dwarfed by the servants, who 
 told her ghost-stories, so powerfully affecting her that }-ears 
 afterward she would slip out of bed in all the dreadful, 
 haunted darkness, grope shivering and shuddering to the 
 stairs, and crouch there where she could see a glimmer of 
 light or hear a murmur of voices. 
 
 The most noted of these servants was Athanasius, a Greek 
 boy escaped from the Turkish massacre, morc s the pity, one 
 is tempted to say, and despatched to her father as a waiter 
 by Bishop Wainwright. Rose was sent out to walk with him 
 every day, being then only three years old, and he would 
 regale her on the way with the most frightful recitals, threat 
 ening that if she ever told her father or mother he would 
 murder her, a possibility which she fully believed of him. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 187 
 
 So thoroughly had secrecy been burned into her soul by fear 
 that she never told of him till she was a grown woman, and 
 had forgotten every word of his stories ; but she never forgot, 
 she has said, her horror when she chanced to meet his fierce 
 black eyes at the table, and, thinking he might fulfil his 
 threat on the supposition that she had betrayed him, would 
 open her lips to cry out, " O Athanasius ! don t kill me ! I 
 haven t told ! " when the thought that such an exclamation was 
 truly betrayal and sudden death checked her. It is very 
 possibly something of her own experience of this sort that 
 has made her one of the most eloquent advocates of oppressed 
 children. 
 
 After leaving the shelter of her mother s side, Rose entered 
 a female seminaiy, under the care of Mr. John P. Brace, 
 who had been an instructor in the school where her mother 
 received her education before becoming a pupil of Mrs. 
 Sigourney s. The early growth of her powers, which was 
 marked by the fact of her knowing how to read perfectly at 
 the age of three, was equally perceptible in her school life, 
 where she wrote prize-poems, composed dramas for the young 
 amateurs of the school, and learned languages, all as if it were 
 play : some verses written then under the title of " Hearts 
 ease " would have done credit to the maturer poetesses of 
 the preceding generation. 
 
 At sixteen she graduated ; and it was during the same year 
 that she united with the church, making a profession of 
 religion which has ever since been as vital to her as tho 
 atmosphere she breathed. But although of the straitest sect 
 herself, she has always been liberal and kindly in relation to 
 the views of others. To some, in her enthusiasm for beauty, 
 her idealism, and her sense of the consoling power of visible 
 nature, it would seem as if a strain of pagan blood had, after 
 all, a little enlarged the Puritan, if there were any possi 
 bility of the pagan upon the scene. For if one recalls the 
 dark antecedents of that region which gave her birth, the 
 strength and sternness of a race springing on a soil but half 
 reclaimed from the primeval forest, but half redeemed from 
 
188 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 the lurking savage, haunted by terrors of the known nnd of 
 the unknown, where thought descended straightened by the 
 iron cage of a strict creed, nowhere stricter, and nowhere 
 enduring with more unrelaxing rigor, it will be felt that so 
 rich and beautiful a nature as Rose Terry s was as foreign to 
 all that gloomy shadow of descent as a tropical blossom 
 would be to that belt of the eternal snows where only the 
 lichen grows. 
 
 But whatever her own nature and identity may be, that 
 descent has given her a warm and kindred sympathy with the 
 experiences of people who share it with her, and she derives 
 from it her faculty of depicting the last delicate shade and 
 contour of the New England country life in a manner rivalled 
 by no other delineator. For capital as the dialect of Mrs. 
 Stowe is in this field, and delicious as the "Biglow Papers" 
 are, I should say that they neither of them quite render that 
 inner piquancy and flavor which she has caught, nor altogether 
 evince complete perception of that strange character, soon to 
 be only a thing of history, with all its contrasts and colors, 
 its wealth and its meagreness, the depth of its sombreness, 
 the flashes of its drollery, the might of its uprightness, the 
 strength of its superstitions, with its shadows, its grotesque- 
 ries, and its undying pathos, all of which she sees with 
 keen insight and personal sympathy, humanizes with fearless 
 fidelity to nature and most tender humor, and brightens with 
 a brilliant wit. 
 
 It is not in any flattering light that she takes up this theme ; 
 she finds in it occasion for romance of all the darker sort, as 
 well as for trenchant phrase and for illimitable laughter. In 
 the sketch of the tc West Shetucket Railway," that Hawthorne 
 might have written ("Crispin, rival de son maitre, un petit 
 chef cToeuvre que Moliere a oubliS defaire" as Arscne IIous- 
 saye says), she looks on a blacker side than many of us are 
 quite willing to admit the existence of; but it is on this black 
 side that she knows how to throw the irradiation of her genius, 
 and, while bringing out the abrupt lights and darks, softening 
 all with the divine glow of pity. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 189 
 
 " To a person at all conversant with life in the deep country 
 of New England," she says: "Life in lonely farms among its 
 wild mountains, or on the bare, desolate hills that roll their 
 sullen brown summits mile on mile through the lower tracts 
 of this region, there is nothing more painful than the 
 prevalence of crime and disease in these isolated homes. 
 Born to an inheritance of hard labor, labor necessary to mere 
 life ; fighting with that most valorous instinct of human nature, 
 the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate not only 
 rigorous but fatally changeful, a soil bitter and barren enough 
 to need that gold should be sewn before more than copper 
 can be harvested, without any excitement to stir the half 
 torpid brain, without any pleasure, the New England farmer 
 becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts 
 akin to the beasts that perish, hard, cruel, sensual, vindic 
 tive. An habitual church-goer, perhaps ; but none the less 
 thoroughly irreligious. All the keener sensitiveness of his 
 organization blunted with over-work and under-feedins: till 
 
 " O 
 
 the finer emotions of his soul dwindle and perish for want of 
 means of expression, he revenges himself on his condition in 
 the natural way. And when you bring this same dreadful 
 pressure to bear on women, whose more delicate nature is 
 proportionately more excitable, whose hearts bleed silently to 
 the very last drop before their lips find utterance, when you 
 bring to bear on these poor weak souls, made for love and 
 gentleness and bright outlooks from the daily dulncsa of 
 work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish 
 tyranny of husbands to whom they are tied beyond escape, 
 What wonder is it that a third of all the female lunatics in our 
 asylums are farmers wives, and that domestic tragedies, even 
 beyond the scope of a sensation novel, occur daily in these 
 lonely houses, far beyond human help or hope?" 
 
 It is not always from such gloomy material, however, that 
 she has drawn, and whenever she has used it it is to brighten 
 it with her inexhaustible pleasantry. " The s other folks die 
 and don t remember you, and you re just as bad off as if you 
 wa n t a widder," comes on a funereal occasion ; a touch of 
 
190 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 rude nature breaks upon the pathos of a scene where " the 
 locusts in the woods cluttered as though they was fry in ," and 
 phrases of the vernacular, such as "chewin of meetin -seed," 
 "the shockanum palsy," "dumb as a horned critter," and a 
 world of others are preserved for all time, like bugs in amber. 
 
 A multiplied value is given to these characterizations by 
 the circumstance that their types are fast becoming extinct. 
 The pious old spinster, A\ho could give lessons in the five 
 points of Calvinism to the modern minister, will soon be no 
 more, and it is a historical study when we find her, as we do, 
 for instance, in the person of Miss Lavvy, uttering her shrewd 
 aphorisms, " Well, of all things ! if you hain t got aground on 
 doctrines," cries the old tailoress. " Happilony, you hear to 
 me, you ve got common sense, and does it stand to reason 
 that the Lord that made you hain t got any ? ... If you ve 
 got so t you can t understand the Lord s ways, mebbe you d 
 better stop. Folks that try dippin up the sea in a pint-cup 
 don t usually make it out. . . . We ain t a right to vex our 
 selves about to-morrow ; to-day s all we can handle ; the 
 manna spiled when it was kep over." 
 
 Immediately after graduation Rose began to teach in Hart 
 ford, although she did not long remain there while thus 
 occupied, presently taking a situation in a Presbyterian 
 church school in Burlington, N. J. In the fourth year there 
 she became a governess in the family of the clergyman ; but 
 after a while, feeling the need there was of her at home, she 
 returned to Hartford and began her more precisely literary life. 
 
 Her first story, written for " Graham s Magazine," at the 
 age of eighteen, encouraged her; but her dream was that of 
 developing her powers of poetry. Sympathy with those 
 whom she met and knew from day to day, a quick and keen 
 eye for the ridiculous, a heart touched with pity, and the 
 natural faculty of the raconteur, diverted her in some mea 
 sure into the stories of New England life of which I have 
 spoken ; but the fluttering aspiration of her nature, at home 
 in lofty regions, lifted her on wings of song ; and every one 
 of her stories that deals with human nature in other than 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 191 
 
 its rustic New England aspects is as much a poem as if 
 written in measure with rhyme and rhythm. 
 
 Her first verses were printed in the New York " Tribune," 
 and nothing better shows the tenderness of the tie between 
 her and her mother, and the inherent modesty of her 
 nature, than the fact of her using her mother s initials for a 
 pseudonym, and hiding her own authorship altogether. Mr. 
 Charles A. Dana, then editorially connected with the "Tri 
 bune," was her very good friend in this matter, and she has 
 always cherished for him a grateful attachment. Those who 
 befriend us in these trying if glowing days of our first en 
 deavor, become in some degree a part of the ideal we 
 pursue, and never lose the light then shed about them, and 
 this was her case in relation also to many others who watched 
 the opening of her genius with interest and sympathy. Rose 
 Terry is the most loyal of friends where she has given 
 her affection ; her fidelity is as stanch as her choice is dis 
 criminating, and her enthusiasm once kindled knows no 
 bounds, since in its cause there is nothing she would not sac 
 rifice except her soul. Possibly she would be as good a 
 hater as lover should occasion rise, for indifference is impos 
 sible to her, and all her emotions are strong ones. 
 
 Such a spirit, sensitive to all the phenomena of the material 
 and immaterial universe, is the animate essence of poetry ; 
 and it is no wonder that as week by week her verses appeared 
 they touched a wider and wider circle, till inquiry rose as to 
 their origin, and it was at last demanded that they should be 
 gathered into a volume where their lovers could have them 
 more nearly at hand. Between the lines of this little volume 
 much of the author s experience and personality can be read by 
 one in search of it. A passionate love of beauty pervades it, 
 a stinging scorn of the ignoble. Every here and there a 
 delicate sadness breaks through its reserves : 
 
 o 
 
 "My life is like a song 
 
 That a bird sings in its sleeping, 
 Or a hidden stream that flows along 
 To the sound of its own soft weeping." 
 
192 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 And again we have it in the " New Moon," in " Implora Pace/ 
 and in the " Fishing Song " heard over the wide gray river : 
 
 " And the ways of God are darkness, 
 
 His judgment waiteth long, 
 He breaks the heart of a woman 
 With a fisherman s careless song." 
 
 o 
 
 It is a sadness, nevertheless, that once in a while rises to an 
 impersonal height, as in the strength of the lines : 
 
 "Hast thou no more enduring date 
 Than out of one despair to die?" 
 
 Or yet again, 
 
 " God sees from the high blue heaven, 
 
 He sees the grape in the flower ; 
 He hears one s life-blood dripping 
 
 Through the maddest, merriest hour; 
 He knows what sack-cloth and ashes hide in the purple 
 of power ! " 
 
 Here, too, in such fiery verses as " Samson Agonistes," 
 "Fremont s Ride," and "After the Camanches," may be seen 
 the writer s patriotism, her politics, and her lively interest in 
 the questions of the day ; her religious feeling is found in the 
 "Bell Songs "and in "Prayer," to speak of no others; and 
 her sympathy with the human heart in " x\t Last," and in 
 " The Two Villages," a thing that has been printed and 
 reprinted, carried in work-baskets and pocket-books, and 
 everybody s heart. There is a tremendous vigor and vivid 
 picturesqueness in her poems of " Semele " and "The Suttee," 
 weird and wonderful phases of passion, and in "Doubt," a 
 poem without a peer, in its own order, unless it be Emer 
 son s "Brahma;" while " Basile Renaud " is a ballad that in 
 dramatic fire, spirit, and beauty is worthy of the first poet 
 of the age. Meantime, "In The Hospital," "Done For," 
 and " Lost on the Prairie," Avere the pioneers of the Border 
 ballad, originated the idea and gave the motive to all of that 
 nature that have ever followed. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 193 
 
 There are few poets who have the power of presenting a 
 scene so that its very atmosphere is felt; but Rose Terry 
 always does ; here the spell of cool odors and dews and 
 rustling leaves are had, where 
 
 " Far through the hills some falling river grieves, 
 
 All earth is stilled 
 Save where a dreaming bird with sudden song is thrilled;" 
 
 And there the sense of the forest distils about us as 
 
 "The thick leaves that scent the tremulous air 
 
 Let the bright sunshine pass with softened light, 
 And lips unwonted breathe instinctive prayer 
 In these cool arches filled with verdurous night." 
 
 None of her poems are more spiritually or suggestively lovely 
 than that with the title of " Trailing Arbutus," which seems 
 to bear about it the fragrance of the flower itself. 
 
 " Were your pure lips fashioned 
 
 Out of air and dew, 
 Starlight unimpassioned, 
 
 Dawn s most tender hue, 
 And scented by the woods that gathered sweets for you ? 
 
 
 
 " Were not mortal sorrow 
 
 An immortal shade, 
 Then would I to-morrow 
 Such a flower be made, 
 And live in the dear woods where my lost childhood played." 
 
 Through all these pages a sweet, keen, delicate music throbs 
 and sings itself. I remember when I first read them how 
 it haunted me, a beautiful ghost that would not down, and 
 after twenty-five years they are still singing their tunes in my 
 brain. 
 
 Of late years other work has in too great measure super 
 seded the delight of singing, although a long poem was written 
 to be read at the celebration of the anniversary of the Groton 
 
194 ROSE TEKIir COOKE. 
 
 Massacre, the selection of her name as that of the poet of the 
 day, showing the pride and appreciation in which her native 
 State holds her ; and later she gave the young girls of the 
 graduating class of Smith College " The Flower Sower," as 
 full of freshness and purity as the spring morning is of sun 
 shine and dew. 
 
 Ten years after writing her first story, " The Mormon s 
 Wife," of which we have already spoken, was published, and 
 after that time Rose became a constant contributor to " Put 
 nam s Monthly" till it ceased, to "Harper s," the Atlantic," 
 and other periodicals as they rose, receiving the best pay 
 given, although the best may be said to be inadequate for 
 such work. If many of these stories are not poems, as I 
 have said, it is simply in form. What fine unison with 
 nature breathes through them, what feeling for the ineffable 
 experiences of which all are conscious but which most are 
 powerless to reduce to words, how rich and varied is the 
 diction, and how sonorous the phrasing ! What sentences are 
 such as this: "The music lived alone in upper air; of men 
 and dancing it Avas all unaware ; the involved cadences rolled 
 aAvay over the lawn, shook the dew-dropped roses on their 
 stems, and went upward in the boundless moonlight to its 
 home." And who, Avith brush and pigment, can paint a pic 
 ture more actually and perfectly than this: "From the front 
 door-step, a great slab of IICAVII granite, you looked south 
 ward down a little green valley, striking a range of wooded 
 hills, and on the other hand a bright chain of lakelets 
 threaded on a rippled river. To the right, as you faced this 
 lovely outlet, a mountain lifted its great green shoulders and 
 barren summit high in air; and, to the left, a lake slept in 
 the bosom of just such lofty hills, wooded to the water s 
 edge, and so reflexed and repeated in that tranquil mirror 
 that its shifting dyes of golden verdure mimicked the 
 peacock s beauteous throat, and changed, faded, brightened, 
 grew dark, or gold, or gray, Avith eA r ery Avandering cloud, each 
 sun-kiss from the sunnier heaven, all flying shoAvers or 
 ruffling winds; \vhile, to the north, mountain overlapping 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 195 
 
 mountain, painted by the deepening distance with darkest 
 green, solemn purple, or aerial blue, and hiding in their giant 
 breasts the road that threaded those secret abysses, daunted 
 and defied the gazer with a mystery of grand beauty that 
 might make a poet hopeless and a painter despair." 
 
 Although stories as forcible as "Freedom Wheeler s 
 Controversy," full at once of a terrible pathos and a, grim 
 humor, have since come from her pen, nothing that she has 
 ever written has exceeded the absolute beauty of "Metempsy 
 chosis," published twenty years or more ago, and of which I 
 subjoin a portion : 
 
 " I drew the long skirt of my lace-dress up over my hair, 
 and quietly went into the greenhouse. The lawn and its 
 black firs tempted me, but there was moonlight on the lawn, 
 and moonlight I cannot bear ; it burns my head more fiercely 
 than any noon sun ; it scorches my eyelids ; it exhausts and 
 fevers me ; it excites my brain, and now I looked for calm. 
 This the odor of the flowers and their pure expression 
 promised me. A tall, thick-leaved camellia stood half-way 
 down the border, and before it was a garden-chair. The 
 moonlight shed no ray there, but through the sashes above 
 streamed cool and fair over the blooms that clung to the wall 
 and adorned the parterres and vases ; for this house was set 
 after a fashion of my own, a winter-garden under glass ; no 
 stages filled the centre. It was laid out with no stiff rule, 
 but here and there in urns of stone, or in pyramidal stands, 
 gorgeous or fragrant plants ran at their own wild will, while 
 over all the wall and along the woodwork of the roof trailed 
 passion-flowers, roses, honeysuckles, fragrant clematis, ivy, 
 and those tropic vines whose long dead names belie their 
 fervid luxuriance and fantastic growth ; great trees of lemon 
 and orange interspaced the vines in shallow niches of their 
 own, and the languid drooping tresses of a golden acacia 
 flung themselves over and across the deep glittering mass of 
 a broad-leaved myrtle. 
 
 " As I sat down on the chair, Pan reared his dusky length 
 from his mat and came for a recognition. It was wont to be 
 
196 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 something more positive than caresses ; but to-night neither 
 sweet biscuit nor savory bit of confectionery appeared in the 
 hand that welcomed him ; yet he was as loving as ever, and, 
 with a grim sense of protection, flung himself at my feet, 
 drew a long breath, and slept. I dared not yet think ; I 
 rested my head against the chair, and breathed in the odor of 
 flowers ; the delicate scent of tea-roses ; the southern per 
 fume, fiery and sweet, like Greek wine, of profuse heliotropes, 
 - a perfume that gives you thirst, and longing, and regret. 
 I turned my head towards the orange-trees ; southern, also, 
 but sensuous and tropic was the breath of those thick white 
 stars, a tasted odor. Not so the cool air that came to me 
 from a diamond-shaped bed of Parma violets, kept back fro 
 long from bloom that I might have a succession of them ; 
 these were the last, and their perfume told it, for it was at 
 once a caress and a sigh. I breathed the gale of sweetness 
 till every nerve rested and every pulse was tranquil as the aif 
 without. 
 
 " I heard a little stir. I looked up. A stately calla, that 
 reared one marble cup from its gracious, cool leaves, was 
 bending earthward with a slow and voluntary motion ; from 
 the cup glided a fair woman s shape ; snowy, sandalled 
 feet shone from under the long robe ; hair of crisped 
 gold crowned the Greek features. It was Hypatia. A 
 little shiver crept through a white tea-rose beside the calla ; 
 its delicate leaves fluttered to the ground ; a slight figure, 
 a sweet sad face with melancholy blue eyes and fair brown 
 hair, parted the petals. La Valliere ! She gazed in my 
 eyes. 
 
 " Poor little child ! said she. f Have you a treatise 
 against love, Hypatia? 
 
 "The Greek of Egypt smiled and looked at me also. M 
 have discovered that the steps of the gods are upon wool, 
 answered she ; if love had a beginnning to sight should not 
 we also foresee its end? 
 
 ff And when one foresees the end, one dies, murmured La 
 Valliere. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 197 
 
 " Bah ! exclaimed Marguerite of Valois, from the heart of 
 a rose-red camellia; not at all, my dear; one gets a new 
 lover ! 
 
 " Or the new lover gets you, said a dulcet tone, tipped 
 with satire, from the red lips of Mary of Scotland, lips 
 that were just now the petals of a crimson carnation. 
 
 "Philosophy hath a less troubled sea whereon to ride than 
 the stormy fluctuance of mortal passion ; Plato is diviner than 
 Ovid, said a Puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was 
 fashioned of the white camellia-blooms behind rny chair, and 
 circled the prim beauty of Lady Jane Grey. 
 
 " Are you a woman, or one of the Sphinx s children? 
 said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild 
 purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually 
 shaped itself into gorgeous oriental robes, rolled in waves of 
 splendor from the lithe waist and slender arms of a dark 
 woman, no more young, sallow, thin, but more graceful 
 than any bending bough of the desert acacia, and with eyes 
 like midnight, deep, glowing, flashing, melting into dew, as 
 she looked at the sedate lady of England. 
 
 " You do not know love! resumed she. It is one 
 draught, a jewel fused in nectar ; drink the pearl and 
 bring the asp ! 
 
 " Her words brought beauty ; the sallow face burned with 
 living scarlet on lip and cheek ; the tiny pearl-grains of teeth 
 flashed across the swarth shade above her curving, passionate 
 mouth ; the wide nostril expanded ; the great eyes flamed 
 under her low brow and glittering coils of black hair. 
 
 " Poor Octavia ! whispered La Valliere. Lady Jane Grey 
 took up her breviary, and read. 
 
 " After all, you died ! said Hypatia. 
 
 " I lived ! retorted Cleopatra. 
 
 " Lived and loved, said a dreamy tone from the hundred 
 leaves of a spotless La Marque rose ; and the steady unhast- 
 ing, unresting soul of Thekla looked out from that centreless 
 flower, in true German guise of brown, braided tresses, deep 
 blue eyes like forget-me-nots, sedate lips, and a straight nose. 
 
198 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 " I have lived, and loved, and cut bread and butter, 
 solemnly pronounced a mountain-daisy, assuming the broad 
 features of a fraulein. 
 
 " Cleopatra used an Egyptian oath. Lady Jane Grey put 
 down her breviary and took up Plato. Marguerite of Valois 
 laughed outright. Hypatia put a green leaf over Charlotte, 
 with the air of a high-priestess, and extinguished her. 
 Who does not love cannot lose, mused La Valliore. 
 Who does not love neither has nor gains, said Hypatia. 
 The dilemma hath two sides, and both gain and loss are pro 
 blematic. It is the ideal of love that enthralls us, not the real. 
 
 :f Hush, you white-faced Greek ! It was not an ideal ; it 
 was Marc Antony. By Isis ! does a dream fight and swear 
 and kiss? 
 
 The Navarrese did ; and France dreamed he was my 
 master, not I ! laughed Marguerite. 
 
 This is most weak stuff for goodly and noble women to 
 foster, grimly uttered a flame-colored hawk s-bill tulip, that 
 directly assumed a ruff and an aquiline nose. 
 
 " Mary of Scotland passed her hand about her fair throat. 
 Where is Leicester s ring? said she. 
 
 The Queen did not hear, but went on. Truly, you 
 make as if it was the intent of women to be trodden under 
 foot of men. She that ruleth herself shall rule both princes 
 and nobles, I wot. Yet I had done well to marry. Love 
 or no love, I would the House of Hanover had waged war 
 with one of mine own blood ; I hate those fair, fat Guelphs ! 
 
 " Love hath sometimes the thorn alone, the rose being 
 blasted in bud, uttered a sweet and sonorous voice, with a 
 little nasal accent, out of the myrtle-boughs that starred with 
 bloom her hair, and swept the hem of her green dress. 
 
 " Sweet soul, was thou not, then, sated upon sonnets? 
 said Mary of Scotland, in a stage aside. 
 
 " Do not the laurels overgrow tho thorn? said La 
 Valliere, with a wistful, inquiring smile. 
 
 " Laura looked away. They are very green at Avignon, 
 said she. 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 199 
 
 " Out of two primroses, side by side, Stella and Vanessa 
 put forth pale and anxious faces, with eyes tear-dimmed. 
 
 " Love does not feed on laurels, said Stella ; they are 
 fruitless. 
 
 " That the clergy should be celibate is mine own desire, 1 
 broke in Queen Elizabeth. Shall every curly fool s pate of 
 a girl be turning after an anointed bishop? I will have this 
 thing ended, certes ! and that with speed. 
 
 r Vanessa was too deep in a brown study to hear. Pres 
 ently she spoke. f I believe that love is best founded on a 
 degree of respect and veneration, which it is decent in youth 
 to render unto age and learning. 
 
 del! muttered Marguerite. Is it, then, that in this 
 miserable England one cherishes a grand passion for one s 
 grandfather ? 
 
 " The heliotrope clusters melted into a face of plastic con 
 tour, rich, full lips, soft, interfused outlines, intense, purple 
 eyes, and heavy, waving hair, dark indeed, but harmonizing 
 curiously with the narrow gold fillet that bound it. It is no 
 pain to die for love, said the low, deep voice with an echo 
 of rolling gerunds in the tone. 
 
 That depends on how sharp the dagger is, returned 
 Mary of Scotland. If the axe had been dull 
 
 " From the heart of a red rose Juliet looked out ; the 
 golden centre crowned her head with yellow tresses ; her 
 tender hazel eyes were calm with intact passion ; her mouth 
 was scarlet with fresh kisses, and full of consciousness and 
 repose. Harder it is to live for love, said she ; hardest of 
 all to have ever lived without it. 
 
 How much do you all help the matter? said a practical 
 Yankee voice from a pink hollyhock. * If the infinite rela 
 tions of life assert themselves in marriage, and the infinite 
 "I" merges its individuality in the personality of another, the 
 superincumbent need of a passional relation passes without 
 question. What the soul of the seeker asks for itself and the 
 universe is, whether the ultimate principle of existent life is 
 passional or philosophic? 
 13 
 
200 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 " Your dialectic is wanting in purity of expression, 
 calmly said Hypatia ; the tongue of Olympus suits gods and 
 their ministers only. 
 
 " Plato hath ho question of the matter in hand, observed 
 Lady Jane Grey, with a tone of finishing the subject. 
 
 " I know nothing of your questions and philosophies, 
 scornfully stormed Cleopatra. Fire seeks fire, and clay 
 clay. Isis send me Antony, and every philosopher in 
 Alexandria may go drown in the Nile ! Shall I blind my 
 eyes with scrolls of papyrus when there is a goodly Roman 
 to be looked upon? 
 
 " From the deep blue petals of a double English violet 
 came a delicate face, pale, serene, sad, but exceeding ten 
 der. Love liveth when the lover dies, said Lady Rachel 
 Russell. I have well loved my lord in the prison; shall 
 I cease to affect him when he is become one of the court 
 above ? 
 
 " You are cautious of speech, Mesdames, carelessly spoke 
 Marguerite. Women are the fools of men ; you all know it. 
 Every one of you has carried cap and bell. 
 
 " They all turned towards the hawk s-bill tulip ; it was not 
 there. 
 
 " Gone to Ken il worth, demurely sneered Mary of Scot 
 land. 
 
 "A pond-lily, floating in a tiny tank, opened its clasped 
 petals ; and with one bare pearly foot upon the green island 
 of leaves, and the other touching the edge of the marble 
 basin, clothed with a rippling, lustrous, golden garment of 
 hair, that rolled down in glittering masses to her slight 
 ankles, and half hid the wide, innocent blue eyes and infantile, 
 smiling lips, Eve said, I was made for Adam, and slipped 
 silently again into the closing flower. 
 
 " But we have changed all that! answered Marguerite, 
 tossing her jewel-clasped curls. 
 
 " They whom the saints call upon to do battle for king 
 and country have their nature after the manner of their 
 deeds, came a clear voice from the fleur-de-lis that clothed 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 201 
 
 itself in armor, and flashed from under a helmet the keen 
 dark eyes and firm beardless lips of a woman. 
 
 " There have been cloistered nuns, timidly breathed La 
 VallicM-e. 
 
 " There is a monk s hood in that parterre without, said 
 Marguerite. 
 
 " The white clematis shivered. It was a veiled shape in 
 long robes that hid face and figure, who clung to the wall 
 and whispered Paraclete I 
 
 " There are talcs of saints in my breviary, soliloquized 
 Mary of Scotland ; and in the streaming moonlight, as she 
 spoke, a faint outline gathered, lips and eyes of solemn peace, 
 a crown of blood-red roses pressing thorns into the wan tem 
 ples that dripped sanguine streams, and in the halo above the 
 wreath, a legend partially obscured, that ran, * Utque talix 
 fiosa nulli alteri plantce adhcereret. 
 
 " But the girl there is no saint; I think, rather, she is of 
 mine own land, said a purple passion-flower that hid itself 
 under a black mantilla, and glowed with dark beauty. The 
 Spanish face bent over me with ardent eyes and lips of sym 
 pathetic passion, and murmured, Do not fear ! Pedro was 
 faithful unto and after death ; there are some men 
 
 " Pan growled. I rubbed my eyes. Where was I?" . . . 
 
 The oftener I read this story, in which history, poetry, the 
 dramatic, and the natural, blend so many charms, the more 
 irresistible I find its spell, and sometimes I hesitate to ac 
 knowledge that, in its own vein, the passage I have quoted 
 has its superior. To me Rose Terry Cooke is the queen of 
 all living story-tellers ; in the power of wringing tears and 
 forcing laughter I do not know her superior, and Ludvig 
 Ticek and Edgar Poe are alone her equals. 
 
 The writing of stories and poems has been, after all, but 
 an outside matter with her, a sort of ring of Saturn. The real 
 business of her life has gone on within its circle, a life largely 
 given to others, crowded with domestic interests and occupa 
 tions, in which she has proved, to quote a couplet of her own, 
 that 
 
202 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 "Daily, hourly, loving and giving 
 In the poorest life makes heavenly living ; " 
 
 a life little of which belongs to the public, and whose tenor 
 until her marriage was varied only by a journey to Can- 
 nda, or the West, or the White Mountains, by the publi 
 cation of her " Poems," and a marvellously sweet and simple 
 book for Sunday-school children called " Happy Dodd," and 
 later by a volume of collected stories, by no means her 
 best. 
 
 When Rose was about twenty-nine her idolized sister 
 Alice, younger than herself by nearly five years, married ; 
 and in the delicate state of this sister s health her two chil 
 dren became the care and delight of Rose. Much as these 
 children may owe to her, it is to them chiefly that Rose owes 
 her delicate and innermost sympathy with children, the know 
 ledge of their pretty patois, and of their needs and natures ; 
 and for years they made all the happiness she had. Great 
 griefs came to her, the death of her mother, the long illness 
 and death of her sister ; but the love of the children has 
 remained a precious possession. 
 
 It would be no brief or light thing to tell the story of all 
 that Rose Terry Cooke is in a home, among the poor, in the 
 life of a neighborhood, or beside a sick-bed. Her sister used 
 to say that she thought of everything like a woman and did 
 everything like a man. There was never any limit to her 
 self-devotion, and there is none to-day ; she is a prodigal of 
 her time, her work, her thought, her money, and herself. 
 Hardly less is to be expected of so generous and enthusiastic 
 a spirit ; for enthusiasm is itself a self-forgetting. 
 
 I recall an instance of this enthusiasm, when she Was a 
 good deal younger than she is now. She happened to attend 
 Plymouth Church one morning when the pastor brought upon 
 the platform a little colored child who was to be returned to 
 slavery unless a certain sum of money could be paid for her 
 at once, Mr. Beecher undertaking to raise that money in his 
 church and set the child free. As he told the story of her 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 203 
 
 little life and wrongs, in his inimitable manner, every heart 
 was harrowed, none more so than that of Rose, who was half 
 wild with excitement, wrought to a fever of pity and horror ; 
 and every purse flew open, and Rose had no purse about her. 
 But on her hand, a white and tiny hand, was a ring she valued, 
 a ring with a single fine opal in its setting, if it had been 
 the Orloff diamond it would have made no difference, it was 
 all she had when the box came round, and she took it off and 
 dropped it in. It chanced that the ring exactly fitted one of 
 the fingers of the little brown hand, and Mr. Beecher gave it 
 to the child in token of her freedom and her friends, as the 
 money raised was amply sufficient to purchase her safety ; 
 and presently advertising for information concerning the 
 giver of the ring, he christened the child into the new life 
 with the name of Rose. If the reader should ever see a 
 painting by Eastman Johnson, called the " Freedom Ring," 
 where a child sits on a tiger-skin and looks curiously and 
 gladly at a jewel on her hand, it is this incident which it 
 commemorates. 
 
 It is such hearty consonance and accord, such quick re 
 sponse, aided perhaps by the pungent wit which is born of 
 common sense at its highest development, that makes Rose 
 Terry constantly the recipient of all manner of sympathetic 
 confidences, both from people whom she knows and those whom 
 she never met before, but who seek her, certain of receiving 
 comfort, and repose in her the sad and sacred secrets of their 
 lives. - People, too, turn up, thinking that this or that passage 
 of her writing is about themselves, so true a chord does she 
 strike with her touch that knows the sore spots of the human 
 heart. 
 
 Possibly no odder experience ever befell any one than she 
 has encountered in the simulation and personation of herself 
 by various individuals for reasons best known to themselves. 
 The first of these appeared in a Pennsylvania town, in the 
 shape of a woman who claimed there that she had written 
 everything ever published under Rose Terry s name, that the 
 name was a nom de plume any way, the name of a little cousin 
 
204 KOSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 of hers who died young, her uncle, the child s father, allow 
 ing her to use it. 
 
 This interesting person aroused a wild religious excitement 
 among the young people of the place, fell into hysteric 
 trances on hearing sacred music, and made herself generally 
 adored and followed. As irritating a fact as any in the mat 
 ter may have been her statement that she had received eighty 
 thousand dollars from these writings of hers, and had used it 
 all in educating poor girls ! After a time Mrs. Stowe re 
 ceived a note from the lady with whom this pretender 
 boarded, which ran, 
 
 "DEAR MADAM, I call upon you to silence the base reports 
 spread about here concerning a lovely Christian woman at pres 
 ent staying with me. A line from you, stating that she is the 
 author of the works written under the signature of Rose Terry, 
 will stop the rumors at once, and much oblige yours truly." 
 
 Mrs. Stowe immediately responded that she had known 
 Rose Terry from her birth, and that she was then, and had 
 been for many years, living in Hartford, and the other person 
 was necessarily an impostor. 
 
 Years afterward this gay deceiver came to Rose s native 
 place, established herself there as one of the leaders in re 
 ligious and charitable matters, told some one that she had 
 written much under Rose s name, told some one else that she 
 had eighteen hundred dollars a year from the "Atlantic 
 Monthly," and marked several of the best poems in a religious 
 collection as her own, the publisher positively denying her 
 statement when asked about it. This peculiar individual still 
 holds a trusted position in a city charity, and lives in a 
 wealthy family as guide, philosopher, and friend, although 
 the truth has been told to her clientele, who persist in regard 
 ing her as a persecuted saint. 
 
 The next counterfeit of her identity was in the person of a 
 lady on a railroad train, who made acquaintance with the 
 sister of a friend of Rose s, the sister never happening to have 
 seen Rose ; she informed her that she was Rose Terry, that she 
 
ROSE TERRY COOKE. 205 
 
 was going abroad to write a book, and various other items of 
 her literary affairs, of which Rose herself is never in the habit 
 of speaking to casual acquaintances, having, as she says, an 
 old-fashioned predilection for thcpassee grace of modesty. 
 
 Number three of these replicas was not so bad as might be, 
 as she simply offered her services in a New York Sunday 
 school, and having registered this name of her fancy, never 
 appeared. 
 
 Number four, however, very soon replaced her, making 
 her avatar, at a hotel in New York and confiding the fact of 
 the authorship of certain sentimental, romantic, and humorous 
 stories and verses to a Southern lady who presently betrayed 
 her. 
 
 But number five carried things to a pretty pass ; meeting 
 an acquaintance of Rose s in the cars on the way from Hart 
 ford, she naturally enough inquired if she lived there, and then 
 if she knew Rose, and thereat proceeded to give quite a cir 
 cumstantial account of her own intimacy with the object of 
 her remark. On reaching New York, she left the train at the 
 upper station, and the pocketbook of Rose s Hartford ac 
 quaintance left with her. 
 
 As curious as anything done in the counterfeiting way by 
 these worthies is the fact that it was Rose whom they dared to 
 make the subject of their deceits and lies, for in the fires of 
 her indignant scorn and anger a lie is something that should 
 
 O o O 
 
 shrivel, it could not live in her presence. Honest herself, 
 with an unflinching integrity, she has small mercy on mean 
 nesses and falsehood, although, tender-hearted to a fault, 
 she is full of forgiveness for the repentant. 
 
 Rose is one of the most emotional of people. Music flatters 
 her to tears, as it did the "aged man and poor" of St. Agnes 
 Eve ; she loses herself, like a child, at the play ; and she 
 outstrips justice in the generosity of her judgments on her 
 literary contemporaries, some of whom owe her a debt of 
 inspiration not to be repaid. She is an easy and rapid writer, 
 a child of nature, owing little to art, writing on her knee and 
 seldom copying, in a compact and regular script that tells of 
 
206 ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 an even pulse ; submitting to interruption, and never shutting 
 herself up from her household duties for the sake of her pen. 
 She is an amazing mimic, a delightful talker, having an im 
 mense memory with stores of learning, and being the wittiest 
 woman I have ever met ; alive to the tips of her fingers, she 
 takes the keenest interest in everything and everybody about 
 her. Tall and shapely, dressing richly, she is still very 
 attractive in person ; in her youth, with her Spanish color, her 
 great soft dark eyes, her thick and long black hair, and the 
 sweetness and vivacity of her expression, she is said to have 
 been singularly beautiful. I have a picture of her, taken as 
 a Quakeress, the relic of some fancy fair where all were in 
 costume, that is lovely enough for a Madonna. 
 
 On the 16th of April, 1873, a great change came into 
 Rose Terry s life, a change that lifted its daily round into the 
 ideal. She became then the wife of Mr. Rollin II. Cooke, an 
 iron manufacturer of Litchfield County, Connecticut ; and 
 she went to live with him, after the death of her father, at 
 Winsted, a little mountain town full of gorges and boulders, 
 and forest trees, the tumbling foam of brooks and the whir 
 ring wheels of manufactures, which she has described in a 
 number of " Harper s Monthly," and where she occupies a 
 large old-fashioned house, once a colonial mansion, standing 
 under the shadow of great trees, with a rocky ledge in front 
 lifting its black edge against the sunset. Her life has been 
 ideal ; for there is an entire sympathy of taste, and feeling, 
 and opinion, and enjoyment between the husband and wife ; 
 they are completely complementary to each other ; and a 
 more intimate union could hardly be imagined ; a union at 
 which all who know them, who love and honor them, who 
 realize the tenderness of her nature and the nobility of his, 
 rejoice with a full heart, and which has given them ten years 
 of almost perfect happiness. Out of this late happiness, with 
 life, and strength, and health, what lovelier work than ever 
 before may yet blossom from Rose Terry Cooke s hands ! 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAJST. 
 
 BY LILIAN WHITING. 
 
 Charlotte Cushman s Childhood Her Remarkable Imitative Faculty First 
 Appearance on the Stage A Scanty Stage Wardrobe A Friend in Need 
 
 An Amusing Experience The Struggle for Fame Macready s 
 Sympathy and Influence First Visit to Europe "Waiting in the 
 Shadow" Debut in London A Brilliant Triumph Her Ability 
 Recognized at Last in her Native Land Glimpse of her Life in Rome 
 Unfaltering Patriotism Her Munificent Gift to the Sanitary Commission 
 
 The Culmination of her Power A Notable Dramatic Triumph Her 
 Farewell to the Stage Address of William Cullen Bryant Miss Cush 
 man s Response Her Illness, Death, and Last Resting-Place. 
 
 After my death I wish no other herald, 
 No other speaker of my living actions, 
 To keep mine honor from corruption 
 Than such an honest chronicler as Griffith. 
 
 Queen Katherine. 
 
 N attempting any interpretation of the artist, it is 
 in the inner life that we must seek the clue. 
 Thoughts are his events, and creations are his 
 only real achievements. Genius controls its 
 possessor, and life becomes a journey under 
 sealed orders, advancing less by development 
 than by crises of surprises and revelations. 
 The proverbial unrest of genius is the result of 
 this law. 
 
 That divine fruition of creative power which we call Art 
 is the result of intricate elements. Into its forces enter in 
 herited instincts, the rude powers of material necessity, and 
 those invisible but potent tides of spiritual life. Yet back 
 of these, and defying all analysis, is always the elusive force, 
 the element of the unknown. In studying the life of Miss 
 Gush man, this great fact of the elusive force that defies 
 analysis emphasizes itself to us. In vain we seek its source 
 in her parentage or in the external circumstances of her life. 
 
 207 
 
208 CHARLOTTE CUSIIMAN. 
 
 Charlotte Saunders Cushman was born in Richmond street, 
 in Boston, July 23, 18IG. She died at the Parker House, 
 in Boston, February 18, 1876, in the nation s centennial year. 
 In the sixty years between these dates a wonderful life was 
 lived. A girl born into humble and primitive conditions 
 goes forth and conquers a world. 
 
 She was the daughter of Elkanah and Mary Eliza (Babbit) 
 Cushman. Her father was born in Plymouth. Left an 
 orphan at the age of thirteen, he walked to Boston in search 
 of employment and began the conscious struggle of life. He 
 established himself in business as a merchant on Long Wharf, 
 but when Charlotte was thirteen years of age he met with 
 such reverses as impelled her, child as she was, to consider 
 how she could rely on herself. Hereditary instincts were 
 strong forces within her. For generations back, on the part 
 of both parents, her ancestors had been exceptional for in 
 dustry, energy, and piety. 
 
 It is believed that Robert Cushman, the founder of the 
 family in America, born about 1580, preached the first ser 
 mon in New England, and it was he to whom Governor Brad 
 ford alludes as "the right hand of the Adventurers, who for 
 divers years has managed all our business with them to our 
 great advantage." Elkanah Cushman, the father of Char 
 lotte, was the seventh generation in descent from Robert 
 Cushman, and the fifth bearing the name of Elkanah. The 
 Babbit family, too, were honorably known. The maternal 
 grandfather and great-grandfather of Charlotte Cushman were 
 graduates of Harvard University. Her grandmother Babbit 
 (born Mary Saunders) was gifted with a remarkable degree 
 of the imitative faculty, and this gift Charlotte inherited to an 
 extent that made her, as a child, un enfant terrible, and 
 which in later years imparted an added vitality to her dra 
 matic power. 
 
 Of her childhood Miss Cushman herself said : " Imitation 
 was a prevailing trait with me. On one occasion, when 
 Henry Ware, pastor of the old Boston Meeting-House, was 
 taking tea with my mother, he sat at table talking, with his 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 211 
 
 chin resting in his two hands, and his elbows on the table. I 
 was suddenly startled by my mother exclaiming, f Charlotte, 
 take your elbows off the table and } r our chin out of your 
 hands ; it is not a pretty position for a young lady ! I was 
 sitting in exact imitation of the parson, even assuming the 
 expression of his face." 
 
 In early youth Charlotte s special gift appeared to be 
 music. She received in it careful cultivation. She sang in 
 church choirs, and a few years later, about 1834-35, when 
 Mrs. Wood came first to sing in Boston, and inquiries being 
 made for a contralto singer to support her, Miss Cushman was 
 recommended. The result of a trial was satisfactory, and 
 both Mr. and Mrs. Wood assured her that she had a fortune 
 in her voice if properly cultivated for the lyric stage. She 
 became a pupil of James G. Maeder, and under his instruc 
 tion made her tirst appearance in the role of Countess Alma- 
 viva, in the " Marriage of Figaro," at the Tremont Theatre. 
 Following this she went to New Orleans and sang, when, 
 almost without warning, her voice failed. This marked the 
 second of those distinct crises which one traces in studying 
 critically the life of this remarkable woman, and which sug 
 gest the changes to which Emerson refers as those that break 
 up the currents of life, but which are advertisements of a 
 nature where law is growth. 
 
 To Charlotte Cushman each of these successive crises of 
 life came as the stepping-stone to larger experiences, till of 
 them she might well have said : 
 
 Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul ! 
 
 As the swift seasons roll ; 
 
 Leave thy low vaulted past, 
 
 Let each new temple, statelier than the last, 
 
 Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
 
 Till thou at length art free, 
 
 Leaving thine outgrown cell by life s unresting sea. 
 
 But it was reserved for the insight that results from 
 experience to enter into the profound truth of these lines. 
 
212 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 The girl s eagerness and tremulous anticipation had not then 
 deepened to the woman s endurance and the conviction of 
 personal power. She was left stranded as it were by a 
 seeming misfortune, which is often only fortune in disguise. 
 So it proved to Charlotte Cushman. Her dramatic ten 
 dencies and latent possibilities had revealed themselves to 
 others, and she was asked to essay the r6h of Lady Mac 
 beth to the Macbeth of Mr. Caldvvell in the principal theatre 
 of New Orleans. With characteristic inspiration she seized 
 the opportunity. "So enraptured was I with the idea of 
 acting this part, and so fearful of anything preventing mo," 
 she wrote of it later, "that I did not tell the manager I had 
 no dresses until it was too late for me to be prevented from 
 acting it ; and the day before the performance after rehearsal 
 I told him. He immediately sat down and wrote a note of 
 introduction for me to the tragedienne of the French Theatre. 
 This note was to ask her to help me to costumes for the 
 role of Lady Macbeth. I was a tall, thin, lanky girl at that 
 time, about five feet six inches in height. The French 
 woman, Madame Closel, was a short, fat person of not more 
 than four feet ten inches, her waist full twice the size of 
 mine, with a very large bust; but her shape did not prevent 
 her being a very great actress. The ludicrousnoss of her 
 clothes being made to fit me struck her at once. She roared 
 with laughter; but she was very good-natured, and by dint 
 of piecing out the skirt of one dress it was made to answer 
 for an underskirt, and another dress was taken in in every 
 direction to do duty as an overdress, and so make up the 
 costume. And thus I essayed for the first time the part of 
 Lady Macbeth, fortunately to the satisfaction of the audience, 
 the manager, and all the members of the company." 
 
 Here Charlotte Cushman struck the keynote of her life, 
 and although it was appointed for her to sound the whole 
 scale of difficulty, and denial, and defeat; of aspiration, 
 and triumph, and inspiration, yet here as an untried girl she 
 touched the supreme possibilities of her artistic life. From 
 it her path was to lead away in many labyrinthine turnings 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 213 
 
 till she might well have questioned whether she would ever 
 come to her own. Unseen faces were to break up all the old 
 relations of her life, to force her out under new skies and to 
 experiences prefigured in her dreams and awaiting her in 
 actual guise. 
 
 At the close of the New Orleans season she embarked in a 
 sailing-vessel for New York. Mr. Simpson, manager of the 
 Park Theatre, offered her a trial, but in a part that seemed 
 to her, coming fresh from her New Orleans triumph in Lady 
 Macbeth, too insignificant. Finally she accepted an offer 
 from the Bowery Theatre, where she entered into a three 
 years engagement at a salary of twenty-five dollars per 
 week, to increase ten dollars a week each year. She was to 
 appear in Lady Macbeth, Jane Shore, Mrs. Haller, and 
 other characters. She had no wardrobe, and this the man 
 ager offered to procure, deducting five dollars per week from 
 her salary to meet the expenses. Miss Cushman at once 
 induced her mother to leave the boarding-house she was 
 keeping in Boston, and join her with two of her brothers in 
 New York. For her elder brother she procured a situation 
 in a store, putting the younger at school. So the little 
 household in New York was established and supposed to be 
 on a firm foundation for three years. 
 
 The week before her engagement at the theatre was to begin 
 she was seized with rheumatic fever ; recovering after three 
 weeks, she went upon the stage, and at the end of that week 
 the theatre was burned, with all her wardrobe, all her debt on 
 it, and her three years contract ending, she said, in smoke. 
 
 Then followed a brief engagement at Albany, which was a 
 triumphant success, and where, as Miss Cushman laughingly 
 narrated, more members of both houses of the General 
 Assembly could be found at her benefit than at the Capitol. 
 
 Following this came an engagement at the Park Theatre in 
 New York, in some minor position, at a salary of twenty 
 dollars per week ; a period of some three or four years 
 from the time she was twenty-one to twenty-four or five 
 of ceaseless study, activity, and nebulous projects. Macready 
 
214 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 came and she supported him. " Even with this great and 
 cultivated artist," wrote an English critic who saw her at this 
 time, "she held her own. She had not his experience, but 
 she had genius. There were times when she more than 
 rivalled him ; when in truth she made him play second." 
 
 In the winter of 1842, a young woman of twenty-six years 
 of age, she undertook the sublime audacity of managing the 
 Walnut Street Theatre of Philadelphia. Her company in 
 cluded Messrs. Chippendale, Fredericks, and Whcatleigh, 
 Alexina Fisher, the Misses Vallee, one of whom was after 
 wards the Avife of Ben DeBar, her sister Susan Cushman, and 
 others ; she served herself as leading lady, acting her large 
 repertoire. 
 
 Time passed on, and in October, 1844, Miss Cushman 
 sailed for England. Her finances ran low ; a benefit per 
 formance given in her native Boston met little response. 
 The cultured Hub has small faith in the possibility of entertain 
 ing angels unawares. It insists on visible winjrs, and full 
 
 O U O * 
 
 credentials, after which it cannot be surpassed in polite 
 courtesy. The city in which Hawthorne sat neglected, and 
 wrote sadly of himself "as the most obscure man of letters of 
 the day," permitted this young woman, whose brilliant 
 genius was destined to honor above all others her native city, 
 to go out from it with a benefit attended by an audience de 
 scribed by the press of that day as " ungenerously small and 
 largely made up of foreigners." However, this did not 
 matter. That Boston failed to discern the genius of Haw 
 thorne or of Charlotte Cushman in its early manifestations 
 was not, on the whole, to be regretted. " The man is not 
 Avorth much," says the brilliant Autocrat, "who cannot treat 
 himself to an interval of modesty." Genius will cut its own 
 channels, whether the world deride or applaud. When 
 Jupiter divided the goods of the world the poet was absent, 
 lost in a day-dream. Returning, he reproached the god for 
 saving none for him. "True, there is nothing left to give 
 you," replied Jupiter, " but my heaven is always open to 
 you." The legend is vital with truth. Heaven is always 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSIIMAN. 215 
 
 open to the artist, and if the world albeit Beacon street 
 prove inhospitable, he has his resources and his inspirations. 
 Charlotte Cushman found hers. Under new skies a new life 
 beo-an. Yet with what a combination of fainting heart and 
 
 O 
 
 tenacity of purpose she went forth words are powerless to 
 picture. 
 
 The Avinter she passed in Albany was made memorable by 
 the anticipations of all that constitutes a woman s fairest and 
 holiest life. For the first and last $\me love came to her; 
 yet, while she " dreamed and thought life was beaut} ," came 
 the rude awakening to find that for her "life was duty." 
 Turning from the clasp of arms strong and tender and sustain 
 ing, she found herself alone, with only the wreck of a 
 vanished happiness, and the memory of "the tender grace of a 
 day" that was forever dead. It is idle to repent the story in 
 detail. It was all over so long ago. Of it Charlotte Cush 
 man herself wrote, 
 
 " There was a time in my life of girlhood when I thought 
 I had been called upon to bear the very hardest thing that can 
 come to a woman. Yet, if I had been spared this early trial, 
 I should never have been so earnest and faithful in my art ; 
 I should have still been casting about for the counterpart, 
 and not given my entire self to my work. God helped me in 
 my art-isolation, and rewarded me for recognizing Him and 
 helping mj self. . . . My art, God knows, has never failed 
 me, never failed to bring me rich reward, never failed to 
 bring me comfort. I conquered my grief and myself. 
 Labor saved me then and always, and so I proved the eternal 
 goodness of God." 
 
 The influence of Macready was doubtless a potent element 
 in Miss Cushman s resolve to put fortune to the test by going 
 abroad. "Come to England," he had said to her, "where 
 your talents will be appreciated at their true value." Yet it 
 was with an almost desperate resolve to win success, rather 
 than with any rose-colored anticipations of meeting it, that 
 Charlotte Cushman sailed on her voyage, which was the 
 threshold of that wonderful life awaiting her. Goethe s 
 
216 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 emphasis of the parting of the ways is one that every life, 
 which is at all distinctive in its aims or individual in its 
 method, repeats. The defined separation from the original 
 point of departure can be discerned. 
 
 In her diary on this voyage she copied from Longfellow s 
 " Hyperion," as if to reassure herself, the words : " Look not 
 mournfully into the past ; it comes not back again. Wisely 
 improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the future 
 without fear and with a manly heart." 
 
 And again she found courage and inspiration in the lines 
 from Browning s " Paracelsus " : 
 
 D 
 
 "What though 
 
 It be so? if indeed the strong desire 
 Eclipse the aim in me? if splendor break 
 Upon the outset of my path alone, 
 And duskest shade succeed ? What fairer seal 
 Shall I require to my authentic mission 
 Than this fierce energy? this instinct striving 
 Because its nature is to strive? enticed 
 By the security of no broad course, 
 With no success forever in its eyes ! 
 How know I else such glorious fate my own, 
 But in the restless, irresistible force 
 That works within me? Is it for human will 
 To institute such impulses still less 
 To disregard their promptings? What should I 
 Do, kept among you all ; your loves, your cares, 
 Your life, all to be mine ? Be sure that God 
 Ne er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart ! " 
 
 Miss Cushman arrived in England November 18, 1844. 
 Her first movement was a little excursion into Scotland with 
 an agreeable party of friends, and later, while waiting the 
 slow course of theatrical engagements, whose methods exhibit 
 as little rapidity as the mills of the gods, she dashed over to 
 Paris with characteristic energy, and for ten days put herself 
 en rapport with the French stage, which left on her a per 
 manent impression. Returning to England she found a 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 217 
 
 letter from Macready, with the proposition that she should 
 appear in a company with himself and Miss Faucit. This 
 proposal she rejected, as it would place her in an apparent 
 competition with Miss Faucit, who was at that time the 
 favorite of the English public, and she retired into hurnblo 
 lodgings in London to await her destiny. 
 
 The faithful maid, Sally Mercer, without a reference to 
 whom any sketch of Miss Cushman were incomplete, was 
 with her, and acted, as Miss Cushman herself said, as 
 her "right hand." It was a period of that waiting "in the 
 shadow " which so often precedes the most brilliant achieve 
 ment. She registered her determination at a high standard 
 and by inherent force compelled her own conditions. 
 
 Her first appearance in London was made at the Princess s 
 Theatre, in the rdle of Bianca in "Fazio." Of her debut 
 the London " Times " said : " The great characteristics of 
 Miss Cushman are her earnestness, her intensity, her quick 
 apprehension of readings, her power to dart from emotion 
 to emotion with the greatest rapidity, as if carried on the 
 impulse alone. . . . We need hardly to say that Miss Cush 
 man is likely to prove a great acquisition to the London 
 stage. For passion real, impetuous, irresistible passion 
 she has not at present her superior." 
 
 The next role in which she appeared was Rosalind, in "As 
 You Like It." The last line of this critique indicates that the 
 large inclusiveness of Miss Cushman s was the predetermining 
 element in her great success. Versatility is strength. The 
 force that goes to each effort becomes the force of all. 
 
 In the following March Miss Cushman thus writes to her 
 mother : " By the packet of the 10th I wrote you and sent 
 newspapers, which could tell you in so much better language 
 than I could of my brilliant and triumphant success in Lon 
 don. I can say no more to you than this: that it is far, 
 far beyond my most sanguine expectations. In, my most 
 ambitious moments I never dreamed of the- success which has 
 awaited me and crowned every effort I have- made. . . . To 
 you I should not hesitate to tell all my grief and all my: 
 14 
 
218 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 failure if it had not been such, for none could have felt more 
 with me and for me. Why, then, should I hesitate (unless 
 through a fear that I might seem egotistical) to tell you all 
 my triumphs, all my success? Suffice it, all my successes put 
 together since I have been upon the stage would not come near 
 my success in London ; and I only wanted some one of you 
 here to enjoy it with me, to make it complete. 
 
 "I have played Bianca four times, Emilia twice, Lady 
 Macbeth six times, Mrs. Holler live, and Rosalind five, in 
 five weeks. I am sitting to five artists." 
 
 In this winter of 1844-45 the life of Charlotte Cushman 
 flowered into bloom and fragrance. She was then in her 
 twenty-ninth year, a time when the girl s first flush of eager 
 ness had not faded, while it was still reinforced by the calm 
 poise of woman s strength. Friendships crowded her life with 
 beauty. The most distinguished literary and artistic people 
 of that day sought in her sympathy and society. Like 
 Margaret Fuller, like all great and gifted spirits, Charlotte 
 Cusliman had a capacity for friendship. Hers was a nature 
 large enough to include a wide range of sympathies. Earn 
 estness was the keynote to her spiritual scale. A prominent 
 dramatic critic said that the secret of her success on the stage 
 was that "she is in earnest in everything she undertakes." 
 
 The currents of social sympathy that set toward Charlotte 
 Cushman during her first London winter were indicated by 
 the verses that were written, the pictures that were painted, 
 in her honor, and from the inspiration of her life. Eliza 
 Cook celebrated in verse her friendship. The poet Rodgers 
 sought her out. Breakfasts and other entertainments were 
 given for her. 
 
 Her London success made success in the provinces a fore 
 gone conclusion ; indeed, it thus predetermined and prefigured 
 the success of her entire future. For when an individual 
 life has registered a certain degree of attainment it has 
 thereby gained an impulse that moves with accelerated im 
 petus to its final achievement. 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 219 
 
 In the following autumn Miss Cushman summoned her family 
 to London, where they took a furnished cottage at the suburb 
 of Bayswater, and where she and her sister Susan studied 
 together the rdles of w Romeo and Juliet," in which they 
 appeared at the Hay market Theatre, making their ddbut in 
 that play on the night of December 30, 1845. It would not 
 have been the natural choice of Charlotte Cushman to appear 
 in male character, but by enacting Romeo she could support 
 her sister as Juliet, and the rdle provided opportunities to 
 which she was fully equal. 
 
 A prolonged tour through the provinces followed, during 
 which the sisters played in all the prominent cities of Great 
 Britain, and during the succeeding summer Miss Cushman 
 visited Switzerland, where she was more enchanted than she 
 had dreamed of being, and from whence she returned to Lon 
 don with new inspirations, caught from the mountain heights. 
 Somewhere about this time Miss Jewsbury, who was Char 
 lotte Cushman s faithful friend, wrote to her, saying that 
 "you are not a machine, but a woman of genius," and insist 
 ing that she must not be discouraged if a reaction followed so 
 great an excitement. 
 
 It is wonderful how in all this unrest and nervous tension 
 of her professional struggle she kept herself up to a certain 
 level of serenity and repose. It is recorded that she " made 
 many friends of quiet domestic people," and she herself told 
 how she " tried always to keep her prow turned toward good." 
 To a young friend who had histrionic aspirations she wrote at 
 this time: "I should advise you to get to work. . . . You 
 must suffer, labor and wait before you will be able to grasp 
 the true and the beautiful. You dream of it now ; the in 
 tensity of life that is in you, the spirit of poetry which makes 
 itself heard by you in indistinct language, needs work to 
 relieve itself and be made clear." 
 
 With all Charlotte Cushman s capacity for friendship 
 and those words signify a great deal, this capacity for friend 
 ship she was, as every artist must be, severe in the sense 
 of selection. She was as discriminative as she was <renerous 
 
 o 
 
220 CHARLOTTE CUSIIMAN. 
 
 in response. While she would sacrifice personal ease and even 
 personal achievement for a life that needed it, and in which 
 this sacrifice would be as seed to take root and grow, she had 
 withal the delicate intuition of the artist nature ; its instinct 
 of preservation not to waste itself needlessly. 
 
 In 1845-46 Miss Cushman was associated with James Wai- 
 lack, whose influence was educative to her in her art. In the 
 summer of 1849 she returned to America, playing a brilliant 
 series of engagements throughout the country. The nightly 
 average of her receipts was greater than had been Macready s. 
 The woman who had gone out alone from her native country 
 five years before clinging to the faith that 
 
 "Be sure that God 
 Ne er dooms to waste the strength He deigns impart ! " 
 
 returned with recognized honor and with a permanent place 
 awarded her in histrionic art. 
 
 In October, 1852, Miss Cushman first visited the Eternal 
 City in company with Harriet Hosmer, who was then on her 
 way to study art in Rome, and with Grace Greenwood. Dur 
 ing this winter Page s portrait of her was painted, the pic 
 ture preserved at Villa Cushman at Newport. It is of this 
 portrait, painted when she was thirty-six years of age, that 
 Paul Akers said : " It is a face rendered impressive by the 
 grandest repose, a repose not to be mistaken for serenity, 
 but which is in equilibrium." 
 
 In January, 1856, she was in England and gave a dinner to 
 Mme. Ristori, whose first visit it was to London. For Ris- 
 tori s acting, as well as for Salvini s, Miss Cushman had the 
 greatest admiration. Throughout her life she preferred the 
 natural to the conventional school of acting ; yet the Thedtre 
 Frangais seems to have impressed her, as it did Miss Kate 
 Field, who, in her brilliant and glowing biography of Fech- 
 ter, describes her own feelings when, after having been from 
 childhood under the influence of the natural school of acting, 
 she first witnessed the French drama. Miss Cushman always 
 preferred Ristori to Rachel, perhaps somewhat from the Puri- 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 221 
 
 tan in her, which recognized a kindred nobility of character 
 in Ristori. 
 
 The winter of 1856-57 again found Miss Cushman in Rome, 
 and it was at this time that she first met Miss Emma Stebbins, 
 her friend and future biographer. This was a winter rich in 
 all that makes the fulness of life. A party of congenial 
 friends were with her. Her " evenings " were the occasions 
 of charming social reunions. Her musical gift was exercised 
 freely, and memories are yet vivid of her rich voice in " Wilt 
 Thou not Visit Me?" or the touching pathos with which she 
 rendered Kingsley s ballad of " The Sands o Dee." Gounod s 
 "There s a Green Hill Far Away "was among her favorite 
 musical selections. Of Miss Cushman s home in Rome, Miss 
 Stebbins says : " This home was a genuine one, and so grew 
 every year more and more in harmony with the true hospita 
 ble nature of its mistress. Its walls gradually became cov 
 ered with choice pictures and such sculpture as there was 
 space for ; but its chief beauty consisted in its antique carved 
 furniture, its abundance of books, and the patent fact that 
 every part and parcel of it was for daily use, and nothing for 
 mere show." 
 
 Among Miss Cushman s friends at this period was Miss Isa 
 Blagdon, who was also an intimate friend of the Brownings, 
 and to whose memory Florence erected a commemorative) 
 tablet after her death, in 1873. Miss Elizabeth Peabody 
 shared Miss Cushman s generous hospitality in Rome, and 
 chronicles the months as rich in enjoyment. " But even 
 amid the glories of Rome," says Miss Peabody, "there was 
 nothing that I studied with more interest and intensity than 
 Miss Cushman." 
 
 Of the morning talks at Miss Cushman s home, Elizabeth 
 Peabody writes : " Can you, or anybody with mortal pen, 
 describe so that readers could realize the high-toned, artistic, 
 grandly-moral, delightfully-human nature, that seemed to be 
 the palpable atmosphere of her spirit, quickening all who 
 surrendered themselves to her influence? What sincerity, 
 what appreciation of truth and welcome of it (even if it 
 
222 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 wounded her) ; what bounteousness of nature ; and how the 
 breath of her mouth winnowed the chaff from the wheat in 
 her expression of observed character and judgment of con 
 duct." 
 
 When the war of the rebellion came it affected Miss Cush- 
 man deeply. She was firm in her conviction, even in the 
 early days, that the war would never end until slavery was 
 abolished. Her patriotism was unfaltering all through those 
 years of a nation s agony. In June, 1863, she returned to 
 her native country, her chief reason being to act for the 
 sanitary fund. In the report of Henry W. Bellows, president 
 of the Sanitary Commission, the sum of $8,267.29 is credited 
 to Charlotte Cushman, and Mr. Bellows says: "It is due 
 to Miss Cushman to say that this extraordinary gift of money, 
 so magically evoked by her spell, is but the least part of 
 the service which ever since the war began she has rendered." 
 
 The outward events of Miss Cushman s life in the decade 
 of 1860 to 1870 were to an unusual degree a translation of 
 her inner experience : a materialization, as it were, of thought 
 and feeling. They were the years of the culmination of her 
 power as an artist, and of the finest fruition of her woman 
 hood. During the years 1865-56 she is again in Ror~e, and 
 writing home letters freighted with valuable literary expres 
 sions. Of Browning s " Saul" she says : "It is so very fine, 
 full of grandeur and meaning." Of Whittier she writes : 
 
 o o 
 
 " He is a true soul, with a pure poet s heart." Her letters to 
 Miss Fanny Seward are strong in expressions of her feeling 
 for America. 
 
 The latter years of her life developed her talent for 
 dramatic reading. It is said she liked better to read " Mac 
 beth " than to act it. In her wide repertoire she had included 
 the male parts of Romeo, Hamlet, and Cardinal Wolsey. 
 In Hamlet she had an intuitive perception of the poetic power 
 of the character, and entered into its ps}*chological mystery 
 by a power of spiritual insight, of fine divination, that has 
 been almost unprecedented in the history of the stage. Her 
 Cardinal Wolsey was a magnificent triumph. In complete 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 223 
 
 contrast to these rdles were her Rosalind, Beatrice, Juliana, 
 and Lady Gay Spanker. The three greatest rdles of her 
 dramatic life were, without doubt, her Lady Macbeth, her 
 Meg Merriles, and her Queen Katherine. "As Meg Mer- 
 riles" said William Winter, " she obeyed the law of her own 
 nature ; as Queen Katherine, she obeyed the law of the poetic 
 ideal that encompassed her. Her best achievements in the 
 illustration of Shakspeare were accordingly of the highest 
 order of art. They were at once human and poetic. They 
 were white marble suffused with fire." 
 
 Contemporary dramatic criticism is always valuable, and 
 preserves, as by a picture, the art of the actor. An engage 
 ment in Chicago was made pleasantly memorable to Miss 
 Cushman by the presentation of a ring in black enamel, on 
 which, in gold letters, was the inscription, "Kind words. 
 McVicker s Theatre, Jan. 11, 1873." 
 
 The last engagement at Booth s Theatre in New York was 
 one of the most brilliant of her life. It was here that she 
 took her final leave of the metropolitan stage in the play of 
 " Macbeth," on a night whose performance has passed into 
 history as one of the most notable dramatic triumphs in 
 America. It was the evening of November 7, 1875. 
 
 Both Mrs. Siddons and Macready had taken leave of the 
 stage in this tragedy. It was fitting that it should also be 
 the farewell play of Charlotte Cushman. 
 
 The scene that night was one of marvellous grandeur. The 
 house was made up of people distinguished in literature, art, 
 and social life. It is thus described by Mr. Winter : 
 
 " The house was brilliantly illuminated, and it was deco 
 rated with a taste at once profuse and delicate. A tricolor, 
 spangled with golden stars, was twined about the proscenium 
 columns, and hung in festoons along the fronts of the gal 
 leries. The chandeliers were garlanded with autumn leaves, 
 and with leaves and fruit of the vine, symbolical of the 
 maturity of that genius and the ripeness of that fame in which 
 Miss Cushman retires from the theatre. Banners displaying 
 the arms of the States were arranged along the upper tier. 
 
224 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 The flag of the Republic formed an arch over the central 
 entrance, and flung its cheerful and hopeful folds over the 
 proscenium boxes. In one of these boxes, inscribed in 
 golden letters with the name of the Arcadian Club, which 
 society prompted this demonstration, and has carried it for 
 ward to signal and honorable success, sat the poet Bryant, 
 the poet Stoddard, Peter Cooper, and other distinguished 
 guests of the club. In the opposite proscenium box, in 
 scribed with the name of the Army and Navy Club, sat 
 Major-General Hancock, Mr. Tilden, and other dignitaries of 
 peace and of war. Perfumes, from great silver braziers upon 
 the stage, made the air fragrant, and the dreamy music of 
 the dear old Scotch melodies turned it into poetry and 
 attuned every heart to sympathy with the spirit of the time. 
 
 " It was about eleven o clock when the curtain fell upon the 
 tragedy. The curtain rolled up again, and one of the most 
 distinguished companies that have ever been seen in a public 
 place came into view. The stage was crowded. Prominent in 
 the throng were Mr. Wallack, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Boucicault, 
 Mr. Gilbert, Miss Charlotte Thompson, and other professional 
 friends of Miss Cushman. The venerable face of William 
 Cullen Bryant, austere, yet tender, shone out of the central 
 throng. Mr. Charles Roberts, who had been selected by the 
 Arcadian Club to read Mr. Stoddard s ode, appeared at the 
 right of the stand, which was wrought of the beautiful floral 
 testimonials offered to Miss Cushman. The actress herself, 
 hailed by plaudits that almost shook the building, entered 
 and took her place upon the left of the stage ; and the cere 
 monies of farewell began. Mr. Stoddard s poem carries along 
 with it its own testimonial. It is conceived and written in a 
 simple spirit and style ; it is worthy of the genuine theme and 
 the lofty occasion ; and it was uttered with sympathy and 
 force, and received with every mark of public pleasure, 
 the applause at the end of the stanza which couples Cushman 
 with Shakspeare being in a marked degree spontaneous and 
 emphatic." 
 
 The poet Bryant addressed Miss Cushman, presenting her 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 225 
 
 with a laurel-wreath bound with white ribbon, resting on a 
 purple velvet cushion. Embroidered in golden letters was 
 this inscription : 
 
 ffleruft JJFerat. 
 
 18 JL d. 74- 
 
 " A. C." were the initials of the Arcadian Club. 
 
 From the response of Miss Cushman is extracted this 
 paragraph : 
 
 "You would seem to compliment me upon an honorable 
 life. As I look back upon that life it seems to me that it 
 Avould have been absolutely impossible for me to have led any 
 other. I was, by circumstances, thrown at an early age into 
 a profession for which I had received no special education, 
 but I had already been brought face to face with necessity. 
 I found life sadly real and intensely earnest; and in my 
 ignorance of other ways of study, I resolved to take there 
 from my text and my watchword ; to be thoroughly in 
 earnest, intensely in earnest, in all my thoughts and in all my 
 actions, whether in my profession or out of it, became my 
 one single idea. And I honestly believe herein lies the 
 secret of my success in life. I do not believe that any great 
 success in any art can be achieved without it." 
 
 The song of " Auld Lang Syne " was sung by Mrs. Annie 
 Kemp Bowler, the entire audience joining in the chorus, and 
 with this and the applause of four thousand people the curtain 
 fell upon the farewell appearance of Charlotte Cushman. 
 True, she appeared on the stage after this date, playing a 
 notable engagement in Philadelphia, and giving readings in 
 Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis; 
 but virtually this splendid ovation was her final farewell. 
 
226 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 Her last appearance before a Boston public was made in the 
 Globe Theatre in May, 1875. During the previous winter 
 she had first seen Eistori in " Elizabeth" and " Marie Antoi 
 nette," and of her Miss Cushman writes to a friend : " She is 
 the greatest woman artist I have ever seen. Such perfect 
 nature, such ease, such grace, such elegance of manner, such 
 as befits a queen. On Monday night I sat in the directors 
 box, holding a beautiful bouquet of roses and lilies-of-the- 
 valley for her. As I lifted the bouquet she saw it and came 
 over to the box. She is near-sighted, so did not recognize me 
 until she came near ; then she gave a start toward me, saying, 
 Ah, cam arnica? Her voice is the most lovely, and her 
 mouth the most fascinating, after Titiens, of any artist I ever 
 saw." 
 
 On her last appearance in Boston she impersonated Lady 
 Macbeth, supported by Mr. D. W. Waller as Macbeth. Of 
 the scene at the conclusion of the play Mr. Clapp writes : 
 
 "When the curtain was raised again, the stage presented the 
 appearance of a drawing-room, and in its centre stood a gilt 
 table upon which rested a floral crown with laurel wreath. 
 Upon either side were placed bronze statuettes of Mercury 
 and Fortune, resting upon handsomely carved pedestals. 
 Other floral decorations were about the stage. After a 
 moment s pause, Mr. Cheney entered from the left, leading 
 Miss Cushman, whom he briefly presented." 
 
 Mr. Curtis Guild then addressed Miss Cushman in a grace 
 ful speech, concluding with the words : "And now, when we 
 depart, and when 
 
 4 Fallen is the curtain, the last scene is o er, 
 The fav rite actress treads the stage no more,* 
 
 we shall each and all of us remember that though 
 
 Many the parts you played, yet to the end 
 Your best were those of sister, lady, friend. " 
 
 Miss Cushman concluded her response by saying: "Look 
 ing back upon my career, I think I may, without vain-glory, 
 say that I have not, by any act of my life, done discredit to 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 227 
 
 the city of my birth. Believe me, I shall carry away with 
 me in my retirement no memory sweeter than my associations 
 with Boston and my Boston public. From my full heart, 
 God bless you, and Farewell I " 
 
 For many years before her death Miss Cushman had been 
 a sutFerer from a malady that proved fatal at last. In 
 October, 1875, she established herself in rooms at the Parker 
 House in Boston. The suffering was great and almost uninter- 
 mitting in character, yet she bore it all bravely and never made 
 herself the topic of conversation. Intimate friends came to 
 her daily. Until within two days before her death she wrote 
 each day to her family at Newport, in that loved villa by the 
 sea where she had passed so many happy hours. 
 
 On the morning of February 12, in walking through the 
 corridor, she took a sudden cold which resulted in pneumonia, 
 from which she died on the eighteenth six days later. 
 James Russell Lowell s poem of " Columbus" had always been 
 with her a favorite, and a few hours before she went out into 
 the Infinite Unknown she asked to have it read aloud. Its 
 words had been a part of her evolved experience of life : 
 
 "Endurance is the crowning quality 
 And patience all the passion of great hearts. 
 
 One faith against a whole earth s unbelief, 
 One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 
 
 This incident suggested some exquisite lines that appeared 
 at that time in a Boston journal, signed "C. T. E.," of which 
 the first and last stanzas were : 
 
 " For wast not thou, too, going forth alone 
 
 To seek new land across an untried sea ? 
 New land, yet to thy soul not all unknown, 
 Nor yet far off, was that blest shore to thee. 
 
 " Thine was a conflict none else knew but God, 
 
 Who gave thee, to endure it, strength divine: 
 Alone with Him the wine-press thou hast trod, 
 And Death, His angel, seals the victory thine." 
 
228 CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 
 
 The funeral services were held in King s Chapel. They 
 were simple in character, as befitted the sacred majesty of 
 the occasion. For an hour before the services people were 
 permitted to pass through the room where she lay, beautiful 
 in the light of the holy peace reflected from that noble coun 
 tenance. "God giveth quietness at last" was the refrain in 
 every heart. 
 
 In King s Chapel flowers sent by loving hands lay about 
 her. The deep organ music in its solemn chant blended with 
 the prayers that were said. The chancel inscription : "This is 
 my commandment to you, that you love one another," seemed 
 the expression of her entire life. Still and cold lay Charlotte 
 Cushman in the last dreamless sleep under the shadow of 
 white lilies that leaned above her, fair and fragrant. 
 
 Forty years had passed since the untried girl had gone out 
 from her native city to conquer life. In those years she had 
 done more. She had conquered herself. She had learned the 
 lesson of renunciation. She had won the reward of achieve 
 ment. 
 
 To Charlotte Cushman life was a conflict. Born into 
 simple, primitive conditions, with the inherited instincts of a 
 long line of Puritan ancestry, yet with the tragic intensity 
 of creative genius in her soul, and the glow of its sacred 
 mystery in her being, what wonder that those two warring 
 forces should have alternately swayed her throughout her 
 plastic youth, and stamped their traces on her mature woman 
 hood? It was this meeting of two forces that could never, 
 from their intrinsic nature, mingle, that gave to her character 
 an aspect of superficial inconsistency. In reality she was 
 strictly true, but now one nature and now the other domi 
 nated her. 
 
 Her character was made up of the massive forces, and 
 it included with almost startling distinctness two entirety 
 different personalities. 
 
 " Oh, sorrowful, great gift 
 Conferred on poets of a twofold life 
 When one life has been found enough for pain," 
 
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. 229 
 
 wrote Elizabeth Browning, and this twofold life was essen 
 tially that of Charlotte Cushman. 
 
 To some degree it was true of her, as Miss Kate Field has 
 said of Ristori, that in her presence " it required a mental 
 effort to recall her histrionic greatness." Conversely this was 
 equally true, and to those who knew in her the grandeur, the 
 sublimity, the intensity of the artist, it was difficult to asso 
 ciate her with other than the artistic life, or to see in her 
 aught but the grandest tragic actress of America. 
 
 The religious earnestness of her character never faltered. 
 
 o 
 
 It was a part of her identity ; and, disregarding all forms, the 
 heart of the woman spoke when she said, " I can go to any 
 church and find God." 
 
 She is dead. " The curtain drops upon a vanished 
 majesty." A plain granite shaft, thirty-three feet in height, 
 stands in Mount Auburn, and at its base is the name, 
 Charlotte Cushman. Afar to the east lies the beautiful city 
 that she loved her native Boston. Beyond rolls the blue 
 sea. The wind sighs its low requiem among the trees. 
 It is hallowed ground. Here stands the monument to 
 Margaret Fuller. The beloved poet Longfellow sleeps not 
 far away. Names that have made life sacred and heaven 
 more dear meet the eye. Lingering among the loveliness 
 of Mount Auburn one feels that, indeed, 
 
 " Happy places have grown holy : if we go where once we went, 
 Only tears will fall down slowly as at blessed sacrament." 
 
 Remembering the crystalline purity and truth of this 
 divinely-gifted woman, you may find yourself repeating, as 
 you stay and stray by her last resting-place, the words 
 of Queen Catherine, whose impersonation was the most 
 majestic triumph in the art of Charlotte Cushman : 
 
 " After my death I wish no other herald, 
 No other speaker of my living actions 
 To keep mine honor from corruption 
 Than such an honest chronicler as Griffith." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 BY SUSAN COOLIDGE. 
 
 The Little Maid of Medford Her Early Life and Happy Marriage Hooks 
 She has Written Surprise and Indignation excited by Her " Appeal " 
 The Battle of Life Rowing against the Tide Her Patience, Fortitude, 
 and Reliance Stirring Times Devotion to Her Husband Life at 
 Wayland Her Bright Humor Sympathy for Old John Brown 
 Mrs. Mason s Violent Letter Mrs. Child s Famous Reply She is Prom 
 ised a "Warm Reception" Her Loyalty, Self-Denial, and Work during 
 the Civil War Princely Generosity Serene Old Age Death of Her 
 Husband Mrs. Child s Touching Tribute to His Memory Waiting 
 and Trusting Her Death and Funeral. 
 
 N the year 1636 one Richard Francis emigrated 
 from England to America and settled in Cam 
 bridge, Mass., where his tombstone may be seen 
 to this day. A hundred and thirty-nine years 
 later we find one of his descendants taking part 
 in the skirmish at Concord, where he is said to 
 have killed five of the enemy. Half a century 
 after Concord, another descendant of the same 
 sturdy stock was settled as a baker in Medford, 
 Mass., where he first introduced what are still 
 known as " Medford crackers." He was the father 
 of Lydia Maria Francis, the subject of this sketch ; and in 
 Medford, on the llth of February, 1802, she was born. 
 
 To children of a thoughtful and intelligent cast, the very 
 bareness of New England life at that period had in it some 
 thing formative and stimulating. The keen, youthful obser 
 vation and analysis, undistracted by trifles, expended them 
 selves upon facts with their underlying principles, upon 
 theories and the convictions to be deduced from them. At 
 nine years of age, the little maid of Medford was puzzling 
 230 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 231 
 
 her brains to find out exactly what that " Raven down of 
 darkness" could be which smiles when stroked, and was 
 sorely perplexed by the explanation of her teasing brother 
 Convers, that it must mean the fur of a black cat, which 
 snaps and crackles with electricity when caressed in cold 
 weather ! At twelve she read " Waverley," and exclaimed, 
 " Why cannot I write a novel ? " In her seventeenth year 
 she writes to her brother : " Do not forget that I asked you 
 about the flaming cherubims, the effects of distance, horizon 
 tal and perpendicular, Orlando Furioso, and Lord Byron ! " 
 
 Her earliest teacher was an old woman known as " Mann 
 Betty," who kept her school in an untidy bedroom, and 
 chewed much tobacco. At no time does Lydia Francis seem 
 to have had better opportunities for education than the public 
 academy of her native town could furnish, with the exception 
 of one year at a private seminary. But her mind had that 
 power of assimilation which converts spare diet into generous 
 growth. And the home atmosphere in which she was reared 
 was full of good, practical teaching. 
 
 David Francis, her father, though not a highly-educated 
 man, was remarkably fond of books, and possessed of a wide 
 and zealous benevolence. His anti-slavery principles were in 
 advance of his time, and his children were taught from their 
 infancy to exercise a frugal self-denial with regard to their 
 own wants, and a hospitable generosity towards those of 
 others. A Sunday dinner was always carried to " Marm 
 Betty," and at Thanksgiving she and all the other humble 
 friends of the family, to the number of twenty or thirty, 
 were assembled and feasted. This mingling of frugality on 
 the one hand, and liberality on the other, characterized Mrs. 
 Child during her whole life. 
 
 In the year 1819 Convers Francis was ordained pastor over 
 the first Unitarian church at Watcrtown, Mass., and his sister 
 went to live with him. Two years later her first book ap 
 peared, a novel called " Hobomok," after its Indian hero. It 
 is a tale somewhat resembling " Enoch Ardcn," with the 
 important variation that the noble red-man who has married 
 
232 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 the heroine promptly gives up his wife and child on the reap 
 pearance of her early lover. But this was in the dawn of 
 American letters ; and with all its crude improbability, 
 "Hobomok" enjoyed such a measure of popularity as to 
 warrant the publication during the following year of a second 
 novel, " The Kebels ; or, Boston before the Revolution," 
 bearing a motto from Bryant, and " respectfully inscribed " 
 to George Ticknor. The immediate effect of its appearance 
 was to make its author a celebrity in her own circle. 
 
 In 1825 Miss Francis opened a private school in Water- 
 town, and in 1827 she established ft The Juvenile Miscellany," 
 pioneer to the long line of American children s magazines. 
 In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a lawyer in Boston, 
 and took up her residence in that city. The following year 
 appeared " The Frugal Housewife," a manual of domestic 
 management, which proved so suited to the wants of the 
 public that it has since attained its fortieth edition. Later 
 came, in a natural sequence, " The Mother s Book," " The 
 Girl s Own Book," " The History of Women," and "The 
 Biographies of Good Wives." It was about this time that 
 " The North American Review," then the highest literary 
 authority in the country, said of her : " We are not sure that 
 any woman of our country could outrank Mrs. Child. Few 
 female writers, if any, have done more or better things for 
 our literature in the lighter or graver departments." 
 
 This was probably the time of Mrs. Child s life in which 
 she tasted most of what the world calls ease and good. 
 Happily and congenially married to the man she loved, 
 courted and invited, revelling in the work which she most 
 enjoyed doing, feeling an increasing influence resulting from 
 it, the sweetness of a new home-life encompassing her day 
 by day ; surely this was much for any woman to possess, and 
 very much for any woman to endanger. Many young wives 
 in her situation would have found abundant occupation for 
 mind and heart in self-cultivation, the enjoyment of society, 
 or the details of housekeeping. Decorative art, or whatever 
 did duty for it in those early days, would have claimed atten- 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 233 
 
 tion, and the scant facilities for household convenience fur 
 nished a real excuse for much personal labor and supervision. 
 
 But neither house nor social ambitions, nor the absorbing 
 interests of her literary life, stood in Mrs. Child s way for 
 one moment when her conscience recognized an obligation. 
 In 1833 the American Anti-Slavery Society was started at a 
 convention held in Philadelphia. It attained an instant un 
 popularity. Immediately afterward Mrs. Child wrote and 
 published her "Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans 
 called Africans," and by doing so cut herself off from much 
 of what must have been to her the pleasantness of life. 
 
 It is difficult at the present day to realize the surprise and 
 indignation excited by this "appeal, "so justly called forth 
 and so temperately made. The sale of Mrs. Child s books 
 fell off the subscriptions to her magazine were withdrawn. 
 Many acquaintances closed their doors against her. That she 
 knew what she hazarded and was prepared for the result is 
 proved by the preface to her book : " I am fully aware of 
 the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken ; but though 
 I expect ridicule and censure I do not fear them. A few 
 years hence the opinion of the world will be a matter in 
 which I have not the most transient interest ; but this book 
 will be abroad on its mission of humanity long after the hand: 
 that wrote it is mingling with the dust." 
 
 "Thenceforth her life was a battle," says Mr. Whittier, "a 
 constant rowing hard against the stream of popular prejudice 
 and hatred. And through it all pecuniary privation, loss 
 of friends and position, the painfulness of being suddenly 
 thrust from the still air of delightful studies into the bit 
 terest and sternest controversy of the age, she bore herself 
 with patience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance upon the 
 justice and ultimate triumph of the cause she had espoused. 
 Whenever there was a brave word to be spoken her voice 
 was heard, and never without effect. It is not exaggeration 
 to say that no man or woman of that period rendered more 
 substantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 
 great renunciation to do it." 
 15 
 
234 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 Of the intensity of public feeling against the anti-slavery 
 reformers her letters of this date bear evidence. In August, 
 
 O 7 
 
 183 ), she writes to a friend : 
 
 "I am at Brooklyn, at the house of a very hospitable 
 Englishman, a friend of Mr. Thompson s. I have not 
 ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to go to 
 church to-day, so great is the excitement here. You can 
 form no conception of it. Tis like the times of the French 
 llevolution, when no man dared trust his neighbor. Private 
 assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the 
 street to stab Arthur Tappan ; and very large sums are 
 offered for any one who will convey Mr. Thompson into the 
 slave States. He is almost a close prisoner to his chamber, 
 his friends deeming him in imminent peril the moment it is 
 known where he is. Your husband could hardly be made to 
 realize the terrible state of fermentation now existing here. 
 Mr. Wright was yesterday barricading his doors and win 
 dows with strong bars and planks an inch thick. Violence in 
 some form seems to be generally expected." 
 
 Fearless of consequences, however, Mrs. Child persevered 
 in her self-appointed task. Between the years 1833 and 1838 
 she published four additional works treating on the evils of 
 slavery. In 1836 appeared her romance of "Philothea," the 
 scene of which is laid in ancient Greece. This book would 
 seem to embody a reaction of the dreamy and imaginative 
 side of her nature against its practical counterpart. Intensely 
 practical she was, with a capacity for detail which extended 
 to the humblest domestic economies ; yet, singularly enough, 
 this clear common-sense and talent for administration was 
 balanced by a passionate craving for art, and by a love of 
 beauty which made the everyday sights of nature a continual 
 feast. One of her letters, written in 1840, exhibits this : "I 
 am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmed with sculpture, 
 ashnmed because it seems like affectation in one who has had 
 such very limited opportunity to become acquainted with the 
 arts. I have a little plaster figure of a caryatid which acts 
 upon my spirits like a magician s spell. Many a time this 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 235 
 
 hard summer I have laid down the dishcloth or broom and 
 gone to refresh my spirit by gazing at it for a few minutes. 
 It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer I 
 place flowers before it ; and now I have laid a garland of 
 acorns and amaranths at its feet. I do dearly love every 
 little bit of real sculpture." And later, " It is not I who 
 drudge, it is merely the case containing me. I defy all the 
 powers of earth and hell to make me scrub floors or feed 
 pigs, if I choose meanwhile to be off conversing with the 
 angels." Again, in 1841, " A Southern gentleman some time 
 since wrote to me from New Orleans, postage double and 
 unpaid, inviting me to that city, and promising me a warm 
 reception and lodgings in the calaboose with as much nigger 
 company as you desire. He wrote according to the light 
 that was in him. He did not know that the combined police of 
 the world could not imprison me. In spite of bolts and bars 
 I should have been off like a witch at midnight, holding fair 
 discourse with Orion, and listening to the plaintive song of 
 Pleiades mourning for the earth-dimmed glory of their 
 fallen sister. How did he know in his moral midnight 
 that choosing to cast our lot with the lowliest of earth was 
 the very way to enter into companionship with the highest 
 in heaven?" 
 
 A curious sympathy with the mystical and speculative was 
 another of Mrs. Child s characteristics. She had also a fond 
 ness for ghost stories and supernatural signs and imitations. 
 But these strangely-balanced traits worked in perfect adjust 
 ment and without friction. "Her mysticism and realism ran 
 in close parallel lines without interfering with each other," 
 said Mr. Whittier, and he adds, "she was wise in counsel; 
 and men like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. 
 Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselves of her fore 
 sight and sound judgment of men and things." 
 
 In 1844 Mr. and Mrs. Child were engaged by the Anti- 
 Slavery Society as joint editors of their weekly newspaper, 
 " The Anti-Slavery Standard," just started in New York. The 
 state of Mr. Child s health did not at first permit him to share 
 
236 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 in the labor, and for a considerable time his wife carried it on 
 without him. The separation which this involved was painful 
 to them both. In the early days of their married life Mrs. 
 Child had written to her husband, " It is nonsense for me to 
 go a-pleasuring without you. It does me no good ; I am only 
 homesick for you, and my private opinion is that I shall not 
 be able to stand it a whole week." Now circumstances forced 
 her to " stand it " for two years ! 
 
 "My domestic attachments are so strong, and David is 
 always so full of cheerful tenderness, that this separation is 
 dreary, indeed," she writes to her brother ; and to another 
 friend, " My task here is irksome to me. Your father 
 will tell you that it was not zeal for the cause but love 
 for my husband which brought me hither. But since it 
 was necessary for me to leave home to be earning some 
 what, I am thankful that my work is for the anti-slavery 
 cause." 
 
 Eight years did the husband and wife continue their joint 
 editorship. During that time Mrs. Child, whenever in New 
 York, occupied a room in the house of " Friend Hopper," 
 whose biography she afterward edited so charmingly. Under 
 his roof her ardent and wide philanthropy found stimulus 
 as well as sympathy. "Dwelling in a home where disin 
 terested and noble labor were as daily breath, she had great 
 opportunities," wrote one of her friends. " Since the keen 
 tragedy of city life began it has seen no more efficient organi 
 zation for relief than when dear old Isaac Hopper and Mrs. 
 Child took up their abode under one roof in New York." 
 
 It was about this time that Lowell, in his " Fable for 
 Critics," gave what is perhaps the most charming of the 
 many attempted sketches of Mrs. Child, in the person of 
 "Philothea": 
 
 " The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls, 
 But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles ; 
 And folks with a mission that nobody knows, 
 Throng thickly about her as bees on a rose. 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 237 
 
 Yes, a great soul is hers, one that dares to go in 
 
 To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin, 
 
 And to bring into each, or to find there some line, 
 
 Of the never completely out-trampled divine; 
 
 If her heart at high floods swamp her brain now and then, 
 
 * Tis but richer for that when the flood ebbs again, 
 
 As after old Nile has subsided, his plain 
 
 Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain ; 
 
 What a wealth it would bring to the narrow and sour 
 
 Could they be as a Child but for one little hour." 
 
 During her eight years of editorship Mrs. Child wrote for 
 the " Boston Courier " that series of " Letters from New 
 York," which, appearing afterwards in book form, proved 
 their popularity by going into seven or eight editions. In 
 1852 the husband and wife gave up the conduct of the "Anti- 
 Slavery Standard," and retired to the small rural town of 
 Wayland, in Massachusetts, where, with brief exceptions, the 
 remainder of their lives was spent. Of this new abode Mrs. 
 Child, in some "Reminiscences" found among her papers, 
 says : 
 
 "In 1852 Ave made a humble home in Wayland, Mass., 
 where we spent twenty-two pleasant years entirely alone, 
 without any domestic, mutually serving each other, and 
 dependent on each other for intellectual companionship. I 
 always depended upon his richly stored mind, Avhich was able 
 and ready to furnish needful information on any subject. He 
 was my walking dictionary of many languages, my universal 
 encyclopedia." 
 
 Nothing could seem lonelier than the life led by Mrs. Child 
 in Wayland during the greater part of the year. With few 
 neighbors, and fewer visitors, off the lines of travel, shut in 
 by winter snow, immersed in needful household work, prac 
 tising a rigid economy, yet the spirit that was in her turned all 
 these hard things into beauty. " Her life in the place made, 
 indeed, an atmosphere of its own, a benison of peace and 
 good-will " ; and here, as elsewhere, she found people to help 
 and loving work to do. The inward cheer of her undaunted 
 
238 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 nature acknowledged no hinderance and left no chill ; 
 loneliness was a thing unknown or undreaded, so long as she 
 had the company of her husband, who was so deservedly dear 
 to her. Of him she writes in the " Reminiscences " already 
 quoted : " In his old age he was as affectionate and devoted 
 as when the lover of my youth ; nay, he manifested even 
 more tenderness. He was often singing 
 
 * There s nothing half so sweet in life 
 As love s old dream. 
 
 " Very often, when he passed by me, he would lay his hand 
 softly on my head and murmur, Carum caput. But what 
 I remember with the most tender gratitude is his uniform 
 patience and forbearance with my faults. He never would 
 see anything but the bright side of my character. He always 
 insisted upon thinking that whatever I said was the wisest and 
 wittiest, and whatever I did was the best. The simplest little 
 jeu d esprit of mine seemed to him wonderfully witty. Once 
 when he said, I wish for your sake that I was as rich as 
 Croesus, I answered, You are Croesus, for you are king of 
 Lydia. How often he used to quote that." 
 
 Sweet words to be recorded by a wife of seventy-two, of a 
 husband who had gone to his rest at the age of eighty ! 
 What more could she say or he desire ? 
 
 It was during the third year of this secluded life in Way- 
 land that Mrs. Child published her most important work, 
 "The Progress of Religious Ideas in Successive Ages." It 
 appeared in 1855 in three large volumes. "More than eight 
 years elapsed between the planning and the printing, and for 
 six years it was her main pursuit." During its progress she 
 writes to her brother with regard to it : 
 
 " My book gets slowly on. I am not sustained by the least 
 hope that my mode of treating the subject will prove acceptable 
 to any class of persons. No matter. I am going to tell the 
 plain unvarnished truth, as clearly as I can understand it, and let 
 Christians and Infidels, Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics 
 and Protestants, and Swedenborgians, growl as they will." 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 239 
 
 This laborious work brought Mrs. Child no pecuniary 
 reward ; it barely paid expenses. This was, no doubt, due 
 to the fact that, gentle and candid as was the tone of the book, 
 it was in opposition to the pervading religious tendencies of 
 the community in which she lived. Her treatment of the 
 questions involved was too dispassionate. Each sect in turn 
 felt its claims understated. As we have seen, she was not 
 unprepared for this result, nor was she disheartened by it. 
 " This is the second time I have walked out in stormy 
 weather without a cloak," she said to a friend. " I trust I 
 have never impelled any one in the wrong direction. Most 
 devoutly do I believe in the pervasive and ever-guiding spirit 
 of God ; but I do not believe it was ever shut up within the 
 covers of any book, or that it ever can be. Portions of it, 
 or rather breathings of it, are in many books. The words of 
 Christ seem to me full of it as no other words are. But if 
 we want truth we must listen to the voice of God in the 
 silence of our soul, as he did." 
 
 In the year following the publication of "The Progress of 
 Religious Ideas," we have the following picture of her life : 
 
 "This winter has been the loneliest of my life. If you 
 could know my situation you would pronounce it unendur 
 able. I should have thought so myself if I had had a fore 
 shadowing of it a few years ago. But the human mind can 
 get acclimated to anything. What with constant occupation 
 and the happy consciousness of sustaining and cheering my 
 poor old father in his descent into the grave, I am almost 
 always in a state of serene contentment. In summer my 
 once extravagant love of beauty satisfies itself with watching 
 the birds, the insects, and the flowers in my little patch of 
 a garden. I have no room in which to put the vases and 
 engravings and transparencies that friends have given me from 
 time to time. But I keep them safely in a large chest, and 
 when birds and flowers are gone I sometimes take them out, 
 as a child does his playthings, and sit down in the sunshine 
 with them, dreaming how life would seem in such places, and 
 how poets and artists come to imagine such things. This 
 
240 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 process sometimes gives rise to thoughts which float through 
 the universe, though they began in a simple craving to look 
 at something that is beautiful." 
 
 The words that we have underlined in this letter seem to 
 us to express the serene philosophy which was one of Mrs. 
 ^Child s prominent characteristics. Her large-mindedness 
 with regard to others was no less remarkable. Of Dr. 
 Channing she writes : " At first I thought him timid and 
 even time-serving, but soon discovered that I formed this 
 estimate merely from ignorance of his character. I learned 
 that it was justice to all, not popularity to himself, which 
 rendered him so cautious. He constantly grew upon my 
 respect until I came to regard him as the wisest as well as 
 the gentlest apostle of humanity. / owe him thanks for 
 helping to preserve me from the one-sidedness with which 
 zealous reformers are apt to run. He never sought to under 
 value the importance of anti-slavery, but he said many 
 things to prevent my looking upon it as the only question 
 interesting to humanity. My mind needed this check, and I 
 never think of his many-sided conversations without deep 
 gratitude." 
 
 Another extract, equally striking to those who recognize 
 the narrowing influences of literary ambition in the majority 
 of minds, is this : 
 
 "I am not what I aspired to be in my days of young 
 ambition ; but I have become humble enough to be satisfied 
 with the conviction that what I have written has always 
 been written conscientiously, that I have always spoken 
 with sincerity if not with power. In every direction I see 
 young giants rushing past me, at times pushing mo some 
 what rudely in their speed, but I am glad to see such strong 
 laborers to plough the land and sow the seed for coming 
 years." 
 
 Of the warmth of her affections and friendship sufficient 
 proof has already been given. She was as just to others as 
 to herself, and more generous. Nothing jarred upon her 
 more than to detect a small motive in her own action. 
 
LTDIA MARIA CHILD. 241 
 
 " I have a confession to make to you," she says to a friend, 
 whose birthday came in the same month with her own. "I 
 intended to send you some little rattle-trap on your birthday, 
 but I said to myself, That will seem like reminding her of 
 my birthday. She is rich and I am poor. If I send her 
 plaster she will perhaps send me marble ; it will be more 
 delicate not to do it. I am ashamed, thoroughly ashamed, of 
 these mean ideas, for the thought I am poor and thou 
 art rich ought never to interrupt the free flowing of 
 human souls toward each other. Nevertheless I did it, as 
 I have done many other things that I regret and am 
 ashamed of." 
 
 Absolute integrity was a part of Mrs. Child s nature. She 
 was thoroughly in earnest. To know the truth and obey it 
 was her chief desire. " It is the likeness of my soul in some 
 of its moods," she says, referring to Domenichino s Cumsean 
 Sybil, ff Oh, how I have listened!" 
 
 Her benevolence was wide as the sea. Down to the last 
 years of her life it kneAV no slackening. "I have never 
 experienced any happiness to be compared to the conscious 
 ness of lifting a human soul out of the mire," she writes, 
 with regard to a drunkard, reformed by months of intelligent, 
 painstaking, daily effort on her part. In her will an annuity 
 of fifty dollars a year was left to this man, to be paid in 
 monthly instalments so long as he should refrain from drink. 
 His was but an example of the many lives which she touched 
 and helped, and furthered toward higher standards. 
 
 A constant bright humor plays about her earnestness, like 
 harmless summer lightning against a clear sky. " The Bos 
 ton Post was down upon me for the verse about President 
 Pierce," she writes in 1856. "I could not help it. His name 
 would not rhyme to anything but curse." 
 
 At another time she wrote, " Miss R. complains of the ex 
 ceeding slowness with which things tended to that result 
 (emancipation). I told her of the consolation an old nurse 
 gave to a mother whose child was very sick. The mother 
 said, " The medicine doesn t seem to work as you thought it 
 
242 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 would." The nurse replied, "It will work. Trust in God, 
 madam : he s tedious, but he s sure." 
 
 And once more : "It is natural enough that Gerrit Smith 
 should deem me wise. When I approach him I don t go 
 dancing on a slack-rope, decorated with spangles and Psyche 
 wings ; I walk on solid ground as demurely as if I were 
 going to meeting with psalm-book in hand. If I happen to 
 catch a glimpse of a fairy by the way, she and I wink at 
 each other, but I never let on. He supposes the chosen 
 teachers of my mind to be profound statesmen and pious 
 Christian fathers. I never introduced him to any of my 
 acquaintances of light character." 
 
 Still again : " You were right in your prediction about your 
 poems. Many of them are too metaphysical for my simple, 
 practical mind. I cannot soar so high, or dive so deep ; so I 
 stand looking and wondering where you have gone, like a 
 cow watching a bird or a dolphin. A wag says that when 
 Emerson was in Egypt the Sphinx said to him, You re 
 another. I imagine the Sphinx would address you in the 
 same way." 
 
 Some who read this will recall the neat drollery of her 
 return strokes to the violent letter addressed her by Mrs. 
 Mason of Virginia, after Mrs. Child s application to the 
 authorities of that State for permission to minister to old 
 John Brown, then a wounded prisoner. Mrs. Mason had 
 asked, with what was intended to be scathing sarcasm, 
 
 " Now compare yourself with those your sympathy would 
 devote to such ruthless ruin, and say on that word of honor 
 which has never been broken, would you stand by the bedside 
 of an old negro dying of a hopeless disease to alleviate his 
 sufferings as far as human aid could? Do you soften the 
 pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and 
 comfort you can give? Did you ever sit up till the wee 
 hours to complete a dress for a motherless child that she 
 might appear on Christmas day in a new one, along with her 
 more fortunate companions? We do these and more for 
 our servants." 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 243 
 
 To this Mrs. Child retorted : 
 
 " To the personal questions you ask me I will reply in the 
 name of all the women of New England. It would be ex 
 tremely difficult to find any woman in our villages who does 
 not sew for the poor and watch with the sick whenever occa 
 sion requires. We pay our domestics generous wages, with 
 which they can purchase as many Christmas gowns as they 
 please, "a process far better for their characters, as well 
 as our own, than to receive their clothing as a charity 
 after being deprived of just payment for their labor. I 
 have never known an instance where the f pangs of mater 
 nity did not meet with requisite assistance ; and here at 
 the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell 
 the babies" 
 
 The outbreak of the civil war two years later aroused her 
 to the most active interest. Her strong anti-slavery feeling 
 was in the outset at variance with her patriotism. " I wait to 
 see how the United States will deport itself," she writes. 
 " When it treats the colored people with justice and humanity 
 I will mount its flag on my great elm-tree. Until then I 
 would as soon wear the rattlesnake on my bosom as the eagle. 
 It seems as if the eyes of the government were holden, that 
 they cannot see." 
 
 Her helpfulness, however, could not remain inactive when 
 there was such pressing work to do. Very soon she was 
 deep in every sort of undertaking collecting funds, collect 
 ing supplies, urging Whittier to the writing of patriotic 
 songs, sewing, knitting, quilting. At first this work was 
 done only for special regiments, of whose conduct she felt sure. 
 
 " This winter I have for the first time been knitting for the 
 army ; but I do it only for Kansas troops. I can trust them, 
 for they have vowed a vow unto the Lord that no fugitive 
 shall ever be surrendered in their camps. A soldier needs a 
 great idea to fight for ; and how can the idea of freedom be 
 otherwise than obscured by witnessing the wicked, mean, un 
 manly surrendering of poor trembling fugitives? The absurd 
 policy of the thing is also provoking, to send back those 
 
244 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 who want to help us to be employed by rebels to help them 
 to shoot us." 
 
 Later she writes to a friend, half-comically, half-sorrow- 
 fully, " Our cause is going to mount the throne of popular 
 favor. Then I shall bid good-by to it, and take hold of 
 something else that is unpopular. I never work on the win 
 ning side, because I know there will always be a plenty ready 
 to do such work." 
 
 But while clinging firmly to her anti-slavery principles, no 
 one was readier than she to spend and be spent for the service 
 of our country in its hour of need. Her economy, always 
 careful, grew careful ler still. Self-indulgence in the smallest 
 particular was rigidly lopped off. In 1802 she writes to 
 thank a friend for the gift of a book which she had wished 
 to see. When I was in Boston last week I stopped and 
 looked at the advertisement of John Brent, in the windows 
 of Ticknor & Fields. I wanted it very much, and was on 
 the point of stepping in and buying it, but I thought of the 
 contrabands and of other claims upon me still nearer, as 
 natural relationship goes, and I said to myself, f No unneces 
 sary expense till the war is over. I walked away well satis 
 fied with my decision ; but I am amazing glad to have the 
 book." 
 
 Immediately after comes another letter to the husband of 
 the same friend ; " I enclose twenty dollars which I wish you 
 would use for the contrabands in any way you think best. 
 I did think of purchasing shoes, of which I understand they 
 are much in need, but I concluded it was best to send to you 
 to appropriate it as you choose. In November I expended 
 eighteen dollars for clothing, mostly for women and children, 
 and picked up all the garments, blankets, etc., that I could 
 spare. I sent them to Fortress Monroe. Last week I gave 
 A. L. twenty dollars towards a great box she is filling for 
 Port Royal. I still have forty dollars left of a fund I have 
 set apart. I keep it for future contingencies ; but if you 
 think it is more needed now, say the word and you shall 
 have it." 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 245 
 
 "And yet," sa}rs Mr. Phillips, "this princely giver kept 
 till death the cheap, plain fashion of dress which early narrow- 
 means had enforced, used an envelope twice, and never wrote 
 on a whole sheet when a half one would suffice. I do not 
 think, Mrs. Child, you can afford to give so much now, I 
 said to her once, when in some exigency of the freedman s 
 cause she told me to send them from her a hundred dollars. 
 Well, she answered, I will think it over and send you 
 word to-morrow. To-morrow word came, Please send 
 them two hundred. 
 
 " Her means were never large, never so large that a woman 
 of her class would think she had anything to give away. But 
 her spirit was Spartan. When she had nothing for others 
 she worked to get it. She wrote to me once, I have four 
 hundred dollars to my credit at my publisher s for my book 
 on " Looking Toward Sunset." Please get it and send it to 
 the freedmen. And she had nothing of the scholar s disease 
 timidity and selfishness ; her hand was always ready for 
 any drudgery of service. The fallen woman, the over- 
 tempted inebriate, she could take to her home and watch 
 over month by month. And prison bars were no bar to her 
 when a friendless woman needed help or countenance against 
 an angry community. She sought honestly to act out her 
 thought, obeyed the rule, 
 
 * Go put your creed 
 Into the deed ; 
 
 was ready to die for a principle or starve for an idea, nor 
 think to claim any merit for it." 
 
 " Looking Toward Sunset," to which Mr. Phillips alludes, 
 was published in 1804, the last year of the war. It was a 
 collection in prose and verse by various authors, all bearing 
 upon the subject of old age. It met with a most cordial 
 reception. 
 
 " My sunset book has had most unexpected success," 
 writes its author. " The edition of four thousand sold before 
 New Year s Day, and they say they might have sold two 
 
246 LTDIA MARIA. CHILD. 
 
 thousand more if they had been ready. This pleases me 
 beyond measure, for the proceeds, whether more or less, 
 were vowed to the freedrnen ; and cheering old folks with one 
 hand, and helping the wronged and suffering with the other, 
 is the highest recreation I ever enjoyed. JVobles or princes 
 cannot discover or invent any pleasure equal to earning with 
 one hand and giving with the other" 
 
 In 1867 appeared "A Romance of the Republic," which 
 met with equal welcome. Its scenes were laid in the South, 
 and its plot hinged on what had been the great interest of 
 Mrs. Child s life, the slavery question. 
 
 For seven years after the publication of " A Romance of 
 the Republic," the peaceful life at Wayland continued. Age 
 was laying his quieting hand on Mrs. Child s energetic pulses, 
 but his touch neither dulled her sympathies nor blunted her 
 discrimination. She was systematically cheerful. "Cheer 
 fulness is to the spiritual atmosphere what sunshine is to the 
 earthly landscape," she said. "I am resolved to cherish 
 cheerfulness with might and main. The world is so full of 
 sadness that I more and more make it a point of duty to 
 avoid all sadness that does not come within the sphere of my 
 duty. I read only chipper books. I hang prisms in my 
 windows to fill the room with rainbows ; I gaze at all the 
 bright pictures in the shop windows ; I seek cheerfulness in 
 every possible way. This is my necessity in being old. " 
 
 Her letters during this interval are full of comments on 
 books. Reading, then, as always, was her chief recreation, 
 and served as stimulus and refreshment after her daily tasks. 
 
 In a letter dated June 18, 1874, occurs this calm and 
 beautiful passage : 
 
 " David and I are growing old. He will be eighty in three 
 weeks, and I was seventy-two last February. But we keep 
 young in our feelings. We are, in fact, like two old chil 
 dren ; as much interested as ever in the birds and the wild 
 flowers, and with sympathies as lively as ever in all that con 
 cerns the welfare of the world. Our habitual mood is serene 
 and cheerful. The astonishing activity of evil sometimes 
 
LYDIA MAKIA CHILD. 247 
 
 makes mo despondent for a while, but my belief returns as 
 strong as ever, that there is more good than evil in the 
 world, and that the all-wise Being is guiding the good to 
 certain victory. How blest are those whom He employs as 
 His agents." 
 
 With the following October came the stroke which severed 
 this long and happy union. Mrs. Child bore it with ac 
 customed bravery. She writes to a dear friend : 
 
 "I was wonderfully calm at the time, and for twenty-four 
 hours afterward, but since then 1 seem to get more and more 
 sensitive and distressed. I try hard to overcome it, for I do 
 not want to cast a shadow over others. Moreover I feel 
 that such states of mind are wrong. There are so many 
 reasons for thankfulness to the Heavenly Father. And I do 
 feel very thankful that he did not suffer for a long time, that 
 the powers of his mind were undimmed to the last ; that my 
 strength and faculties were preserved to take care of him to 
 the last ; and that the heavy burden of loneliness has fallen 
 upon me rather than upon him. 
 
 " But at times it seems as if I could no longer bear the 
 load. I keep breaking down. They told me I should feel 
 better after I got away from Wayland, where memories 
 haunted me at every step. But I do not feel better. On the 
 contrary, I am more deeply sad. The coming and going of 
 people talking about subjects of common interest makes life 
 seem like a foreign land, where I do not understand the 
 language, and I go back to my darling old mate with a more 
 desperate and clinging tenderness. And when there comes 
 no response but the memory of that narrow little spot where 
 I planted flowers the day before I left our quiet little nest, it 
 seems to me as if all were gone, and as if I stood alone on a 
 solitary rock in mid-ocean, alone in midnight darkness, hear 
 ing nothing but the surging of the cold waves." 
 
 To another friend she writes : " I have passed through a 
 very severe ordeal in separating from the loving and beloved 
 companion of half a century, and in the breaking up of the 
 cosy little nest where we had passed so many comfortable 
 
248 LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 
 
 years. I do not suppose that time will ever entirely heal the 
 deep wound, but I trust the sharpness of suffering will sub 
 side sufficiently to enable me to be of some use during the 
 remainder of the time that remains to me in this world. I 
 cannot solve the problem of this world, except by supposing 
 it to be a primary school for another ; but that other world 
 seems too far off, and the conditions of existence there too 
 vague, to be positive relief from the loneliness of separation. 
 I can only wait and trust." 
 
 " Wait and trust/ she did, but for a time life w r as become 
 a hard struggle. People are very kind, but I cannot banish 
 the desolate feeling that I belong to nobody and nobody be 
 longs to me," she tells a friend during the year following her 
 husband s death. Such recognition of loneliness is the al 
 most inevitable fate of one or other of a childless pair, who, 
 for a long term of years, have been all in all to each other. 
 Mrs. Child had never a son or daughter of her own, though, 
 as some one said, "a great many of other people s." 
 
 Calmness and comfort came with time and with the min 
 istrations of the many friends who surrounded her. Her last 
 book, "Aspirations of the "World," a volume of selections on 
 moral and religious subjects, was published in 1878. 
 
 On the morning of October 20, 1880, she died, after a few 
 brief moments of suffering. The generous heart which had 
 beat with all the strongest pulses of her century had at last 
 expended its force, and peacefully and easily the end came. 
 
 The funeral was, as befitted one like her, plain and simple. 
 Mr. Whitticr tells us : " The pall-bearers were elderly, plain 
 farmers in the neighborhood, and led by the old white-haired 
 undertaker, the procession wound its way to the not distant 
 burial-ground over the red and gold of fallen leaves, and 
 under the half-covered October sky. Just after her body was 
 consigned to the earth a magnificent rainbow spanned, with 
 its arc of glory, the eastern sky." 
 
 We can hardly close this little sketch more fittingly than 
 with the beautiful words added to her recently published 
 " Correspondence " by Mr. Wendell Phillips : 
 
LYDIA MARIA CHILD. 249 
 
 " A dear, lovable woman, welcome at a sick bedside ; as 
 much in place there as when facing an angry nation ; con 
 tented with the home she had made. A wise counsellor, one 
 who made your troubles hers, and pondered thoughtfully 
 before she spoke her hearty word. She was the kind of 
 woman one would choose to represent woman s entrance into 
 broader life. Modest, womanly, sincere, simple, solid, real, 
 loyal, to be trusted; equal to affairs, and yet above them; 
 mother wit ripened by careful training and enriched by the 
 lore of ages ; a hand ready for fireside help and a mystic 
 loving to wander on the edge of the actual, reaching out up 
 into the infinite and the unfathomable, so that life was lifted 
 to romance, to heroism, and to loftiest faith." 
 16 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 MAEY CLEMMER. 
 
 fcY LILIAN WHITING. 
 
 Mary Clemmer s Ancestry -Pen-portraits of Her Father and Mother Her 
 Childhood School-life and Early Education Publishing Her First 
 Verses Beginning Her Literary Career Removal to New York First 
 Newspaper Letters Marvellous Industry and Capacity for Work 
 Contracting to Write a Column a Day for Three Years A Chapter from 
 Her Experiences During the War Vivid Description of the Surrender of 
 Maryland Heights Her Journalistic Work How She Gathers Materials 
 for "A Woman s Letter from Washington " Charles Sumner s Friend 
 ship A Busy Life Sought and Caressed by Society Tribute to the 
 Memory of Alice and Phoebe Gary. 
 
 MONG the women of letters in our own country, 
 few have appealed to the public by work that 
 has attracted so wide a personal response as has 
 Mary Clemmer. 
 
 In 1866 she inaugurated an original and 
 specific line of journalistic work that at once 
 fixed public attention. Thousands of families 
 became subscribers to the "New York Inde 
 pendent" when that journal began the publication 
 of "A Woman s Letter from Washington/ Marj r 
 Clemmer s first letter to the "Independent" was written 
 March 4, 1866. In the years that have passed between that 
 date and the present, Mrs. Clemmer has become widely known 
 as a poet and novelist ; yet it is as the fine interpreter of the 
 important phases of Washington life through an eventful series 
 of years that we see her most distinctive work. Her letters 
 from the Capital have always been significant of fine percep 
 tion, wide comprehension, and a refined insight into the sub 
 tle relations and the undercurrents of human life. Strong in 
 their political characterization, these letters have been a potent 
 250 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 251 
 
 force in the shaping of national issues by their power to 
 influence public opinion. 
 
 Mary Clemmer was born in Utica, New York. Her 
 father, Abraham Clemmer, a native of Pennsylvania, was of 
 Huguenot descent. Her mother, Margaret Kneale, was born 
 in the Isle of Man. 
 
 The Clemmer family trace their origin to Alsatia, France, 
 on the borders of Germany. Their name in the fatherland 
 was spelled Klemmer. In 1685, when Louis XIV. pushed 
 his persecutions of the Huguenots past the borders of France 
 into the very heart of Germany, the Clemmer family were 
 among the million Huguenots who then fled from their native 
 soil to seek refuge in strange lands. They settled in Berks 
 county, Pennsylvania, before the American Revolution. 
 Jonas Clemmer, the father of Abraham Clemmer, an edu 
 cated man, a teacher by profession, died when his son was 
 but five years of age his death changing the entire earthly 
 destiny of his child. 
 
 The mother of Abraham Clemmer, born Barbara Schelley, 
 came also from Huguenot stock. The male members of 
 her family for many generations had been practitioners of 
 medicine, or professors of medical science. Her brothers 
 were educated as physicians, and their sons to-day are prac 
 tising physicians in the State of Pennsylvania. She, a girl, 
 denied the liberal education bestowed upon her brothers, 
 possessed in no less degree than they the instinct of healing. 
 With none of the training that bestows a college diploma she 
 became famous in the country surrounding her home for her 
 knowledge of medicines, her skill in using them, and in 
 healing the sick. A woman of magnificent constitution, of 
 great force of character, of profound sweetness of disposi 
 tion, she died in the homestead in Pennsylvania, where she 
 lived from her youth, as late as the year 1873, agod eighty- 
 two years. 
 
 The early death of his father, with the burden that death 
 cast upon his mother of caring for a growing family, were, 
 together, the causes which denied to Abraham Clemmer the 
 
252 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 liberal education, the thorough mental discipline, which, up 
 to his time, had been the birthright of his family. 
 
 In response to a request from the writer of this sketch, 
 Mary Clemmer writes of her father : 
 
 " The first memory I recall of the aspect of my father was 
 when I was five years old. They placed me in a high chair at 
 the tea-table, and instead of eating, I sat gazing at my father, 
 because to my child s vision he looked so handsome. My first 
 outburst of grief I recall at the same table, when a person told 
 me that some time my father s raven hair would be gray. 
 The announcement to me was so terrible I burst into tears. 
 
 " Abraham Clemmer carried in his bearing and on his face 
 the visible stamp of a superior race. He was of fine stature, 
 w r ith an alert step and a haughty poise of the head. His 
 features were patrician in outline and expression. His head 
 high, his hair black and curling, his brows arched, his hazel 
 eyes dark and full, his nose finely aquiline, his mouth as ex 
 quisitely cut as Apollo s, with the suggestion of disdain in 
 its curves, yet full of sweetness. This was the beauty of his 
 prime. In old age, in its patriarchal aspect, it became still 
 more uncommon, and in death was so remarkable that those 
 who had never seen him in life, looking upon him in Ins last 
 sleep, robed for the grave, recall his face to-day, with the 
 seal of ineffable peace upon it, as one of the most nobly 
 beautiful that they had ever gazed upon in death. 
 
 " He had the temperament of the poet. He loved Nature 
 with that passion which finds in her presence perpetual satis 
 faction and solace. He loved beauty with the fine fervor 
 that makes its love religion. He loved music with an enthu 
 siasm that was in itself an inspiration. He wrote with great 
 elegance, drew with remarkable accuracy and facility was 
 a natural linguist. 
 
 " With due opportunity ho would have excelled as an artist, 
 or have succeeded in any profession demanding the develop 
 ment of the finest mental faculties. What in his whole life 
 he never attained was the power of calculation indispensable 
 to merely material success. 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 255 
 
 w Born of a race for many generations devoted exclusively 
 to artistic and scientific pursuits, the calculating insight, the 
 forethought of the money-getter, the commercial instinct 
 that commands financial gain were left by nature out of his 
 temperamental and mental make-up. 
 
 " Unadapted in every way to a life of business, the circum 
 stances of his lot doomed him early to ; it, with the inevita 
 ble sequence failure in all the results that build up financial 
 fortune. He lived and died a poor man, bequeathing to his 
 children as their supreme earthly inheritance, the necessity 
 of shaping life for themselves. His generosity was a fault, 
 giving to others, often to the unworthy, what he should have 
 kept for himself and his children. Honorable at any cost to 
 himself, his heart was full of charity. In my whole life I 
 never heard him speak to the detriment of any human being. 
 The absent were always safe in his kindly and gentle speech. 
 His youth glowed with fire and with dreams for the future 
 whose fulfilment the limitations of his lot made impossible. 
 
 "No man ever put more patience, more industry, more 
 energy, into his struggles for a home and a competency. 
 With a little, only a little, more iron in his nature, he could 
 have compelled adversity to have yielded to fortune, could 
 have commanded the friends who never dreamed that they 
 could have served him till it was too late. It was not in 
 him. He yielded to the blows of adverse fate he never 
 struck back. He accepted at last the fact of material failure 
 as the final sum of his lot accepted it with a gentleness and 
 a patience which lifted its very pathos into the atmosphere of 
 serenity. But the absolute consciousness of this fact was the 
 final blow of fortune. It broke his spirit ; after it he never 
 struggled again. He mellowed into old age with a childlike- 
 ness and sweetness of temper which won the hearts of all who 
 approached him. Years of wasting malady he bore with a 
 patience that was angelic. Hour by hour he drew constant 
 solace from Nature, from the beauty of the green earth 
 that he loved. The joy of sight never foiled him till it failed 
 him on earth forever. Not till the day he died was his chair 
 
256 MARY CLEMMER 
 
 by the window vacant, where for years he had gazed out on 
 the roses of his garden and on the gay sights of the streets 
 of the Capital city. 
 
 "That Christmas Sabbath morning, 1881, when asked if 
 ho felt able to go down stairs, for the first time he shook his 
 head. Before another morning God took him. 
 
 " A Christian believer from youth, with a smile ineffable 
 which chanced to fall upon the face of his child his last look 
 on earth, without a sigh he passed out to the Father of his 
 spirit. Never did that FATHER gather back to His all-loving 
 heart a more ingenuous, a more gentle, a more loving child. 
 
 " Such, ever mourned, ever missed, ever loved, was is 
 my father. 
 
 " One day that was his very own a day all balm and azure 
 and gold we laid all of him that was dust in God s acre in 
 the inalienable churchyard of Rock Creek, in a suburb of the 
 city of Washington, where the pines will sough, the birds 
 sing above his head, the creek murmur, the flowers bloom 
 beside him, till the Resurrection." 
 
 The mother of Mary Clemmcr (born Margaret Kneale) 
 came from the Isle of Man. This little island, in the storm- 
 tossed Irish sea, has an importance wholly disproportionate 
 to its geographical extent. It has a government of its own, 
 a House of Parliament, a people, descended through genera 
 tions of noble blood, a striking and eventful history. In 
 Hawthorne s English Note-book he has recorded his impres 
 sions of the historic spot ; and from its scenery and romantic 
 traditions Scott collected his material for " Peveril of the 
 Peak." The island history dates back to the time that the 
 Norsemen were mighty in the West. 
 
 Wordsworth s famous line, 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land," 
 
 is in a poem that was "suggested by a picture of Peele Castle 
 in a storm." Just outside the ramparts of that castle Mar 
 garet Kneale was born, and under its ancient archways she 
 played through all her childhood. The influences of this 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 2,57 
 
 spot entered into her life, and have flowered into conscious 
 ness in the life of her gifted daughter. 
 
 The Isle of Man lies, in a temperature that fosters a 
 wonderful beauty and luxuriance of nature. Fuschias grow 
 and mass their scarlet blossoms ten and twelve feet high. The 
 mist-crowned heights shine sun-touched and fair above the 
 purple defiles of rocky valleys, over which foam-crested 
 cascades rush, tumbling into the river below. An old legend 
 runs that the isle had once a wizard king who enshrouded it 
 with vapor. Here King Harold Haarfager reigned, and here 
 the Vikings held their sea-throne. Myth and legend have 
 vanished now. The island is only seventy-five miles from 
 Liverpool, and a line of daily steamers connects it with the 
 outer world. Yet something in the sturdy poise of its race 
 recalls the old motto of the land, Quocunque jeceris stabit. 
 [However you throw it, it will stand.] The old enchant 
 ment hovers over the spot, although a sail of six hours brings 
 one into the life of to-day. 
 
 Mary Clemmer writes of her mother and her parentage : 
 " William Kneale is a name still most honorably known in the 
 Isle of Man as borne by the author, Mr. William Kneale, of 
 Douglas. In 1827 my grandfather, William Kneale, a deeply 
 religious and studious man, desiring for his young children a 
 larger outlook and more extended educational advantages 
 than the Isle of Man at that time afforded, sold his patrimony 
 with that of his proud, high-spirited wife (born Margaret 
 Crane) and sailed for America. His destination with his 
 family was the State of Ohio ; but meeting friends from the 
 island by the way at the young city of Utica, New York, 
 he paused on his journey and never resumed it. He at once 
 purchased a homestead, which, now in the heart of the city of 
 Utica, is still in possession of his family. In this homestead 
 grew to womanhood, and was married, Margaret Kneale. 
 
 " She Avas a dazzlingly fair, wide-eyed, blue-eyed daughter 
 of the Vikings. She brought with her to bleak New York 
 not only the radiant complexion for which the women of 
 Mona s Isle are famous, but also all the best inherited traits 
 
258 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 of her ancient race, a passion for liberty in its relation to 
 the whole human family ; absolute faith in God ; the deepest, 
 most spontaneous religious fervor, with an intense desire for 
 knowledge that pervaded her entire being. 
 
 " The city of Utica, settled by many of the oldest and most 
 cultivated families of New England, lured from their sterile 
 surroundings by the opulent soil and magnificent promise of 
 the Mohawk Valley, was from its very beginning a small 
 centre of religious, educational, philanthropic, and reforma 
 tory ideas and action. It was a rallying point for the early 
 " Abolitionists." Beriah Green, Alvan Stuart, and Gerritt 
 Smith, in those days were the apostles and prophets of free 
 dom to the slave. From the convocations over w r hich they 
 presided issued such Abolitionists as John Brown, William 
 Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. 
 
 "To the influence of such public teachers, to the marvel 
 lously active spirit of reform which in all the churches 
 insisted on the highest thinking, acting, and living in every 
 phase of human life ; added to the same influence in her own 
 home, wherein her father was not only the father of his chil 
 dren, but a father in the church, niay be traced that lifelong 
 devotion to every good cause, especially to that of the down 
 trodden and oppressed everywhere, which marks Margaret 
 Clemmer in Washington to-day, as it marked young Mar 
 garet Kneale in Utica long ago." 
 
 In this city, where he chanced to be making a casual visit, 
 she met and married Abraham Clemmer, and here Mary 
 Clemmer and other children were born. 
 
 As a child Mary Clemmer is described by those who have 
 know r n her from infancy as being singularly beautiful and 
 engaging in manner, and as living much in her ideal world, 
 even in those early days. Seated in her little rocking-chair, 
 or wandering in the shaded grounds, while the wind touched 
 caressingly the sunny, breeze-blown hair, she would compose 
 rhymes, repeating them to herself, long before she learned the 
 use of a pen. To the curious student of heredity here was a 
 rare and a wonderful mingling of forces. The poetic legends 
 
MART CLEMMER. 259 
 
 and the magic of the Isle of Man that were assimilated into 
 the life of the mother ; the positive element giving creative 
 force from the grandmother, and the deeply artistic nature of 
 the father coloring her entire being and attuning it to the 
 inspirational temperament. 
 
 When she had just passed childhood, business circum 
 stances led Abraham Clemmer to remove to Westfield, Mass., 
 where two brothers of his wife, one Hon. Thomas Kneale, 
 had already settled. 
 
 In due time Mary Clemmer entered the academy of West- 
 field, one of whose early teachers long before her birth was 
 the famous Mrs. Emma Willard. It was one of those stable 
 and stately schools of the past, where young men were fitted 
 for college and young girls were taught dubious French, and 
 how to read fluently Virgil and Homer. Naturally enough 
 books were to her a passion. The principal of the school, 
 William C. Goldthwaite, one of the rarest and best teachers 
 Massachusetts ever produced, took great interest in this 
 young girl, and especial pleasure and pains in the cultivation 
 of her mind. While a student in the Westfield Academy her 
 first line in verse was put into print. Read as a school 
 exercise, it pleased one of her teachers, Samuel Davis, 
 sufficiently to impel him to send it to his friend, Samuel 
 Bowles, who printed it at once in the " Springfield Re 
 publican." 
 
 In every life there is an hour when the keynote of the 
 future is struck. At Westfield this hour came to Mary 
 Clemmer. For a literary exercise was chosen one day that 
 sweetest poem of Alice Gary s, " Pictures of Memory." Its 
 beauty was noted by Professor Goldthwaite, and after dwell 
 ing on its rhythm as the most perfect in language, he went on 
 to speak of the life of its author, Alice Gary. 
 
 " It fell upon me like a tale of romance," said Mrs. Clem 
 mer, in referring to this time, "and I went on thinking of her." 
 In that hour was forged the unseen links of a chain of lifelong 
 friendship between two noble women. Natives of the same 
 land of song, the subtle affinities of nature reached through 
 
2 GO MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 time and space. Years after, when the young girl whose 
 nature responded so swiftly to that poem had grown to early 
 Avomanhood, she went to New York, and the woman-poet she 
 had cherished as an ideal became to her the wise counsellor, 
 the tender friend : while in turn the young girl met her with; 
 a new and rare appreciation, and became her trusted friend, 
 her perfect biographer. 
 
 When the young girl went to New York she went bearing 
 another name. While yet a school-girl, with no knowledge 
 of actual life, with no desire of her own to impel her to the 
 step she took, moved by misfortune that had fallen upon her 
 home, she yielded to the wishes and the will of others, and 
 was married to a man many years her senior. All that was 
 spiritually right in this relation called a marriage was its 
 final, legal annulment. When with mutual good-will the 
 two honorably parted, she in law, as she was by birth, 
 became again by title solely Mary Clemmer. 
 
 Before this separation occurred, in the first flower of 
 her youth, while living in the city of New York, her 
 artistic nature found its first expression. Her first essay 
 in the journalism she was destined to ennoble and adorn 
 was madein the columns of the Utica "Morning Herald," 
 to which, she contributed a series of letters from New 
 York. 
 
 About this time Mrs. Clemmer wrote a touching little waif 
 of a poem which has never since that date been republished. 
 As it holds in its simple pathos a clue to her complex inner 
 life at this period, the following stanzas of the lines entitled 
 " My Little Sister " are here reproduced : 
 
 " Come to my arms, my little sister, 
 
 Thou of the large brown eyes, 
 In whose deep wells thoughts softly tremble 
 
 Like light in twilight skies. 
 Come to my arms, my little sister, 
 
 Thou of the gleaming hair; 
 Whose sunny life ne er wore a shadow 
 
 Lost from the wing of care. 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 261 
 
 " I ve joined the host of eager runners 
 
 Whose race is for a prize ; 
 My soul hath laid on Toil s great altar 
 
 Its holiest sacrifice. 
 A life of lofty aim and effort 
 
 Is that which suits me best, 
 Till I lie still on Death s chill bosom 
 
 I do not ask to rest. 
 
 " To-day I ve paused amid the struggle, 
 
 I ve banished every care ; 
 I ve passed again Home s placid portal 
 
 And ta en my vacant^ chair. 
 My little sister s fond caresses, 
 
 Her winsome, winning ways, 
 Make glad my heart that loves and blesses 
 
 And joins her pleasant plays, 
 Till I live over in her presence 
 
 My childhood s merry days, 
 
 " Still play with me, my little sister, 
 
 I am so glad to-night, 
 That childhood in earth s darkest places 
 
 Spreads out its wings of light, 
 That I may turn from earth s proud teachers, 
 
 Turn from the earth s deceit, 
 And learn so many holy lessons 
 
 At childhood s sinless feet." 
 
 Beginning with no practical training for, or actual know 
 ledge of journalism, she, groping her way, obeyed the law 
 of necessity, and through her obedience to it at last came her 
 opportunity. In early youth she came to know many cares 
 and to bear heavy responsibilities, which together left her no 
 choice of what she would do. 
 
 Recalling this time Mrs. Clemmer wrote of it in a private 
 letter to a friend : 
 
 "No one can grow as a writer unless she grows as a 
 thinker. Comparatively few appreciate the value of the 
 discipline of trained faculties, that may come through doing 
 faithfully and well the drudgery, so to speak, of intellectual 
 
262 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 work. ... I once entered into a written contract to write 
 one column per day on any subject I was instructed to write 
 on, for three years in advance, and at the end of that 
 three years I had not, for a single day, failed of fulfilling 
 my task, which included everything from book revision, 
 comments on government, public men and affairs, to a com 
 mon advertisement paragraph. You see that I did not miss 
 the apprenticeship of literary work. ... It was a toilsome 
 time, but one positive satisfaction I feel in looking back is the 
 consciousness of the entire command it gave me of all my 
 mental forces. It cured me utterly of the mental perversity 
 that waits for the inspiration of creative moods to do what, is 
 necessary to be done. No matter how great the disinclina 
 tion, whenever I had anything to do I did it, illy sometimes, 
 sometimes better, but / did it, the very best I could at that 
 moment. The final result was not deterioration in style, but 
 a much higher aggregate of forces and of command." 
 
 There are certain very severe limits that must suggest 
 themselves in attempting biographical details of one who is 
 in and of the life of to-day. " The wreath of immortelles 
 that could be fitly placed on a grave cannot be laid on a 
 library table." The life that is dramatic in outward facts is 
 the exceptional life. Rarely is it that of the eventful inner 
 life whose creations are its crises. Men are born and go 
 through life and die with little in the framework of outer 
 circumstances to distinguish one from another. Events 
 spring from within. 
 
 Yet when the war came Mary Clemmer was literally in it. 
 In her novel " Eirene," the chapter on the " Surrender of 
 Maryland Heights " was written from personal experience and 
 personal observation. At that time "Eirene" was running 
 as a serial in " Putnam s Monthly," and this vivid and graphic 
 picture of a war event was widely copied by the press of that 
 day, and was reproduced in " LittelFs Living Age," and in 
 the "London Athenaeum." 
 
 From this memorable description of the surrender of 
 Maryland Heights is extracted the following : 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 263 
 
 SEPTEMBER, 1862. 
 
 We had been expecting to hear the rebel guns for a week. 
 From the moment that we learned certainly that the Confederates 
 were in possession of Frederick ; that they had destroyed the 
 railroad bridge at Monocacy; that they had entirely surrounded 
 us, we knew that they were only awaiting their own convenience 
 to attack Maryland Heights. 
 
 " If we can only keep the Heights," we said, as we looked with 
 anxious eyes to the green pastures above us, " if we can only 
 keep the Heights, we are safe." We could not forget that Jack 
 son said, when last here, " Give me Maryland Heights, and I will 
 defy the world." 
 
 Of what avail would be the force in battle-line on Bolivar 
 Heights, three miles away ; of the array of infantry lining the 
 road to Charlestown ; the earthworks, the rifle-pits, the bat 
 teries of what avail all, if from the other side Jackson ascended 
 Maryland Heights and turned our guns against us ! 
 
 The boys had just had their breakfast on Saturday morning, 
 September 13, when the quick, cruel ring of musketry cutting the 
 air made them start. On one side was the Shenandoah, bounded 
 by Loudoun Heights, on the other the Potomac, with the Heights 
 of Maryland, a high, green, precipitous wall, towering above its 
 opposite shore. 
 
 Jackson had come. Through the blue of that transcendent 
 morning the sunlit woods upon the mountain-tops were echoing 
 with death. Volley after volley shivered the air, and with it the 
 bodies of men. At first the report was far up on the very moun 
 tain summit; then it grew nearer, rattling louder, and I knew 
 that the enemy were advancing. I heard their dreadful war-cry 
 and caught the flash of their bayonets piercing the green woods. 
 
 Suddenly the cry grew fainter, the resounding guns seemed 
 muffled in the thicket, and a loud shout from the soldiers of the 
 republic told that they were driving back the foe. The sounds of 
 battle palpitated to and fro, the double line of bayonets glanced, 
 advancing, retreating, while I listened with suspended breath. 
 The fight on the mountain was to decide our fate. Below the 
 artillerists were at work. The great guns pointed upward. 
 Shells screamed and hissed, tearing the green woods, poisoning 
 the pure ether with sulphurous smoke. Ambulances began to 
 wind down the steep mountain road with their freight of wounded. 
 Many of these brave soldiers were so shattered that they could 
 
264 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 only be carried on blankets, and the sad procession was swelled 
 by the bodies of two of our artillerists, shattered to death at their 
 guns. ... It was just noon when the musketry firing ceased. 
 Tents were struck. Gannon were spiked and sent tumbling 
 down the mountain gorge. Bayonets flashed out from the woods. 
 Long columns of men began moving down the mountain defile. 
 O, saddest, most disgraceful sight of all, the flag which waved 
 from that mountain-top, our signal of freedom and hope, they tore 
 it down. " The Heights are surrendered ! " From the ranks 
 came one curse, long and deep : " If we had not had a traitor for 
 a leader we should not have surrendered." 
 
 It dawned, that memorable Sabbath morning, September 14, 
 1862, in superlative splendor. Through that long azure-gold 
 morning a morning so absolutely perfect in the blending of its 
 elements, in its fusion of fragrance, light, and color, that it can 
 never die out of my consciousness, I sat at the window making 
 bandages; sunshine, balm, and ether suffused the august mountains, 
 and the blue ether which ensphered us. All were unheeded while 
 we awaited the terrors of the day. 
 
 In the spring of 1866 Mary Clemmer wrote from Wash 
 ington her first letter to the "Independent." From that date 
 to the present few weeks have passed during the congressional 
 sessions that she has not contributed to that journal. "A 
 Woman s Letter from Washington" was significant of refined 
 culture, of bright and keen perception, of an insight into the 
 nobler motives of life. It was strong in political character 
 ization, and was apt to photograph pretty clearly politicians, 
 parties, and principles for the delectation of the reading 
 public. In brief, these letters treated topics of thought 
 rather than the mere surfaces of things. 
 
 The feeling with which Mrs. Clemmer looked on all this 
 Vanity Fair is indicated in the following extract from one of 
 her letters in the " Independent " : 
 
 " This letter is only a good-morning and a good-evening, 
 dear friends a salutation on the threshold of winter, as we 
 meet once more with all the summer between us and our last 
 good-by. The world I have left and the world I meet do not 
 
MART CLEMMER. 265 
 
 easily coalesce. The strength begotten of mountain heights ; 
 the peace of stormless lakes ; the pervasive fragrance of the 
 autumnal woods ; the music of a tiny leaf stirring in the blue 
 air ; the rustle of a squirrel scampering through the crisp 
 ferns with his winter nuts ; the lowing of the little black cow, 
 bossed like jet against the twilight sky, coming home across the 
 russet flat all these sights and sounds of a pastoral sphere 
 have come with me hither. Their music is in my ears and 
 their love is in my heart, as I confront this other world, 
 which is no relation of mine the world of rush, and hurry, 
 and of roaring streets ; the World of Vanity and show ; of 
 policy, treachery, and place ; of shallow insights ; of harsh 
 misjudgment and broken faith. This is not my world. I 
 confess to a reluctant hand that lifts a pen to tell of its doings. 
 I am in it but not of it." 
 
 The years that Mrs. Clemmer lias passed at the national 
 capital have been to her varied, eventful, rich in experiences. 
 She went to Washington in her early youth, with all her 
 latent capabilities untried and unproved. 
 
 Her first sustained work there comprised seven newspaper 
 letters each week. She passed long mornings in the ladies 
 gallery of the Senate or of the Hall of Representatives. 
 Nothing about her, not even a scrap of a note-book or pencil, 
 indicated the professional listener. The letters being of an 
 editorial rather than of a reportorial nature, did not require her 
 to appear in the outward rdle of a correspondent. Returning 
 to her rooms, she sent the long letters and telegraphic matter 
 by a messenger who came for them. In the evening she held 
 herself free to receive friends, or for social engagements. In 
 her parlors might have been found the most eminent men of 
 the day. 
 
 The esteem in which Mrs. Clemmer s work was held is 
 indicated in two impromptu notes written in the Senate 
 Chamber by Charles Sumner. One of these bears no date 
 save that of the day of the week. Written at his desk and 
 handed by a page to Mrs. Clemmer in the ladies gallery, it 
 runs : 
 
206 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 " I am glad to see you again, even at a distance. I wish I could 
 tempt you to my house, where you will find some literary curi 
 osities. Sincerely yours, CHARLES SUMNER." 
 
 A pleasant word of greeting this was to the young woman 
 who had that clay returned to her post from a brief sojourn 
 in New York. Another note from Mr. Sumner runs as fol 
 lows : 
 
 " SENATE CHAMBER, 22d March, 1871. 
 
 "I have always thought of you with honor and with a con 
 stant desire to know personally one who does so much by her 
 pen for ideas which I have much at heart. I hope that you 
 will pardon me if I say that we are co-workers in the same field. 
 I am so little abroad that we have not met, but I trust that it may 
 not be so always. 
 
 " Sincerely yours, CHARLES SUMNER." 
 
 That trust was fulfilled, and for the years following this 
 date to that of his death the honored Massachusetts Senator 
 and Mrs. Clemmer were warm personal friends. Perhaps 
 no man was ever more truly apprehended or more fairly 
 interpreted than was Mr. Sumner by Mrs. Clemmer. Of 
 him in one of her " Independent " letters she says : " A man 
 solitary by the primal law of his nature, preoccupied, ab 
 sorbed, aristocratic in instinct, though a leveller in ideas, 
 never a demagogue, never a politician, he is the born master 
 and expounder of fundamental principles." 
 
 Under date of March 5, 1871, Mrs. Clemmer wrote to the 
 "Independent" concerning Lincoln and the Eepublican party 
 as follows : 
 
 " It has been said that when God wants a great man he 
 makes one. I wish that he would make the great man for 
 the Republican party. In Lincoln He gave the man for the 
 time. The occasion came, and ten thousand sprang equal to 
 the occasion. Repressed men, half-developed men, who else 
 had never risen to the full stature of manhood, in the ex 
 tremity of battle towered heroic as the gods. They did their 
 wor.k and vanished. With a few exceptions, the grandest 
 men of our generation have already perished in their prime. 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 267 
 
 Every epoch thrusts forth its demand. Where now is the 
 man for the hour ? The leader of a great party should have 
 not only the intellect to be the highest expounder of its 
 principles, but also embody that in his own manhood which 
 arouses and holds the enthusiasm of the masses for the 
 principles which he ^maintains. 
 
 " While he lived nobody suspected Mr. Lincoln of being a 
 great man. We did not even know how we loved him till he 
 died, and crape floated from every door. Where now in 
 high place can we find a man so simply grand ? Where one 
 who could be trusted to use limitless power as he did, solely 
 to attain the ends of justice and mercy, without thought of 
 himself ? If I am God s instrument, He will never forsake 
 the thing that he uses, but it must accomplish His purpose, 
 I once heard him say, in the heyday of his power, with a 
 humility and sadness never to be forgotten. What is great 
 ness? It is not intellect alone. It is not moral and emo 
 tional quality only. It is character compounded of both. It 
 is wisdom, it is high thought, it is wide vision. It is magna 
 nimity, it is mercy, it is love, it is gentleness and child- 
 heartedness, it is forgiveness, it is supremacy over all 
 littleness. I believe in my race. I believe in man. I pray 
 God to raise up such a chief to save the Republican party to 
 the land which owes it so much." 
 
 The decade between 1870 to 1880 were years in which 
 Mary Clemrner achieved a great amount of creative work, 
 journalistic correspondence, novels, poems, the lives of Phoebe 
 and Alice Gary, "Ten Years in Washington," all followed in 
 quick succession. This work, which in its quantity and quality 
 was enough in itself to absorb the entire time and energies of 
 its author, was really the achievement of a crowded life, 
 of a woman sought and caressed by society ; who was con 
 stantly partaking of, and contributing to, the gay world s 
 elegancies and ceremonies. 
 
 In October, 1872, Mrs. Clemmer completed the biography 
 of the Gary sisters, a work which long intimacy and residence 
 17 
 
208 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 in their home had peculiarly fitted her to undertake. One 
 must always feel in reading Mrs. Clemmer s memorial of 
 these poet-sisters that Providence prepared the work in 
 advance for her, and, in the meantime, prepared her for the 
 work. It is in this book that Mrs. Clemmer pays a beautiful 
 tribute to Alice Gary, as the one friend of her life, in these 
 words : 
 
 " For her sake let me say what, as a woman, she could be 
 and was to another. She found me with habits of thought 
 and of action unformed, and with nearly all the life of woman 
 hood before me. She taught me self-help, courage, and 
 faith. She showed me how I might help others and help 
 myself. Wherever I went I carried with me her love as a 
 treasure and a staff. How many times I leaned upon it and 
 grow strong. It never fell from me. It never failed me. 
 No matter how life might serve me, I believed without a 
 doubt that her friendship would never fail me, and it never 
 did. Yet, saying this, I have not said, and have no power 
 to say what, as a soul, I owe to her." 
 
 In this biography, and especially in depicting the life and 
 character of Alice Gary, to whom she was strongly drawn by 
 that mysterious spiritual affinity which defies for us all analy 
 sis, Mary Clemmer did some of her most perfect literary work. 
 
 Of Alice Gary she wrote: "The intellectual life of 
 neither man nor woman can be justly judged without a 
 knowledge of the conditions which impelled that life and gave 
 to it shape and substance. Alice Gary felt within her soul 
 the divine impulse of genius, but hers was essentially a 
 feminine soul, shy, loving, full of longings for home, over 
 burdened with tenderness, capable of an unselfish, lifelong 
 devotion to one. Whatever her mental or spiritual gifts, no 
 mere ambition could ever have borne such a woman out 
 into the world to seek and to make her fortune alone. 
 Had Alice Gary married the man whom she then loved 
 she would never have come to New York at all, to coin the 
 rare gifts of her brain and soul into money for shelter and 
 bread." 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 269 
 
 The beginning of the friendship with Alice Cary, years 
 before they met face to face, is thus exquisitely told by Mrs. 
 Clcnnner : 
 
 " Years ago, in an old academy in Massachusetts, its pre 
 ceptor gave to a young girl a poem to learn for a Wednesday 
 exercise. It began, 
 
 Of all the beautiful pictures 
 
 That hang on Memory s wall, 
 Is one of a dim old forest, 
 That seemeth best of all. 
 
 "After the girl had recited the poem to her teacher, he told 
 her that Edgar Poe had said, and that he himself concurred in 
 the opinion, that in rhythm it was one of the most perfect 
 lyrics in the English language. He then proceeded to tell 
 the story of the one who wrote it of her life in her Western 
 home, of the fact that she and her sister Phoebe had come to 
 New York to seek their fortune, and to make a place for 
 themselves in literature. It fell like a tale of romance on 
 the girl s heart ; and from that hour she saved every utterance 
 that she could find of Alice Gary s, and spent much time 
 thinking about her, till in a dim way she came to seem like a 
 much-loved friend." 
 
 Of the spiritual experiences of Alice Cary she recorded : 
 "The life of one woman who has conquered her own spirit, 
 who, alone and unassisted, through the mastery of her own 
 will, has wrought out from the hardest and most adverse 
 conditions a pure, sweet, and noble life, placed herself among 
 the world s workers, made her heart and thought felt in ten 
 thousand unknown homes the life of one such woman is 
 worth more to all living women, proves more for the possi 
 bilities of womanhood, for its final and finest advancement, 
 its ultimate recognition and highest success, than ten thou 
 sand theories or eloquent orations on the theme. Such a 
 woman was Alice Cary. Mentally and spiritually she was 
 especially endowed with the rarest gifts ; but no less the low 
 liest of all her sisters may take on new faith and courage 
 from her life." 
 
270 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 Mary Clemmer s literary work is not only widely compre 
 hensive and sound in thought, but it has a peculiarly sympa 
 thetic quality which gives it an enduring hold upon the hearts 
 of the people. It is work especially characterized by insight 
 by the spiritual sight which sees beyond. Sympathy is 
 the polarized light of the mind which reveals the hidden 
 chambers, the secret architecture of human life. It is the 
 supreme endowment of the poet, and it is the predominant 
 poetic temperament of Mrs. Clemmer that gives her writings 
 a vitality which is felt rather than described. This element 
 of her work finds, perhaps, more forcible illustration in the 
 memorial of the lives of Alice and Phoebe Gary, in her poems 
 and in her journalistic work, than in her novels. There are 
 logical reasons for this. Mrs. Clemmer has by nature much 
 of the creative force that is purely artistic. The work done 
 by this type of organization demands not so much repose as 
 freedom ; not so much time as it does the consciousness of 
 time. 
 
 In journalistic work Mrs. Clemmer is spontaneous, and 
 infuses into it much of that freedom of utterance which forms 
 the magnetism of private letters. She does not fill out a 
 stilted mechanical framework, but fearlessly writes out her 
 self her clear views and vivid impressions ; and, as a journal 
 istic letter is not of a lengthened structure, she gives the 
 ideal type of a newspaper letter. 
 
 Her poems are an utterance. They express, to all who 
 feel their subtle interpretation, the intensity of the inner life 
 of this woman-artist, an inner flame that burns not for this 
 world. You feel how it is that she " hears the songs of 
 heaven afar." It is the sound of the living waters to one 
 who cannot drink ; the far-falling echo that her ear catches 
 amid the din and strife of the market-place, which these 
 poems voice and repeat again in their own music ; and to 
 their exquisite quality we would add nothing, take away 
 nothing. They stand as the indices to a life, and their un 
 dercurrents of meaning are to him who holds the kej r to their 
 sacred harmony. They draw their inspiration from the hid- 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 271 
 
 den wells of being, from a woman s deepest experiences, 
 love, life, and death. 
 
 The logical reason, which, in a critical estimate of Mrs. 
 Clemmer s varied work, may be applied to the fact that her 
 novels have not, as yet, ever exhibited her full power, lies 
 in the very nature of the work itself. A novel is not written 
 in an hour, a day, a week. It requires complete surrender. 
 It does not demand an application that is utterly unremitting, 
 but its characters must take possession of the mind in such a 
 manner as to develop naturally. This class of artistic work 
 cannot be forced into a hothouse growth, indeed, what 
 true work of the artist can be ? It is easily seen how in Mrs. 
 Clemmer s crowded life, that of a woman in society ; who 
 entertains largely in her own elegant home ; who holds a 
 leading place on the editorial staff of a weekly paper of New 
 York city ; who averaged for years seven journalistic letters 
 per week, letters accurate in facts, fine in philosophical 
 generalization, and vigorous in thought : from this data it 
 will be readily seen how incongruous the writing of novels 
 must be to such a life. " Any work, the presentation of 
 which should fill the whole soul, cannot be undertaken in ex 
 traneous moments snatched from other duties," says Goethe. 
 
 These remarks are not intended as any apology for Mrs. 
 Clemmer s fiction. It needs none. It stands fair among that 
 of this age. It is only in comparing the actual work with her 
 own ideal in romance, and that marvellous latent power of 
 Mrs. Clemmer s nature which has never yet adequately 
 expressed itself, that a discrepancy is suggested. " His 
 Two Wives," which appeared first as a serial in the Boston 
 publication, " Every Saturday," is a work of unusual power. 
 
 In regard to this novel the only marvel is that it could 
 have been written at all. The request had been urged 
 upon Mrs. Clemmer to contribute a serial story to " Every 
 Saturday." Declining at first, from what seemed the 
 negation of overfilled time, she was led to consider the 
 project, to which all her natural creative power responded. 
 She undertook the work, giving to it simply the Friday 
 
272 MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 afternoon of each week, sending the chapters just as they 
 flowed from her pen ; and when the story was published 
 in book-form it was made up, simply, from the pages of 
 " Every Saturday," without revision from the author. The 
 story, which is unique in treatment, and which sets itself like 
 a series of pictures in the memory, is rendered a remarkable 
 production when the circumstances under which it was writ 
 ten are considered. 
 
 Some of the finest work of Mary Clemmer has been in 
 monographs on characters with whom she was strongly in 
 sympathy. Among these were papers on Charles Simmer, 
 Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Emerson, and on Longfellow. 
 
 As a poet Mary Clemmer has touched chords to which the 
 response has been peculiarly sympathetic. In this phase of 
 creative work she has made herself the interpreter of two 
 distinct forces, the life of nature and the emotions of the 
 human heart. Her utterances are strongly subjective, yet 
 much of it is from the material of imagination, and sympathetic 
 rather than of real or of personal experience. A forcible 
 instance of this is in the poem entitled "The Dead Love," 
 which upon its appearance in her volume of " Poems of 
 Life and Nature," was greeted by those discerning per 
 sons, the critics, as "written from the depths of her own 
 experience," whereas it was really written when she was a 
 young girl, with no experience of love, living or dead, and 
 was a sympathetic response to a girl-friend whose painful 
 experience she thus interpreted. In the "Good-by, Sweet 
 heart," Mrs. Clemmer touches her highest lyric force. In 
 her "Arbutus" we see the oneness of her soul with nature, 
 a harmony that is again interpreted in the two sonnets entitled 
 "The Cathedral Pines," written one summer day at Intervale, 
 New Hampshire. 
 
 The deeply religious nature of Mary Clemmer is revealed 
 in every line she has ever written. The life of her mother 
 from early childhood has been full of religious enthusiasm. 
 In joy or in sorrow she seeks in silence and in solitude 
 communion with the Divine Spirit. In the work of the 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 273 
 
 distinguished daughter this religious meditation, this uninter- 
 mitting spiritual aspiration, is embodied and wrought into 
 practical application to men and things, and to the minutest 
 duties of human life. 
 
 Mary Clemmer has ennobled journalism by her profound 
 conviction of its moral significance. Measuring her work by 
 an ideal standard, she has always written up and not down 
 to the mentality of the hour. The action and reaction of 
 human life in its special phases in national statesmanship has 
 been subtly analyzed and ably revealed by her. In the 
 world, though not of it, the poetry of her nature has saved 
 her from the allurements of fashionable frivolities. Her 
 work, be it poetry or politics, has always in it the inspira 
 tional element. She has the divining instinct of the poetic 
 temperament, the kindling of its fervor, the vividness of its 
 imagery. 
 
 Mrs. Clemmer s home on Capitol Hill, in Washington, is a 
 large, hospitable brick mansion, book-lined and picture-hung ; 
 with its souvenirs of friendship from names honored among 
 men, its dainty elegance, its sweetness of repose. It is cos 
 mopolitan in its atmosphere. It could not be otherwise when 
 presided over by this fair, blue-eyed poet woman, whose 
 sympathies and interests radiate like a star to all points of 
 individual and national interests. Years ago Mrs. Clem 
 mer purchased this house, and with her parents entered 
 it to make a home. In this household the father and the 
 mother were the honored guests, the treasured counsellors, 
 the beloved ones to whose comfort and happiness, first of all, 
 the household arrangements were subservient. In the winter 
 of 1881 the aged father passed away, cheered to the last by 
 the unfailing tenderness of his daughter. The mother still 
 graces and brightens this home with her gentle presence, that 
 falls as a benediction on the stranger or the guest. 
 
 Into this home come the tributes of respect and of love. 
 Through the discipline of waiting, through rich and varied 
 experiences, Mrs. Clemmer is garnering material and forces 
 for her future literary work. 
 
274 MART CLEMMER. 
 
 While Mrs. Clemmer has never been an active advocate in 
 special reforms, she has been a potent force in general advance 
 ment. By nature and temperament she is distinctively the 
 artist, the writer, and she has not the aggressive inclination to 
 tilt a lance on all occasions, yet when the occasion appeals to 
 her moral power she has the full courage of her convictions. 
 Those who are leading the cause of the political enfranchise 
 ment of women ; those who are consecrating their lives to 
 temperance, to philanthropy, find in Mary Clemmer not alone 
 the sympathizer and the helper, but the inspirer. Women go 
 to her home as on a pilgrimage to seek the sweetness and 
 light that never fails them there. Many an " Independent " 
 letter has been sacrificed ; many an artistic expression has 
 been left unwrought, to meet the claims of humanity. To 
 Mary Clemmer, truly, the life is more than meat ; the need 
 of one humble human heart is more to her than the fame or 
 applause of the world. 
 
 The story of a life ! Who may presume to tell it? And 
 who, while that life is a part of the present forces of 
 humanity, may dare reveal its deepest meanings, its romance, 
 its invisible yet potent dreams ? Let those who would fore 
 cast the horoscope of Mary Clemmer read, in her "Poems of 
 Life and Nature," three sonnets: "Recognition," "The 
 Friend," " The Lover." If the reader will he may read a 
 story between the lines. 
 
 Little dreamed this young girl of the great world on 
 whose threshold she stood when she crossed that un 
 seen line of fate and went to New York. The reader 
 of her novel " Eirene " may fancy that something of her 
 own experience is reflected in this paragraph regarding her 
 heroine : 
 
 " She had reached that crisis in life when a woman of oppo 
 site nature, disappointed and wounded in her affections, turns 
 toward the prizes of intellect and ambition, and sallies forth 
 into the great world in search of a crown. It never occurred 
 to this girl that such a thing was possible to her. Of the rich 
 endowments of her mind as personal possessions she had no 
 
MARY CLEMMER. 275 
 
 consciousness, much less that it might be possible for her to 
 use them to build up a splendid fate for herself in the world. 
 The ro;ilm of letters, the realm of art she knew were both in 
 this vast world into which she was going ; both in a dim and 
 distant way had a charm for her ; she had read of and wor 
 shipped the queens of women who had reigned therein. How 
 remote and inaccessible seemed these realms. . . She did 
 not think at all that this enchanted world, in which the beau 
 tiful, the gifted, and the prosperous dwell, could be for her." 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 New York Society Forty Years Ago Prof. James J. Mapes An Ideal 
 Home Genuine Hospitality Mary Mapes Dodge Her Two Boys 
 What First Turned Her Attention to Writing First Workshop A 
 Cosy "Den" Birthday Feasts for Jamie and Harry A Birthday Poem 
 Red-Letter Days How " Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates," came to 
 be Written Merited Reward Mrs. Dodge s Remarkable Editorial Capa 
 city Her Clear Insight and Sound Judgment Editing " St. Nicholas 
 A Model Magazine for Children Who and What Makes it So The 
 Care and Labor Bestowed upon Each Number Mrs. Dodge s Home Life 
 and Happy Surroundings. 
 
 ORTY years ago, or so, New York still kept some 
 thing of her earlier simplicity of manners. Her 
 best society had passed the toil of poverty, 
 without yet having entered upon the toil of 
 wealth. The great fortunes of to-day were un 
 dreamed of, as the ostentation which vaunts 
 them was unknown. Hospitality was not ex 
 pressed in monumental dinners and balls, but 
 in more intimate visiting. Strangers, bringing let 
 ters of introduction to well-known citizens, were 
 invited to their houses in a friendly way, and contributed 
 whatever brightness they possessed to the general household 
 pleasure, as they received the best which the household could 
 bestow. 
 
 Ceremony is a necessary defence in large communities, and 
 the great city long since outgrew this period of grace. But 
 it was the good fortune of the subject of this sketch to be 
 born into one of the most hospitable homes upon the island, 
 at a time when hospitality meant much. Professor James J. 
 276 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 277 
 
 Mnpes was not only a scholar of distinction, an eminent 
 scientist, and an inventor of note, but a man of wide social 
 accomplishments, a brilliant talker, and famous wit. His 
 wife, accustomed in her father s house to entertain a wide 
 circle, was a graceful and gracious hostess, unconsciously an 
 ticipating Emerson s precept : " Certainly, let the board be 
 spread, and let the bed be dressed, but let not the emphasis 
 of hospitality lie in these things." 
 
 In this household the children heard high affairs discussed 
 in a high way. Men of science, poets, painters, musicians, 
 statesmen, philosophers, journalists, were familiar friends. 
 The talk was of scientific achievements, of music, painting, 
 and the drama ; of great philanthropic and benevojent move 
 ments all over the world ; of contemporary history, as the 
 news of the morning journal recorded it ; of projected laws 
 and the reasons for them. The petty gossip and small per 
 sonalities which, in so many families, do duty as conversation 
 never intruded their impertinent heads. 
 
 It was a great thing for bright children thus to have the 
 round world rolled daily to their door. And this liberal edu 
 cation was balanced by a rigorous training in those disciplin 
 ary studies which teach the mind exactness. 
 
 It was a theory of Professor Mapes a theory which his 
 distinguished daughter has done so much to make a popular 
 article of faith that children instinctively like good reading 
 if they are fortunate enough to find it. And, at a time when 
 juvenile books represented a waste land of dreary facts and 
 drearier morals, with only an occasional oasis of fancy or 
 freshness, he taught his own flock to find a genuine delight in 
 the old ballads, in Shakspeare, and in Walter Scott. To 
 her thorough knowledge of English literature, and her love 
 of it, Mrs. Dodge owes the excellence of her style ; and this 
 love and knowledge she owes to the influence of her father. 
 Of the four daughters of the house, the eldest and youngest 
 showed remarkable musical ability, and became accomplished 
 musicians. The third had a talent for painting, studying 
 diligently at home and abroad, and choosing the artist s pro- 
 
278 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 fession. The second, Mary, was one of those fortunate mor 
 tals from whose christening feast no ill-tempered fairy stayed 
 away to give her a plague for a dowry. She had an aptitude 
 for music, drawing, and modelling, a quick ear and tongue 
 for languages, a clear and critical judgment, great executive 
 capacity, and an indomitable cheerfulness and serenity of 
 spirit, which made any labor or success seem possible to her. 
 But in her girlhood, before she had decided between the 
 claims of sculpture and painting, another voice appealed to 
 her, and she left the home of her father for the home of her 
 husband. 
 
 In the happy years which followed, the claims of husband 
 and children, of domestic affairs, of friends and society, 
 absorbed her time. But the constant contact with an excep 
 tionally able mind stimulated her own mind to steady growth, 
 while the new household, like the old, welcomed the best 
 people and the best thought. From this house might have 
 been drawn that famous picture of the ideal home which 
 " should bear witness to all its economy that human culture is 
 the end to which it is built and garnished. It stands there 
 under the sun and moon to ends analogous and not less noble 
 than theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep ; but 
 the pine and the oak shall gladly descend from the moun 
 tains to uphold the roof of men as faithful and necessary as 
 themselves ; to be the shelter always open to the good and 
 the true ; a hall which shines with sincerity, brows ever tran 
 quil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert; whose in 
 mates know what they want ; who do not ask your house how 
 theirs should be kept ; who have aims ; who cannot stop for 
 trifles." 
 
 Almost without warning this beautiful home was closed by 
 the sudden death of its master, and Mrs. Dodge, with her 
 two young children, returned to the house of her father, then 
 living in New Jersey. To take up her life again in the old 
 spirit of rejoicing ; to rear and educate her boys as their 
 father would have done ; to do a man s work with the persist 
 ent application and faithfulness of a man, to gain a man s 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 281 
 
 pay, yet to leave herself freedom and freshness to enter into 
 all her children s interests and pursuits as their comrade and 
 friend, was the duty she saw before her. It was almost an 
 accident which first turned her attention to writing. But 
 having decided that writing must be her work, it became 
 necessary to contrive a workshop. 
 
 In the country, as in the city, the hospitality of Professor 
 Mapes was boundless. Vacant chairs stood at the table for 
 the chance comer, and the friendly host was disappointed if 
 they remained vacant. Time had brought money losses, and 
 the household economy was of the simplest. But such 
 cordiality of spirit was there, in that rambling old house, 
 such bright discourse, such refinement of atmosphere, such 
 beauty of surroundings, as made luxury seem vulgar. 
 
 Professor Mapes himself was the prince of good talkers. 
 His mother, a charming old lady, in her day one of the 
 charming young girls who could remember having been 
 saluted by the adored Washington, who had danced with the 
 courtly Lafayette at the famous Castle Garden fete tendered 
 him by the citizens of New York, and who, on occasion, 
 would graciously exhibit the tiny slippers and stupendous 
 headdress which had adorned the ball, held a little court 
 of her own, under her son s roof, received her visitors with a 
 certain state and ceremony, and delighted her great-grand 
 sons with stories of that historic past which seemed to them 
 an age of gods and heroes. Their young mother and her 
 sisters had their troops of friends, the children their compan 
 ions. Sunshine, music, flowers, the heartiest good-fellowship 
 filled the house. No atmosphere could be more delightful to 
 live in. In none could hard work have been more difficult. 
 
 A stone s throw from the dwelling stood a deserted farm 
 house, its low-pitched attic tenanted only by spiders, and 
 heaped with that debris of human occupation which long 
 housekeeping consigns to the living tomb of garret spaces. 
 Of this dusty solitude Mrs. Dodge took possession. The 
 boys knocked down a partition wall, turning two mean cham 
 bers into one generous one, cleared away the rubbish, made a 
 
282 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 treaty of pence with the banished spiders, which secured to 
 them the undisputed possession of an adjoining territory, re 
 stored a hinge here, put up a shelf there, and lo ! the coveted 
 study was ready for the decorator and furnisher. By what 
 magic a few pieces of cast-off furniture were made to assume an 
 air of special utility and youthfulness, by what abracadabra 
 the odds and ends of ornament which nobody claimed for the 
 house were forced to set themselves in harmony for the 
 adornment of" the den ; " by what spell this ill-proportioned, 
 dingy loft became the quaintest and brightest of habitations, 
 at once spacious and cosy, must remain an incommunicable 
 secret. Certain women are born with the gift of decoration 
 in their finger-tips. Draperies fall into perfect folds at their 
 touch. Colors and shapes are obedient to a look. Not even 
 the white waste of ceilings, or the aggressive angularity 
 of corners, refuses to become part of the charming whole. 
 But most domestic artists of this order need beautiful material 
 to work with. It is only genius which creates elements as 
 well as results. 
 
 A few yards of Florida moss, a few hunches of bright 
 leaves, a few cheap pictures, a small company of high-bred 
 books, a drift of softly-brilliant drapery falling across an 
 ancient lounge, a cheerful old patriarch of a Franklin stove, 
 and eveiywherc flowers, and flowers, and again flowers 
 these were all the visible agencies at work to produce an 
 harmonious completeness. Nobody ever remembered that 
 the carpet was made of rags. Nobody ever noticed the lack 
 of curtains at windows which the climbing ivy hung with 
 softest green. Nobody ever thought that rough-cast was an 
 objectionable wall-finish. And if " the ornament of a house 
 is the friends who frequent it " that eyrie under the roof was 
 ornamented indeed. For thither came many a choice spirit, 
 and often and often the old beams heard " talk, far above 
 singing." 
 
 Here, too, were celebrated those little birthday feasts which 
 the boys considered the red-letter days of their calendar. 
 The festivities began only when the day s work was ended ; 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 283 
 
 for the youngsters, their lessons ; for their mother, her task 
 of writing. Manuscript and thoughts of manuscript being 
 pushed aside, she covered the writing-table with a white 
 doth festooned with greenery from the woods, set forth the 
 two or three oranges, the little dish of nuts, the simple birth 
 day cake, with its tiny candles sparkling the measure of the 
 young life s counted years, and then only, most often while 
 the eager lads were clamoring for admission, found time to 
 write the birthday verses which they thought best of all the 
 feast. When the door was opened they rushed first upon 
 their mother, and then upon the table, to iiiid such a remem 
 brance as this : 
 
 ANOTHER YEAR. 
 
 Old man, with the hour-glass, halt ! halt ! I pray 
 
 Don t you see you are taking my children away? 
 
 My own little babies, who came long ago, 
 
 You stole them, old man, with the beard white as snow ! 
 
 My beautiful babies, so bonny and bright ! 
 Where have you carried them, far out of sight? 
 Oil, dimpled their cheeks were, and sunny their hair! 
 But I cannot find them : I ve searched everywhere. 
 
 My three-year-old toddlers, they shouted in glee; 
 They sported about me ; they sat on my knee. 
 Oh, their prattle and laughter were silvery rain! 
 Old man, must I list for their voices in vain ? 
 
 They were here ; they were gone, while their kisses were warm, 
 I scarce knew the hour when they slipped from my arm 
 Oh, where was I looking, when, peerless and sweet, 
 They followed the track of your echoless feet ? 
 
 My brave little schoolboys, who ran in and out, 
 And lifted the air with their song and their shout: 
 My boys on the coldest days ever aglow, 
 My dear romping schoolboys who tortured me so ! 
 
 There were two of them then ; and one of the two 
 Ah ! I never was watchful enough followed you. 
 My chubby-faced darling, my kite-flying pet 
 Alack ! all his playthings are lying here yet. 
 
284 MART MArES DODGE. 
 
 And the other, O Time ! do not take him away ! 
 For a few precious years, I implore, let him stay ! 
 I love him I need him my blessing and joy! 
 You have had all the rest; leave me one little boy ! 
 
 He halts ! He will stop I No ; the fall of the sand 
 In the hour-glass deceived me. It seemed at a stand. 
 But whom have we here? Jamie! Harry! how? why, 
 Just as many as ever and Time passing by? 
 
 Jamie, my bouncer, my man-boy, my pride ! 
 Harry, my sunbeam, whatever betide 
 I can hardly believe it. But surely it s clear 
 My babies, my toddlers, my schoolboys are here I 
 
 Move on then, O Time ! I have nothing to say ! 
 You have left me far more than you ve taken away, 
 And yet I would whisper a word, ere you go ; 
 You ve a year of my Harry s the latest, you know. 
 
 How does it rank among those that are flown ? 
 Was it worthily used, while he called it his own ? 
 God filled it with happiness, comfort, and health 
 Did my darling spend rightly its love-given wealth? 
 
 No answer in words. Yet it really did seem 
 
 That the sand sparkled lightly the scythe sent a gleam. 
 
 Is it answer and promise? God grant it be so, 
 
 From that silent old man with his beard white as snow. 
 
 To have a " visit with mother" was to the boys the highest 
 conceivable enjoyment. It was for the happy talk, the cheery 
 plans touching the year to come, the intimate sympathy and 
 friendship of these celebrations, and not for any presents 
 they might bring, that they were joyfully anticipated for one 
 twelvemonth, and joyfully remembered for another. The 
 presents, indeed, were few and cheap, for, from their baby 
 hood, the boys had been taught that the value of a gift lay in 
 the spirit which offered it, that the "Low " and not the "what " 
 made life rich, and that their pleasure must be found in the 
 simple things of existence. 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 285 
 
 Mrs. Dodge had already proved herself a clever essayist 
 nnd capital story-teller for grown-up readers when she pub 
 lished her first book, a collection of short tales for children, 
 under the name of " Irvington Stories." It was a modest 
 little muslin-covered duodecimo, with three or four illustra 
 tions by Darley ; a book quite .out of print now, but dear to 
 the heart of many a young man and woman who were chil 
 dren eighteen years ago. So successful was it as not only 
 to pass through several editions, and receive the warmest 
 encomiums of the press, but to elicit praise from the "North 
 American Review," at that time the "big bow-wow" of our 
 literature, which saw that the stories had just enough of im 
 probability to suit the minds of children, for whom the age 
 of fancy and fable renews itself in every generation. " They 
 arc not sermons in words of two syllables," said Rhadaman- 
 thus, "they are not prosy, but what is gracious and lovely in 
 childhood is appealed to indirectly, with something of moth 
 erly tenderness in the tone. Good books for children are so 
 rare, and books to make little spoonies so common, that this 
 should be praised." 
 
 The publisher begged for a second series of "Irvington 
 Stories." Mrs. Dodge, meantime, had begun another story, 
 as a short serial, to run through several numbers of the juve 
 nile department of a weekly religious paper. 
 
 Like the rest of the reading world, she had been thrilled 
 and fascinated by the lately-published histories of Motley, 
 the " Rise of the Dutch Republic," and the " History of the 
 United Netherlands." She resolved to make Holland the 
 scene of a juvenile tale, and give the youngsters so much of 
 the history of that wonderful country as should tell itself, 
 naturally, through the evolution of the story. The subject 
 fascinated her, and grew upon her hands. It passed the lim 
 its which the weekly paper set, and developed into a volume. 
 The publisher, disappointed at not receiving a second collec 
 tion of short stories, was tempted to reject the manuscript 
 offered him. But the author had nothing else ready, he could 
 not afford to forego the prestige of her former success, and 
 18 
 
286 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 so, reluctantly and doubtfully, he issued the most successful 
 juvenile tale of our time, " Hans Brinker ; or, The Silver 
 Skates." No tenderer, sweeter, loftier story was ever told. 
 Boys hearts beat quicker as they read it, with the thrill and 
 stir of action, and old eyes dimmed with tears over the un 
 written pathos of the humble lives it recorded. The critics 
 seemed to take it for granted that a new book by the author 
 of "Irvington Stories" would be worthy of its parentage, 
 and praised the story in a matter-of-course way, but with one 
 accord dwelt on the perfection of the local coloring, which, 
 as the work of an artist who had never seen the Low Coun 
 tries, was a marvellous achievement. On closing the book 
 one did not seem to have been reading about Holland, but to 
 have been living in Holland ; nay, to have been born and bred 
 there ; and to have grown so familiar with the queer customs 
 of that queer country that neither customs nor country any 
 longer seemed queer. 
 
 From the moment of its publication, sixteen years ago, the 
 success of "Hans Brinker" was instant and assured, and to 
 day it is one of the books of steady sale. It has had a very 
 large circulation in America ; has passed through several 
 editions in England ; and has been published in French, at 
 Paris ; in German, at Leipsic ; in Russian, at St. Petersburg ; 
 and in Italian, at Rome. A version in French under the title 
 of " Patins d 1 Argent " was awarded one of the Monthyon 
 prizes, of fifteen hundred francs, by the French Academy. 
 But the crowning tribute to its excellence is its perennial sale 
 in Holland in a Dutch edition, which, when Mrs. Dodge was 
 in Amsterdam a feAv years ago, was recommended to one of her 
 party by a zealous bookseller, as the most attractive juvenile 
 in his collection. 
 
 This success, of course, was no lucky hit, but the merited 
 reward of the hardest work. Mrs. Dodge ransacked libraries, 
 public and private, for books upon Holland ; made every 
 traveller whom she knew tell her his tale of that unique coun 
 try ; wrote to Dutch acquaintances in Amsterdam and Haar 
 lem ; and submitted every chapter to the test of the criticism 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 287 
 
 of two accomplished Hollanders living near her. It was the 
 genius of patience and toil, the conscientious touching and 
 retouching of the true artist, which wrought the seemingly 
 spontaneous and simple task. 
 
 About 1870 Mrs. Dodge became associate editor of "Hearth 
 and Home," a new weekly family paper, her coadjutors being 
 Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mr. Donald G. Mitchell 
 (Ik. Marvel). Her departments exhibited a fertility of ex 
 pedient, a freshness of mind and resource, an inexhaustible 
 spontaneity, an editorial instinct and capacity, which won 
 wide recognition. A few years later, when Messrs. Scribner 
 and Company were considering the publication of a new juve 
 nile magazine, it was to her that they turned for co-operation, 
 and upon her consent to assume its management that the en 
 terprise was established. From the choice of its title, to the 
 superintendence of each number, "St. Nicholas" has been the 
 personal care and labor of nine years. 
 
 Never before, perhaps, had editor so appreciative, gener 
 ous, and helpful publishers ; so capable, tireless, and interested 
 assistants. But with all this help, the original work which 
 must go to every issue of such a publication the planning, 
 inventing, inspiring, the new thought, the fresh combination, 
 the motive and impulse which are the breath of its life, 
 constitutes in itself an incessant and absorbing labor. The 
 mere balance of pages, the artistic grouping of pictures and 
 text, the writing of verses to pictures, the sketching in the 
 rough of pictures to illustrate verses, the enormous corre 
 spondence, the endless detail, the suggestion here, the altera 
 tion there, and, more than all, the regular recurring of the 
 task, as fixedly as the waxing and waning of the moon, de 
 mand an unwearying power of application and organization 
 possible only to an exceptional temperament. 
 
 Besides, in the nature of things, the editing of a periodical 
 for children is far more difficult than the editing for adults. 
 Mature minds, however they may differ in special tastes and 
 individual development, have at least their maturity in com 
 mon. But a child s magazine must address the intelligence 
 
288 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 of five years as genially as the intelligence of fifteen, and 
 neither five nor fifteen must be sacrificed the one to the other. 
 Again, though the constituency of the " Atlantic " or the 
 "Century" widens, as young people grow up to read them, it 
 does not change essentially. Travels, fiction, essays, biog 
 raphy, historical sketches, poetry, please the readers of to 
 day as they pleased the readers of a dozen years ago. But 
 the ingenuity that delighted the children who hugged " St. 
 Nicholas" in 1874 must vary its devices in 1875, or be found 
 neither ingenious nor delightful. A child s contemptuous 
 " Oh, that s old," takes the flavor out of a story or puzzle for a 
 whole family of children. Every year the new fives and fif 
 teens demand a difference not only m degree, but in kind. 
 And the wonder grows that every year they find it. 
 
 But it is not the aim of publishers and editor to create merely 
 the most beautiful and entertaining book for youth Avhich it was 
 possible to create. They saw that in that very interest in, 
 and study of, children which makes this the Children s Age, a 
 subtle danger lurked. It was, as has been said, as if a newly- 
 discovered specimen, known as The Child, were put under 
 the object-glass of the scientific observer, studied, classified, 
 and minutely explained. This observation would be wise 
 were it not that the specimen too often becomes in turn the 
 observer. That is to say, the modern interest in children 
 has produced a special literature, whose tendency is to make 
 them self-conscious, morbid, priggish, and more or less openly 
 disobedient. 
 
 It is a question whether the simple virtues which make 
 childhood lovely did not flourish better in the bleak atmos 
 phere which old-fashioned notions of parental dignity and 
 distance produced, than in the hothouse air which pervades 
 the representative juvenile publication. For this quality of 
 unwholesomeness belongs to many books which are pure, 
 well-written, and interesting. And it is this quality which 
 Mrs. Dodge has succeeded in excluding from " St. Nicholas." 
 She believed that their literature should stimulate and quicken 
 children intellectually, but discourage emotional precocity. 
 
MART MAPES DODGE. 289 
 
 And the innumerable letters which reach the editor reveal the 
 fact that the children who love the magazine most, and best 
 apprehend its spirit, are simple, natural, real children, whose 
 interests are external to themselves, and to whom it has not 
 occurred to wonder whether their exceptional nature is under 
 stood and appreciated by those beings of a commoner fibre 
 their parents and teachers. 
 
 " The magazine," wrote Gail Hamilton to a friend, in her 
 delightfully hearty way, " is the very best children s magazine 
 that was ever read, or seen, or dreamed of. The pictures 
 and the nonsense verses are captivating. I suppose I read 
 that rocking-horse poem over to Jamie Blaine thirty-five 
 thousand times without stopping yielding to his imploring 
 eyes and wheedling voice." " While its freshness lasts," de 
 clared another well-known author, "the bound volume drives 
 away all other books from the table ; and somehow its fresh 
 ness seems to have spells of recurrence. Every rainy day 
 puts new charms in it, and acts as a sprinkle or a soak upon 
 a resurrection flower. The youngsters are not quite sure if 
 they like the pictures on the inside of the cover. They re 
 sure they like them, to be sure; but don t quite like the 
 cheeky way in which the binder and Mother Goose set them 
 selves out in this way in opposition to the dainties of Mrs. 
 Dodge in the inside." " It has been made level with the 
 comprehension of children," wrote Mr. Charles Dudley War 
 ner to the publishers, " and yet it is a continual educator of 
 their taste and of their honor and courage. I do not see how 
 it can be made any better, and if the children don t like it I 
 think it is time to begin to change the kind of children in 
 this country ! " And this is really what the editor has been 
 quietly laboring at for the last nine years. 
 
 As if the shaping and doing of work like this were not 
 enough for one mortal, Mrs. Dodge has published three books 
 since she has had charge of " St. Nicholas," and written a 
 fourth, a serial story for the magazine, which, though already 
 printed in book-form in England, is not to be placed in cov 
 ers in America for another year. The first of these publica- 
 
200 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 tions was the famous " Rhymes and Jingles," a book of verses 
 for children, as spontaneous and irrepressible as the lyrics of 
 Mother Goose, with a frolicsome humor, a subtle wit, a deli 
 cate innuendo, a love of nature in them, which that singer of 
 an elder day never dreamed of. Their inconsequence is not 
 more delicious than their sense, their fun no more captivating 
 than their moral. They seem to have come by nature, as 
 morning-glories blossom in a score of tints, or as mocking 
 birds sing every note known to melody, and to have given 
 Mrs. Dodge no trouble beyond that of collecting them. 
 
 The success of " Rhymes and Jingles " was as great as that 
 of "Hans Brinker" had been. Critics praised their art, their 
 originality, their cleverness ; children delighted in them with 
 no afterthought of " why ; " mothers found them an aid to 
 nursery government, after the heart of Miss Martineau her 
 self. A year or two later came a little volume of prose 
 sketches for adults, entitled "Theophilus and Others," and 
 containing, among other bright papers, the famous "Miss 
 Maloney on the Chinese Question," whose cleverness even its 
 enormous popularity has not availed to cheapen, and that 
 unique bit of satire, "The Insanity of Cain." This collection 
 showed how high a reputation Mrs. Dodge might have won 
 as an essayist and story-writer had she not chosen to devote 
 herself to other labors. The papers showed originality, ver 
 satility, clarity of thought and a richness of humor, unique, 
 perhaps, in a woman s work. 
 
 The volume of prose was followed in 1879 by a small vol 
 ume of verse called "Along the Way." It was truly "a 
 charming way that she has rambled along, for she has not 
 only picked bright and tender things that were growing at her 
 feet, but she has shaken them down from the trees, caught 
 them in her hat as they flew about her, and gently captured 
 them as they fluttered in her hand. It is a happy thing for those 
 of us who do not walk such ways to have her show us what 
 may there be seen." These words of a brother poet touch 
 the keynote of this poet s song. Her verses are full of 
 naturalness, feeling, imagination ; they sing as the birds sing, 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 291 
 
 but, more than all, they have that loftiness of spirit, that 
 serenity of the upper air, which is the poet s sweetest and 
 rarest gift. Among them are none of those lachrymose 
 "Doubts," "Despairs," "Last Requests," "Resignations," 
 " Misunderstandings," which wail through most feminine 
 verse. By contrast, they justify her own witty saying, that 
 Pegasus generally feels impelled to pace toward a graveyard 
 the moment he feels a side-saddle on his back. 
 
 Her sympathy with nature is a sixth sense, as her inter 
 pretation of nature is a new voice. "Shadow-Evidence" and 
 " Once Before " are poems for poets ; " Inverted " gets itself 
 remembered, as it was written, "by heart"; "Old Songs," 
 " Secrets," " My Window Ivy," have floated on newspaper 
 wings into remotest solitudes. In a little lyric called "Heart 
 Oracles " is written that philosophy of life which makes its 
 singer s own days seem so uplifted : 
 
 " By the motes do we know where the sunbeam is slanting ; 
 
 Through the hindering stones speaks the soul of the brook; 
 Past the rustle of leaves we press into the stillness ; 
 
 Through darkness and void to the Pleiads we look ; 
 One bird-note at dawn, with the night silence o er us, 
 Begins all the morning s munificent chorus. 
 
 "Through sorrow come glimpses of infinite gladness ; 
 
 Through grand discontent mounts the spirit of youth ; 
 Loneliness foldeth a wonderful loving; 
 
 The breakers of doubt lead the great tide of truth; 
 And dread and grief-haunted the shadowy portal 
 That shuts from our vision the splendor immortal." 
 
 But the one poem which touches the deepest human ex 
 perience, which breathes comfort in the bitterest human 
 anguish, is 
 
 THE TWO MYSTERIES. 
 
 " We know not what it is, dear, this sleep so deep and still, 
 The folded hands, the awful calm, the cheek so pale and chill ; 
 The lids that will not lift again, though we may call and call ; 
 The strange, white solitude of peace that settles over all. 
 
292 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 "We know not what it means, dear, this desolate heart-pain ; 
 This dread to take our daily way, and walk in it again ; 
 We know not to what other sphere the loved who leave us go, 
 Nor why we re left to wander still ; nor why we do not know. 
 
 "But this we know ; our loved and dead, if they should come this 
 
 day 
 Should come and ask us, " what is life ? " not one of us could 
 
 say. 
 
 Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be, 
 Yet oh, how sweet it is to us, this life we live and see ! 
 
 "Then might they say, these vanished ones, and blessed is the 
 
 thought ! 
 So death is sweet to us, beloved, though we may tell you 
 
 naught ; 
 
 We may not tell it to the quick this mystery of death 
 Ye may not tell us, if ye would, the mystery of breath. 
 
 " The child who enters life comes not with knowledge or intent, 
 So those who enter death must go as little children sent. 
 Nothing is known. But I believe that God is overhead ; 
 And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead." 
 
 But, after all, the true business of Mrs. Dodge s life, the 
 work to which everything else was subsidiary, and without a 
 knowledge of which no intelligent estimate of her powers 
 could be made* has been the rearing and educating of ber two 
 sons. From the dawning of their young intelligence they 
 were taught to regard her as not -more their mother than their 
 boon companion, helper, and friend. She flew kites with them, 
 skated with them, swam with them, passed hours in their 
 improvised gymnasium, set up many a "form" at printing- 
 press, tramped miles beside them, collecting specimens for 
 microscope or herbarium. Whatever subject interested them 
 she studied in secret. When the elder, a born inventor, 
 began to care for the things of his craft, it was she who was 
 ready to explain to him the crystallization of iron, the effects 
 of heat and cold, the laws of statics and dynamics. When 
 the younger, a born musician, began to think of harmonies, it 
 
MARY MAPES DODGE. 293 
 
 was she who seemed to him to know more of the science and 
 art of music than any teacher. 
 
 One afternoon of every week belonged exclusively to the 
 boys, whatever claims were made upon her time by work or 
 friendship. If it became inevitable that that afternoon 
 should be used for other purposes, she appealed to their 
 generosity to release her, which they did, in the spirit of 
 young princes. But she always made up to them that con 
 cession, and this sense of justice pervaded all her dealings 
 with them. She recognized their rights as fully as she desired 
 them to recognize the rights of others. She kept before them 
 the highest ideal of character, and left details of conduct to 
 their instructed moral sense. 
 
 It was the result of her system that through school-life and 
 college-life, and the life of young manhood in the world, she 
 remained the most intimate friend and adviser of her sons, 
 who grew to be what her love and wisdom had foretold. The 
 elder has created, in his own home, an atmosphere like that 
 in which he was bred. The younger, in the flush of his 
 beautiful and round youth, full of capacity, enthusiasm, and 
 purpose, of noble character and rare intelligence, passed on 
 into the life which completes this. 
 
 Dean Swift records it as the opinion of his day that it 
 would not be wise to give women more than a rudimentary 
 education, because mental development would awaken in 
 them an interest in things outside the domestic circle, and 
 render them indifferent to household concerns. But the 
 feminine nature, with its love of home, its instinct of beauty, 
 and its innate desire to minister to the comfort of its beloved, 
 seems conspicuously independent of institutions, and in 
 capable of radical change, even through the insidious influence 
 of the alphabet. The women who have done the best work 
 in literature, and whose culture and interest in affairs are 
 broadest, are, as a rule, not only the women whose domestic 
 duties have been exacting, but who have most ably and con 
 scientiously discharged them. 
 
294 MARY MAPES DODGE. 
 
 Mrs. Dodge is an admirable housekeeper, having that last 
 gift of the good manager, the capacity to keep the intricate 
 wheels of the domestic machinery smoothly turning without 
 ever seeming to touch them. But she is much more than a 
 housekeeper, she is a home-maker ; two offices not neces 
 sarily conjoined, and often drearily dissociated. The order 
 and neatness, the economy and routine of her management, 
 are simply the foundation on which the beauty and serenity 
 of the home rest. Her rooms seem to have been evolved 
 from her individual needs and tastes, and so to have fulfilled 
 that lofty rule, that " the genius and love of the man should 
 be so conspicuously seen in all his estate that the eye that 
 knew him should see his character in his property, in his 
 ornament, in his every expense, for a man s money should 
 not follow the direction of his neighbor s money, but should 
 represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it." 
 
 In this home, the simplest and most spontaneous hospitality 
 dwells. Mrs. Dodge has inherited her father s brilliant 
 
 O 
 
 talent of conversation, and no writing she has ever done gives 
 so strong an impression of her thorough mental equipment, 
 her freshness of view, clearness of insight, sound judgment, 
 vivid sympathy, and affluent humor as an hour s talk. Of 
 those qualities which are above and beyond all these, it is not 
 permitted even to speak. But they cannot be concealed. 
 " Grandeur of character," says Emerson, " works in the dark, 
 and succors those who never saw it." 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 (MARCHIONESS D OSSOLI). 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 Conflicting Opinion? An English Estimate of Margaret Fuller Her 
 Childhood and School-life Her Life as Seen by Others A Peep at Her 
 Journal An Encounter with Doctor Channing Emerson s Opinion 
 Wonderful Power as a Converser Her Great Ambition The Influence 
 She Exerted Horace Greeley s Friendship Connection with the "New 
 York Tribune" "Alone as Usual" Visits Europe Noted Men and 
 Women of the Time Harriet Martineau s Opinion The Great Change 
 in Miss Fuller s Life Her Romantic Marriage in Italy Terrible Trials 
 Homeward Bound Shipwrecked on the Shores of Her Native Land 
 Last Scenes in Her Life. 
 
 .NOTHER sketch of this remarkable woman is 
 called for, and the various comments made by 
 friends show the difficulty of the task. She 
 is as much of a myth as Sappho," says one ; 
 and another, "I envy you your subject;" a 
 third (a man who liked to talk himself), "She 
 was a monstrous thing, don t you try to be 
 like her ! " And a fourth, with a warning shrug, 
 "Why write any more about that woman? She 
 has been done to death ! She was a brilliant per 
 sonality in her day, a marvellous talker ; but her writings 
 wont live, her criticisms were often crude and prejudiced, 
 her conceit colossal, absurd. Take a newer light ! " Still 
 another, a noble woman, whose name is known and loved all 
 over this land, writes : " I want you to make Margaret 
 Fuller better known to the young girls of our country. 
 There should be a volume condensed from her life and 
 writings for study in schools." 
 
 295 
 
296 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 Each bit of advice is true in its own way, and one may 
 well hesitate, as Emerson, Channing, and Freeman Clarke 
 have honored her by a memoir ; such women as Harriet 
 Martineau, Mrs. Child, Miss Anna C. Brackett, have ex 
 pressed their views of her career, and her influence ; Lan- 
 dor, G. P. It. James, Christopher Cranch, Mary Clemmer, 
 and others wrote poems on her death ; while two English 
 writers, Mrs. Newton Crosland, and William Russell, the 
 curiosity-monger, have placed her in their collection of " Ex 
 traordinary Women " and " Eccentric Personages." The 
 latter, determined to serve up a piquant sketch, dwells with 
 delight on "her nasal tones, the quick opening and shut 
 ting of her eyelids, unpleasing cast of features, her hectic 
 nervousness and spectral illusions, her superstitious faith in 
 sortes, talismans, and the occult power of gems, her somnam 
 bulism and wild Dervish-like dances in school-days, her firm 
 belief in the mummeries of mesmerism, her pet scheme for a 
 female congress at Washington, to be presided over by her 
 self, and her superior manner as she spoke from the lofty 
 stilts of a self-conceit unmatchable in this used-up Europe." 
 
 But one more friend gives exactly the sentiment that leads 
 me to try again this oft-told tale. " I personally feel indebted 
 to Margaret Fuller, because she has done so much to help 
 women, and make their position easier, and has stimulated 
 them to more independence." 
 
 To these facts hundreds of women can add a hearty endorse 
 ment from their own experience, and this proves that she ha s 
 left something more than literary criticism, or scholarship 
 versatile and profound, or the memory of her power in mono 
 logue or familiar talk. 
 
 Her character alternately repels and charms, but her story 
 is always sad. Struggles, baffled hopes, unsatisfied longings, 
 heart-hunger, solitude these were her lot; the sarcasm of 
 destiny pursued her from cradle to grave, stern, bitter, 
 relentless. Call it inexorable Fate, or a necessary and 
 blessed discipline it was destined that she should suffer. 
 Some baleful star might be supposed to have darkened her 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 297 
 
 horoscope. In her words, "I have known some happy hours, 
 but they all led to sorrow, and not only the cups of wine but 
 of milk seemed drugged for me." And in her rhapsodic 
 letter to her patron saint Beethoven : " I know that the curse 
 is but for the time. I know what the eternal justice promises. 
 But on this one sphere it is sad. Thou didst say thou hadst 
 no friend but thy art. But that one is enough. I have no 
 art in which to vent the swell of a soul as deep as thine. I 
 am lost in this world." 
 
 Yet \vith this ever-present conviction of limitation and 
 bondage she was no whining, pining misanthrope, but said 
 grandly: "Yet will I try to keep the heart with diligence, 
 nor ever fear that the sun is gone because I shiver in the cold 
 and dark." Oh, it was hard, and hers was a brave fight ! 
 
 An Oriental priestess sent by some mischance into a prim 
 Puritan abode, where her wild fervor, idealism, imagination, 
 passion, were curbed by an iron hand, and classics and ancient 
 history crammed into an already over-excited brain. A sybil 
 in a straight jacket ! Was it a wonder that she raved? Smiles 
 or sneers follow her statement that she was a queen. But 
 queen she proved herself, though uncrowned ; more truly 
 fitted to reign than many a woman born to the purple. Her 
 conceit was half frankness, and conceit seems a frequent fault 
 with the truly great. A series of remarks could be quoted 
 from distinguished poets, orators, scientists, inventors, that 
 would send our heroine s confidence in her pre-eminent 
 ability far into the shade. Genius and self-assertion are 
 twins. 
 
 Margaret Fuller proved herself a teacher, a rare talker, a 
 critic, essayist and editor, a reformer, pioneer, philanthro 
 pist, almost a poet, very nearly an improvisatricc, and, best of 
 all, a loving, true-hearted woman, who never neglected home 
 ties or homely duties, as is shown by her brother s tender 
 tribute. 
 
 A commonplace woman has her compensations. No temp 
 tations for her to wander from the prescribed path ! No 
 ecstacy of exaltation, no frenzy of despair ! No wrestlings 
 
298 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 fierce and vain with the chains of hereditary temperament 
 and circumstance. If, as Swift says, " Censure is the tax a 
 man pays for being eminent," comment and criticism are the 
 tax a woman pays for being original. The forty years of 
 Margaret s life were one long struggle with pain, disease, 
 poverty, surroundings, pent-up affection, "tremendous repres 
 sion," joy ever rimmed with torture. 
 
 Many people seem to be perpetually rattling round in a 
 circle that is too big for them, in complete ignorance of the 
 fact that they have never once touched the boundary line. 
 But Margaret said of herself ; "I have no natural circle." 
 And her path in life was cramped and thorny. She says : 
 " From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to 
 the common womanly lot. I know I should never find a 
 being who could keep the key of my character ; that there 
 would be none on whom I could always lean ; from whom I 
 could always learn ; that I should be a pilgrim, a sojourner 
 on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a 
 place to lay the head than I." And later : " We are born to 
 be mutilated, and the blood must flow till in every vein its 
 place is supplied by the divine ichor." 
 
 Born of good Puritan stock at Cambridge, Mass., May 23, 
 1810, she had "force and quality "in her blood; but her 
 childhood was unhappy unnatural, excited ; her earliest re 
 collection the death of a sister who might have been a 
 companion ; no playmates ; her first friendship an ideal 
 izing fondness for an English lady who exercized a pow 
 erful influence over her life ; instead of story-books, she 
 was at eight years absorbed in Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
 Molicre ; her recreation, the dear old garden, the only 
 place where her precocious brain could rest, and where the 
 best hours of her lonely life were spent. With the flowers 
 she could dream and be happy. Under her father s guidance, 
 and led also by her own tastes, she went over a most un 
 wholesome amount of reading and study, crammed and over- 
 stimulated. And this is her wise comment as she reviewed 
 this period : " Children should not cull the fruits of reflection 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 299 
 
 and observation early, but expand in the sun and let thoughts 
 come to them. They should not through books antedate 
 their actual experiences." 
 
 Next, we see her in school-life ; eccentric, intense, lovable 
 yet disagreeable. She describes this in the story of "Mari 
 ana," never sparing herself. A lady, who was a schoolmate 
 of hers in Boston, described to me Margaret s extraordinary 
 appearance and manner, as with head on one side and an air 
 of power and superiority, she swept through the room to her 
 desk. And as she acted this out I could see the old mag 
 netism lingered yet. " We all put down our books and 
 stared at her, and felt she was a genius." 
 
 Then as a girl at Cambridge ; ardent, passionate, arrogant, 
 drawing around her a rare circle of intimate friends, demand 
 ing of each a high aim and their entire confidence ; anxious 
 to help each to do the very best of which he was capable. 
 She said of herself that she was at nineteen " the most intol 
 erable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing-room," and we 
 presume that many agreed with her. Flat contradiction of 
 her seniors was her natural habit. 
 
 There is a tendency in talking of such a phenomenal and 
 strongly-marked character to either exalt or depreciate ; to 
 fall in love, or unduly dislike ; to find an inspiration or a 
 warning. 
 
 I take two of her own sentences as my guide in this 
 matter. She says : 
 
 " We have pointed out all the faults we could find in Mrs. 
 Browning, feeling that her strength and nobleness deserves 
 this act of self-respect." 
 
 And her remark on some other author : 
 
 " I think where there is such beauty or strength we can 
 afford to be silent about slight defects." 
 
 To represent this modern Hypatia, this Yankee Corinne, 
 this feminine Socrates, and nineteenth-century Sybil, as a 
 well-rounded specimen of womanly perfection, would be a 
 monstrous mistake and a lie as well. One writer compares 
 her to a new flower. To me she is more like a comet ; bril- 
 
300 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 liant, fitful, irregular in orbit, a little dangerous if brought 
 too near, quite mysterious and thoroughly fascinating. 
 
 To people in general Margaret appeared at this time 
 from sixteen to twenty-five sarcastic, supercilious, with a 
 contemptuous benevolence for mediocrity, a strong inclination 
 to quiz, and an overwhelming and ill-bred appreciation and 
 expression of her own ability ; " prodigiously learned and 
 prodigiously disagreeable." Some one who knew her well 
 said that she always found herself giving up the inmost 
 secrets of her heart, while no corresponding confidence was 
 returned, and that she felt after such an interview as if she 
 had been examined, classified, and set one side, with a pin 
 through the back, as another bug for her collection. To 
 others she was sympathetic, sincere, helpful, magnetic 
 her one object in life to grow, to improve, and to urge others 
 to follow her. 
 
 Her conversation then as ever was her forte. Rev. James 
 Freeman Clarke explains : " How she did glorify life to all ! 
 All that was tame and common vanishing away in the pic 
 turesque light thrown on the most familiar things by her 
 rapid fancy, her brilliant wit, her sharp insight, her creative 
 imagination, by the inexhaustible resources of her knowledge, 
 and the copious rhetoric which found words and images apt 
 and always ready." 
 
 She was now familiar with the best French, Italian, 
 and Spanish literature, and in 1832 took up the study 
 of German, able in three months study to read the master 
 pieces in that language, a fact that illustrates her patience, 
 persistence, and power. 
 
 A letter just received from Mrs. Christopher Cranch, of 
 Cambridge, shows how she was loved by those who knew her 
 well. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Febniary 20, 1883. 
 
 You have asked me to do, what would honor me in the 
 doing, were I able to accomplish it in a fitting and appropriate 
 manner. You ask me to write to you of one of the rarest of 
 women, whose talents, whose virtues are revered by all who 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 301 
 
 knew her well, by those who were able to enjoy her friend 
 ship. Have not several of the first minds our country can claim 
 written in her praise, and how much more durable than marble 
 monument will be those words secured to literature in the vol 
 umes already published of her life. Her wit, her learning, her 
 subtle sympathy with all those who could appreciate her qual 
 ities of mind and heart, were cherished by a choice circle, 
 though it also included the simple and the lowly as well as the 
 great. 
 
 She had no personal beauty. Her health was an uncertain de 
 pendence before her visit to Europe, where she ripened in an 
 Italian atmosphere to a degree of physical strength, and a happi 
 ness unknown to her in the cold New England climate of her 
 birth and yet with no personal attractions, with a voice enfeebled 
 by delicate health, often rendered ill by the excitement of a too 
 active brain. Yet this woman drew to her side with admiration the 
 young, the talented, the distinguished what was the charm? 
 it was indescribable, and it was felt by so many who sought a 
 strength in her companionship; whose influence was to elevate, to 
 inspire with new hope and courage the power to battle with the 
 struggles of life and of destiny. Her generosity towards those 
 who interested her, and who sought her aid, if measured by com 
 parison would far outweigh the richest givers, for she sometimes 
 gave her all as in one instance out of many which came to my 
 knowledge, where she devoted to an unfortunate Danish poet the 
 sum which she had for some time been accumulating by intense 
 study, and severe brain work, to accomplish her long-wished-for 
 tour in Europe and lost the whole of it in the generous action 
 to enable him to publish a book, which was a total failure, in New 
 York. 
 
 This of itself should be one of the greenest of laurels that 
 encircles her brow and I would quote as applicable to her the 
 lines that Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to George Sand, 
 "Thou large-brained woman, and large-hearted man;" for indeed 
 her heart was as large as her intellect. 
 
 I remain, dear madam, most cordially yours, with all good 
 wishes, 
 
 ELIZABETH DE~WINDT CRANCH. 
 
 Goethe was now her hero ; she desired to write his life, 
 and make him better known to the American public. Her 
 19 
 
302 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 critique on Goethe is one of her finest efforts. She also 
 translated Eckerman s " Conversations with Goethe." 
 
 We have thus far traced her life as seen by others ; a peep 
 at her journal gives another view. Her aspirations often 
 took the form of written prayer. " Blessed Father, nip every 
 foolish wish in blossom. Lead me any way to truth and 
 goodness. O lead me, my Father ! root out false pride and 
 selfishness from my heart; inspire me with virtuous energy, 
 and enable me to improve every talent for the eternal good 
 of myself and others." And her creed at that time; "I 
 believe in eternal progression. I believe in a God, a beauty 
 and perfection, to which I am to strive all my life for assimi 
 lation. From these two articles of belief, I draw the rules 
 by which I strive to regulate my life." 
 
 Her father removed to Groton, Mass., from Cambridge- 
 port, in the spring of 1833, a matter of deep regret to her. 
 She was decidedly unpopular at this time with all but her de 
 voted circle of intimates. Her formidable wit, keen sense of 
 the ludicrous, indiscriminate sarcasms, pedantic, high-flown 
 talk, and extravagant tendencies in thought and action, were 
 sufficient cause. Yet how little the world knew of her severity 
 with herself, and her humility before God. There is a lesson 
 just here for all of us. 
 
 In the summer of 1835 Miss Fuller met Harriet Martineau, 
 a woman fully as strong, fully as individual as herself. There 
 was at first great enthusiasm on both sides, Margaret hoping 
 she had found the intellectual guide she sighed for, and Miss 
 Martineau, delighted with the brilliancy of her new friend, 
 insisted that Emerson must know her. But of course they 
 clashed later on, and the account of the acquaintance from 
 the Englishwoman s standpoint is funny enough. 
 
 Her life was suddenly changed by the death of her father, in 
 the fall of 1835. The family were left quite poor, and her 
 long-cherished plan of visiting the Old World must be given 
 up. And see how bravely she took her trouble : " The new 
 year opens upon me under circumstances inexpressibly sad. 
 I must make the last great sacrifice, and apparently for evil, 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 303 
 
 to me and mine. Life, as I look forward, presents a scene 
 of struggle and privation only. Yet I hate not a "jot of 
 heart," though much of "hope." My difficulties are not to 
 be compared with those over which many strong souls have 
 triumphed. Shall I then despair? If I do, I am not a strong 
 soul." "Let me now try to forget myself, and act for others 
 sakes. What I can do with my pen I know not. The 
 expectations so many have been led to cherish by my conver 
 sational powers I am disposed to deem ill-founded. I do not 
 feel in my bosom that confidence necessary to sustain me in 
 such undertakings the confidence of genius." 
 
 She now devoted herself to the homeliest domestic duties, 
 reading also in her intense way, and as the result of this dis 
 cipline, her "heart was awakened to sympathize with the 
 ignorant, to pity the vulgar, to hope for the seemingly worth 
 less." 
 
 In the autumn of 1836 she went to Boston as a teacher, 
 both in Mr. Alcott s school and for classes of young ladies. 
 She saw Alcott as he was ; admired his many good qualities, 
 but felt the fallacy of his dicta. " He becomes lost in ab 
 stractions, and cannot illustrate his principles." 
 
 Through the kindness of Mr. George II. Calvert, of New 
 port, Rhode Island, I have before me an autograph letter of 
 hers written to Mrs. Calvert while she was at Providence. 
 Mr. Calvert has added a few words of personal reminis 
 cence. He says : " I wish I could do more for you ; but my 
 interviews with Miss Fuller were brief and far between. 
 Our relations were most cordial, and though of so large a 
 nature, she was not difficult to know, for her soul shone 
 through and lighted up her being with a rare illumination. I 
 first met her, in 1837, in Newport, where she was invited to 
 spend a week with the Channings. I drove Miss Fuller out 
 in the old-fashioned chaise. New books were rare in those 
 days, and Talfourd s "Ion" had lately been republished in 
 Boston. The Doctor spoke of it as a dramatic poem of merit. 
 Miss Fuller quickly, but with the confidence of one not 
 unpractised in such matters, expressed an opposite opinion, 
 
304 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 saying that Talfourd was not a poet ; and it seems to me that 
 she was right. Dr. Channing was better versed in ethic than 
 aesthetic principles, and had probably not studied poetry. 
 This little encounter was conducted with well-stuffed, silk- 
 covered gloves, and the Doctor seemed to defer to Miss Fuller s 
 judgment on such subjects. This pleasant passage at literary 
 arms was characteristic of Margaret Fuller, who was sincere 
 and impulsive, and incapable of worldly calculation." 
 
 It was through Miss Martineau that Miss Fuller became a 
 friend of Emerson. She had reported enthusiastically the con 
 versation of this new light, and introduced them. His first im 
 pression was disagreeable, as with most persons. He says : 
 " Her manner expressed an overweening sense of power and 
 slight esteem of others. The men thought she carried too 
 many guns, and the women did not like one who despised 
 them. I believe I fancied her too much interested in per 
 sonal history ; and her talk was a comedy in which dramatic 
 justice was done to every one s foibles. I remember that she 
 made me laugh more than I liked," etc. 
 
 But her sense of the ridiculous was inborn, and Emerson 
 saw at once that her satire Avas only the outlet of super 
 abundant wit and spirits, and soon went far beyond this into 
 an admiring study of her " many moods and powers." What 
 a great soul she must have been to have won from Emerson 
 this eulogy : " She was an active, inspiring companion and 
 correspondent, and all the art, the thought, and the nobleness 
 in New England seemed at that moment related to her, and 
 she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. Her 
 arrival was a holiday and so was her abode, and all tasks that 
 could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable 
 hour in walking, riding, or boating ; to talk with this joyful 
 guest, who brought wit, anecdote, love stories, tragedies, 
 oracles with her, and, with her broad web of relations to so 
 many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament 
 of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom 
 every question had been finally referred. The day was 
 never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory, and I, 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 395 
 
 who knew her intimately from July, 1836, till August, 1846, 
 when she sailed for Europe, never saw her without sur 
 prise at her new powers." Yet the phrases "imperious 
 dame" and "haughty assurance," with the sentence, "She 
 extorted the secret of life," show that there was still too 
 much of the autocrat in her manner. From the beginning 
 
 o o 
 
 she had idealized herself as a sovereign, and said coolly of 
 Shakspeare : "He was as premature as myself." She said 
 plainly that no man ever gave such invitation to her mind as 
 to tempt her to full expression. "A woman of tact and 
 brilliancy like me has an undue advantage in conversation 
 with men." She also made this astounding statement: "I 
 now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I 
 find no intellect comparable with my own." No wonder that 
 Emerson spoke of her "mountainous Me," and Lowell alluded 
 playfully to her 
 
 " I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air." 
 
 With all this there is for those who have studied her 
 carefully a deal of truth in what Miss Bracket! says on 
 this point : " It seems to me that those who accuse her 
 of self-esteem in any fault-finding sense simply show their 
 own littleness. To her, life, in others, in herself, was an art. 
 Always a sculptor, fully conscious of the difficulties of her 
 tusk, she stood chisel in hand before a half-finished statue." 
 This is excellent, and will prove a key to much that without 
 it cannot be rightly understood. 
 
 But she could not help knowing her power as a converser. 
 I will not say " conversationalist," for it weakens the praise 
 due her. I wonder that " conversationalisabilitativeness " 
 has not been coined for the use of those who imagine that 
 with every added syllable a greater idea of power is given. 
 
 What other woman in this country has achieved a lasting 
 reputation as a converser? Miss Fuller never wearied her 
 auditors. " I never wanted her to stop," was the universal 
 testimony. She was also willing to listen patiently, cordially, 
 and enjoyed making other women talk well. 
 
306 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 With other extraordinary talkers the experience has been 
 vastly different. When Coleridge expatiated for two hours 
 on a couple of ragged soldiers he had encountered by the 
 roadside, Theodore Hook exclaimed at the close, "Thank 
 God he did not meet the regiment ! " There was a preachiness 
 in his harangues which was intolerable. Carlyle was terribly 
 severe on his monologues, and had the courage to say that 
 few had any idea what the old man was driving at. Rogers, 
 too, declared he often did not understand one word the 
 oracle was pouring forth. 
 
 Schiller groaned after two or three interviews with De 
 Stael : " I feel as if I had had a month s illness ; " and said 
 that in order to follow her one had absolutely to convert 
 himself wholly into an organ of hearing. Goethe dreaded the 
 encounter, and braced himself as for a serious trial. Byron 
 called her an avalanche in society. 
 
 Johnson was dogmatism personified. No one else had the 
 slightest chance, and Carlyle, who inveighed constantly 
 against talking, was a growling, cross-grained pessimist, 
 with a profound respect for his own opinions and a profound 
 contempt for the world at large a combination, as Dr. 
 Lord wittily put it, of Diogenes, Jeremiah, atid Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Brougham thought that any one was lucky to get off alive 
 from one of Macaulay s erudite and torrent-like monologues, 
 and Sydney Smith made merry over his nightmare when he 
 dreamed he was chained to a rock and talked to death by 
 Harriet Martineau and Macaulay. 
 
 Is there any other woman who has a more enviable reputa 
 tion as an eloquent and instructive converser? It was Miss 
 Fuller s especial ambition to talk well. " If I were a man 
 the gift I would choose should be that of eloquence. I would 
 prefer it to a more permanent influence. Conversation is my 
 natural element. I need to be called out, and never think 
 alone without imagining some companion." She added to 
 this, "It bespeaks a second-rate mind." 
 
 One of her friends says of her wonderful power in this 
 direction : " Her mood applies itself to the mood of her com- 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 307 
 
 panion point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital 
 way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives, yet she 
 had a light sort of laugh when all was said, as if she thought 
 she could live over that revelation. And this sufficient 
 sympathy she had for all persons indifferently for lovers, for 
 artists, and beautiful maids, and ambitious young statesmen, 
 and for old aunts and coach-travellers. Ah ! she applied 
 herself to the mood of her companion, as the sponge applies 
 itself to water." 
 
 Emerson says of his conversations with her : " They inter 
 ested me in every manner, talent, memory, wit, stern 
 introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feel 
 ing, fhe aspects of the future, each followed each in full 
 activity. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the 
 essential truth gathered from wide research and distilled with 
 patient toil, and by skilful treatment she could make green 
 again the wastes of commonplace." 
 
 From this we drift naturally into the Conversation Class 
 started by her in Boston in 1839. She needed money, and 
 many bright and thoughtful women were glad to pay for the 
 privilege of being guided by her in discussion and listening to 
 her decisions. And it is pleasant to miss her former arro 
 gance, as she says modestly : " I am so sure that the success 
 of the whole depends on conversation being general that I do 
 not wish any one to come who does not intend, if possible, to 
 take an active part. General silence or side talks would 
 paralyze me. I should feel coarse and misplaced were I to 
 harangue overmuch." 
 
 The ladies met at Miss Peabody s rooms. Miss Fuller 
 alluded to the sad fact that women run over a great variety 
 of studies in school, but when they come into real life find 
 themselves unfit for any practical work, as they learn without 
 any attempt to reproduce. She was not there as a teacher, 
 but to give her views and elicit thought from others. The 
 entire circle met her with charming responsiveness. They 
 began with Mythology, then took up the Fine Arts, Educa 
 tion, her favorite theme of Demonology, and the Ideal. I am 
 
308 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 glad k> say that Miss Fuller was always well dressed and 
 looked " sumptuously," and am more glad to add that, while 
 her toilet was appropriate, it was the magnificent impression 
 made by her genius and her face, glorified by lustrous 
 thoughts, that gave the idea of splendor, for her dress had 
 no special expense. 
 
 The influence of this class was grand and wide-spreading. 
 "Everything she said had the power of germinating in other 
 minds," and one lady, who did not like Miss Fuller, and was 
 a severe critic, was obliged to say after one of these rare 
 treats : " I never heard, read of, or imagined a conversation 
 at all equal to this we have now heard." 
 
 Her fame increased, and gentlemen begged for an even 
 ing class to which they might be admitted. This was 
 arranged, but she was still the head by general consent, 
 and Margaret was the best informed of all the party. "Take 
 her as a whole, she has the most to bestow on others by con 
 versation of any person I have ever known. I cannot 
 conceive of any species of vanity living in her presence. She 
 distances all who talk with her." It is something to be 
 proud of that no man ever had to talk down to her standard. 
 
 The summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of the Transcen 
 dental movement in New England, and Mr. Frothingham 
 says that Margaret Fuller was certainly, next to Emerson, the 
 most noble representative of this new departure, "a peer of 
 the realm in this new world of thought." 
 
 o 
 
 Their organ was the "Dial, "and Miss Fuller was the editor 
 for four years. She worked laboriously for small pay, and 
 did much for its success. It is now principally regarded as a 
 literary curiosity. 
 
 In the autumn of 1844 she was invited by Mr. Greeley, 
 who had been impressed by her articles in the "Dial," to 
 become a constant contributor to the "New- York Tribune." 
 This was just the opening she had desired, for she had 
 written only a few weeks before : "At present I feel inclined 
 to impel the general stream of thought ; my nearest friends 
 also wish that I should now take share in more public life." 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 309 
 
 In December she took up her abode with Mr. and Mrs. 
 Grccley. Ill-health and her habit of waiting for a mood 
 were against her in this new position. Mr. Grecley at first 
 disliked her, but they were soon devoted friends. How 
 beautifully he speaks of her devotion to children, and her 
 especial love for his little Pickio, who in turn gave his wholo 
 heart to "Aunty Margaret." lie also applauds her courage 
 and compassion in ministering to those of her own sex who 
 are called "outcasts." "I regard them," she nobly said, "as 
 women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong or 
 misfortune"; and while others deplored their condition and 
 shunned them, she labored to vindicate and redeem. Her 
 articles for the "Tribune" are not especially valuable to 
 day. Her criticisms were far from infallible, but she was 
 always sincere, never discussed in a frivolous spirit, was never 
 an imitator, never spoke for a clique or sect. Her honest, 
 independent convictions were her only guide. Her judgment 
 of Longfellow was unreasonably severe, and it was a hard 
 slap to say of Lowell, " His verse is stereotyped, his thought 
 sounds no depth, posterity will not remember him." No 
 wonder that Lowell following Goldsmith s example attempted 
 a playful retaliation in his "Fable for Critics," giving her the 
 name she had herself assumed : 
 
 "But there comes Miranda; Zens! where shall I flee to? 
 She has such a penchant for bothering me, too ! 
 She always keeps asking if I don t observe a 
 Particular likeness twixt her and Minerva. 
 She will take an old notion and make it her own 
 By saying it o er in her Sybilline tone, 
 Or persuade you tis something tremendously deep 
 By repeating it so as to put you to sleep." 
 
 What a picture he drew of her in one line ! 
 "The whole of whose being s a capital I." 
 
 Lowell is also supposed to have sketched Margaret Fuller 
 in his "Studies of Two Heads," 
 
310 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 " Her eye it seems a cheinic teat 
 And drops upon you like an acid ; 
 It bites you with unconscious zest, 
 So clear and bright, so coldly placid, 
 It holds you quietly aloof, 
 It holds and yet it does not win you; 
 It merely puts you to the proof 
 And sorts what qualities are in you; 
 It smiles, but never brings you nearer, 
 It lights, her nature draws not nigh; 
 Tis but that yours is growing clearer 
 To her assays; yes, try and try, 
 You ll get no deeper than her eye. 
 
 " There you are classified ; she s gone 
 Far, far away into herself ; 
 Each with its Latin label on, 
 Your poor components, one by one, 
 Are laid upon their proper shelf 
 In her compact and ordered mind, 
 And what of you is left behind 
 Is no more to her than the wind ; 
 In that clear brain, which day and night, 
 No movement of her heart ere jostles, 
 Her friends are ranged on left and right, 
 Here, silex, hornblende, sienite; 
 There, animal remains and fossils." 
 
 Miss Fuller was quite a lion in New York society, but the 
 old feeling of isolation never left her. "Alone, as usual," 
 was her reply when questioned as to the reason for sighing 
 after a merry evening. There is no loneliness in life like this, 
 and it is a subject upon which a woman cannot enlarge without 
 being laughed at or accused of maudlin yearnings or weak 
 sentimentality, but Mrs. Browning and others have dared to 
 depict this heart-traged} borne in cheerful silence by many a 
 brave and brilliant woman who is expected to give bread, nay 
 meat and wine, to others, without a crumb to feed her own 
 starving heart. 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 311 
 
 " Yc weep for those who weep? she said 
 Ah, fools! I bid you pass them by. 
 Go, weep for those whose hearts have bled, 
 What time their eyes were dry. 
 Whom sadder can I say? she cried." 
 
 In the spring of 1846 Miss Fuller went abroad with a 
 party of friends, and her letters tell of her meeting with 
 almost all the noted men and women of her time in a way 
 that interests all and can offend or injure none. She found 
 it impossible to get in a word when with Carlyle. 
 
 It must have been a severe verbal tussle, but the Chelsea 
 sage conquered by brute force. "To interrupt him," she 
 complains, "is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance 
 to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears 
 you down ; he allows no one a chance." 
 
 These were hard lines for the woman who in her own 
 country had been so long accustomed to reign, and had 
 found all glad and grateful to listen to her wisdom. 
 
 Her experience reminds me of the indignant Frenchman 
 who had been vainly trying to break in upon his opponent s 
 fiery monologue. " If he coughs or spits he is lost ! " And 
 of Sydney Smith s declaration that Macaulay had never 
 yet heard his voice, as when they met they would both talk 
 every moment on perhaps totally different themes, each 
 regardless of the other s eloquence. After one of these 
 encounters Sydney pathetically exclaimed, thinking of all the 
 good things he had said, "Poor Macaulay, he ll b.e very sorry 
 some day to have missed all this ! " 
 
 Miss Martineau, who had evidently been offended by Miss 
 Fuller s frank expressions of dislike to some portions of her 
 book on America, said that she did not enjoy herself except 
 where she could harangue the whole drawing-room parly 
 without any interruption, although there were those present 
 as eminent as herself; and describes comically Miss Fuller s 
 disappointment that Miss Martineau, after her marvellous cure 
 by mesmerism, exhibited no unusual manifestations, and was 
 in fact more commonplace than ever. Miss Martineau had a 
 
312 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 bad habit of giving every one a black eye as she passed them, 
 and did not fail in her autobiography to pummel her former 
 friend, saying : 
 
 " The difference between us was that while she was livin^ 
 
 o 
 
 and moving in an ideal world, talking in private and dis 
 coursing in public about the most fanciful and shallow 
 conceits which the transcendentalists of Boston took for 
 philosoph} , she looked down upon persons who acted instead 
 of talking finely, and devoted their fortunes, their peace, 
 their repose, and their very lives to the preservation of the 
 principles of the republic. While Margaret Fuller and her 
 adult pupils sat "gorgeously dressed," talking about Mars 
 and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves the 
 elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of 
 the republic were running out as fast as they could go, at a 
 breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting 
 themselves to repair; and my complaint against the "gorge 
 ous " pedants was that they regarded their preservers as 
 hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a 
 less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a 
 set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way. . . . Her life in 
 Boston was little short of destructive. In the most pedantic age 
 of society in her own country, and in its most pedantic city, 
 she who was just beginning to rise out of pedantic habits 
 of thought and speech relapsed most grievously. She was 
 not only completely spoiled in conversation and manners, 
 she made false estimates of the objects and interests of human 
 life. She was not content with pursuing, and inducing others 
 to pursue a metaphysical idealism destructive of all genuine 
 feeling and sound activity : she mocked at objects and efforts 
 of a higher order than her own, and despised those who, like 
 myself, could not adopt her scale of valuation. All this 
 might have been spared, a world of mischief saved, and a 
 world of good effected, if she had found her heart a dozen 
 years sooner, and in America instead of Italy. It is the most 
 grievous loss I have almost ever known in private history, 
 the deferring of Margaret Fuller s married life so long." 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 313 
 
 Greeley admired Channing s delicate way of expressing the 
 fact that, being such a genuine woman, her life Avas maimed 
 and marred by lack of a satisfying love and a home, adding, 
 "If I had attempted to say this I should have somehow blun 
 dered out that, great and noble as she was, a good husband 
 and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated 
 her from a deal of cant and nonsense." But the change is 
 near. Six years before in prophetic strain she gave a glimpse 
 of the volcano beneath the snow : " Once I was almost all 
 intellect, now I am almost all feeling. Nature vindicates her 
 rights and I feel all Italy glow r ing beneath the Saxon crust. 
 This cannot last long. I shall burn to ashes if all this 
 smoulders here much longer. I must die if I do not burst 
 forth in genius or heroism." 
 
 An ample outlet for this flood of feeling came to her in the 
 Italian struggle for freedom and her romantic marriage with 
 the young Marquis D Ossoli, while her inclination to hero-wor 
 ship drew her irresistibly to Mazzini, whom she described as 
 " in mind a great poetic statesman, in heart a lover, in action 
 decisive and full of resources as Crcsar." Her own heroism 
 and philanthrophy shone nobly in her devotion to the cause of 
 freedom, her tireless nursing of the wounded soldiers in the 
 hospital where she was directress, for whom she "would have 
 sold her hair, or blood from her arm ; " and her generosity 
 was always so excessive as to be almost unfair to herself. 
 
 Her marriage, kept private for more than a year for 
 pecuniary and political reasons, was a strange affair to one 
 who did not know the woman s need and longings, much like 
 Madame de StatTs private marriage with the invalid soldier 
 Rocca, who was so much her junior, and inferior to her in 
 everything but love and devotion. But all Margaret s friends 
 felt what one expressed : " I have an unshaken trust that what 
 Margaret did she can defend." 
 
 As she rejoiced that in D Ossoli her heart had " found a 
 home," no one should dare to blame or criticise or even 
 wonder. She could talk of her friends without treachery or 
 gossip ; an example I am proud to follow. 
 
314 MARGARET FULLER. 
 
 She was an utterly changed being aftet the birth of her 
 boy, Angelo ; no arrogance, conceit all gone, only love, hope, 
 and peace. She writes : "What a difference it makes to come 
 home to a child ! how it fills up all the gaps of life, just in 
 the way that is most consoling most refreshing. Formerly 
 I used to feel sad at twilight ; the day had not been nobly 
 spent ; I had not done my duty to myself and others, and I 
 felt so lonely ! Now, I never feel lonely, for even if my little 
 boy dies, our souls will remain eternally united. I console my 
 self in him for my own incapacities. Nothing but a child can 
 take the worst bitterness out of life. The most solid hap 
 piness I have known has been when he has gone to sleep in my 
 arms." I like to think of Margaret Fuller, the happy mother, 
 bending over her baby, splashing with merry frolic in his bath, 
 one bright and perfect gleam of sunshine in her clouded life. 
 
 New and terrible trials were in store for her. During the 
 
 o 
 
 siege of Rome she had to be separated from both husband 
 and child ; one constantly in danger, the other in the charge 
 of an unprincipled nurse, who was willing to starve her darling 
 for the lack of a few scudi. She wrote : " What I endured at 
 that time in various ways not many would survive. In 
 the burning sun, I went every day to wait in the crowd for 
 letters. Often they did not come. I saw blood that had 
 streamed on the wall where D Ossoli was. I have a piece of a 
 bomb that burst close to him." She now wrote to Channing : 
 " You say truly I shall come home humbler. God grant it 
 may be entirely humble. In future, while more than ever 
 deeply penetrated with principles and the need of the martyr 
 spirit to sustain them, I will ever own that there are few 
 worthy, and that I am one of the least." See the statue fully 
 freed from the rough block. 
 
 The piteousness of poverty is ten times increased when it 
 cramps and saddens genius, and it is painful to recall her 
 words ; " It is very sad we have no money, we could be so 
 quietly happy a while." She was obliged to support her 
 family by her pen while preparing her history of the "Recent 
 Revolution in Europe," which, alas, was lost at sea. 
 
MARGARET FULLER. 315 
 
 But her face was now turned homeward and mother- 
 ward. Their passage was taken in a sailing vessel, the 
 Elizabeth. Fate again loomed gloomily on her path. D Ossoli 
 had been warned years ago to "beware of the sea," and 
 Margaret said, " I am absurdly fearful, and various omens 
 have combined to give me a dark feeling. In case of mis 
 hap, however, I shall perish with my husband and child, and 
 we may be transferred to some happier state." 
 
 God grant that this is now a blessed real ity ! Everyone 
 knows the result. Their captain was a victim of small-pox, 
 and Angelo just escaped. When just in sight of land the 
 ship struck on Fire Island beach at daybreak. The rest is 
 too agonizing to redescribe, when all have the scene in their 
 own minds. Her death was like all the rest ; within sight of 
 land, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates not one to save. 
 
 Channing exclaims : "Did the last scene appear but as the 
 fitting close to a life of storms, where no safe haven was ever 
 in reach, where thy richest treasures were so often stranded, 
 where even the nearest and dearest seemed always too far off, 
 or too late to help?" She died for love, she might have been 
 saved, but all must be saved or lost. What a tableau for im 
 mortality was Margaret,, seated in her white robe at the foot 
 of the foremast, her fair hair fallen loose upon her shoulders, 
 face to face with death ! This is her epitaph : "By birth a 
 citizen of New England ; by adoption a citizen of Rome ; by 
 genius, belonging to the world." Better than this, is the tes 
 timony of a friend : " She helped whoever knew her." 
 
 "Thus closed thy day in darkness and in tears ; 
 Thus waned a life, alas ! too full of pain ; 
 But Oh, thou noble woman ! thy brief life 
 Though full of sorrow, was not lived in vain." 
 
 Not in vain, if the women of this land avoid her errors, 
 imitate her virtues, and endeavor to carry out the reforms 
 which she inaugurated. Let us adopt her motto, " Give us 
 truth ; " her watchword, " Patience," and, with her, " love 
 best to be a woman." 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 BY LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE. 
 
 "Father Hopper s" Work Among Convicts and Felons First Sunday Ser 
 vices in a Jail Abby Hopper s Girlhood Following in the Footsteps 
 of Her Father Her Work among the Inmates of the New York Tombs 
 The "Isaac T. Hopper Home " The School for Street Children 
 The Waifs and Strays of Randall s Island Charity Children An 
 Appeal for Dolls Generous Response Affecting Incident The Story 
 of Robert Denyer Mrs. Gibbons Work During the War Nursing 
 Union Soldiers The Draft Riots in New York An Exciting Time 
 Attacking Mrs. Gibbons House Havoc and Devastation Wrought by 
 the Mob Work After the War A Noble Life. 
 
 HE "Hapsburgh lip," the " Guelph heaviness," 
 the " Adams temper," are historic. That subtle 
 drop of blood which forever bequeaths its ten 
 dencies descends from sire to son through long 
 generations. But not less certainly does excel 
 lence derive itself from excellence. Philan 
 thropy in certain races is an inheritance, and 
 the Hopper good-will is as truly a characteristic 
 as the "Hapsburgh lip." 
 
 The father of Mrs. Gibbons, Isaac T. Hopper, 
 of beautiful memory, spent sixty-five years of his 
 allotted fourscore in constant, cheerful, brotherly labors 
 for the outcast, the prisoner, and the fugitive. When he 
 left his home, at the age of sixteen, to begin life for him 
 self, his mother, a woman of lofty and generous character, 
 said to him : " My son, you are now going forth to make 
 your own way in the world. Always remember that you are 
 as good as any other person ; but remember, also, that you 
 are no better." This counsel he received as a birthright, and 
 316 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 317 
 
 the Hopper claim to it still holds good. On the one side he 
 had always the courage of his opinions, the self-respect that 
 
 " Dares to be 
 In the right with two or three ; " 
 
 on the other, he kept the simplest modesty, without self-con 
 sciousness. His wife was a woman of great beauty and singular 
 high-mindedness. They belonged to the society of Friends, 
 and believed in the duty of the simplest living, that world- 
 liiiess might not corrupt or superfluities defraud charity. 
 
 Into this plain home many sons and daughters were born, 
 to delight in the beauty and sweetness of their mother, and 
 that resistless charm of their witty, fun-loving, sport-devising, 
 story-telling, dramatic, Quaker father, which, when he was 
 an old man, still drew children to crowd about him, and 
 prefer " Father Hopper " to their young playmates. From 
 babyhood his own boys and girls were familiar with instances 
 of want and misery that might have made them unhappy had 
 there been any morbidness and sentimentalism in the atmos 
 phere of the household. But they were taught, with a simple 
 matter-of-course-ness which precluded harm, that the unfor 
 tunate had a human claim upon them. . Time and sympathy 
 were not to be wasted in vain pity, but devoted to practical 
 help. Abused apprentices, fugitive slaves, wronged seamen, 
 defrauded workwomen, were familiar figures in their home. 
 On Saturday afternoon they used to take long country 
 rambles with their father, always stopping at the prison to 
 leave whatever comforts they had been able to procure for its 
 inmates. For many years Friend Hopper was an official 
 inspector of prisons, and a tireless Good Samaritan to the 
 most questionable neighbor. 
 
 Those were days when it was still a recent discovery that 
 convicts were human beings, capable of reformation, and 
 penetrable to kindness. Near the close of the last century 
 the Rev. Dr. Rogers of Philadelphia, one of the committee 
 of the first society formed in this country " for relieving the 
 miseries of public prisons," proposed to address a religious 
 20 
 
318 ABBT HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 exhortation to the prisoners on Sunday. The keeper assured 
 him that his life would be in danger. Solitary confinement 
 was the rule of the jail. If the convicts were allowed to 
 assemble together it was feared that they would overpower 
 the guard and escape, to rob and murder as they went. The 
 sheriff finally granted an order for the performance of religious 
 services. But the warden obeyed it with fear and trembling, 
 actually ordering a loaded cannon to be planted near the 
 clergyman, a gunner beside it with a lighted match, while the 
 motley worshippers were ranged in solid column, directly in 
 front of their grim threatener. This is believed to have been 
 the first attempt ever made in America to hold Sunday 
 services in a jail. 
 
 Friend Hopper used to say that there was not a convict in 
 Philadelphia, however desperate, with whom he should fear 
 to trust himself alone at midnight anywhere. He was once 
 warned against a certain violent and revengeful felon who had 
 been heard to threaten the life of a keeper. Thereupon he 
 summoned the man, telling him that he was wanted to pile 
 some lumber in a cellar, and went down with him to hold the 
 light. They remained for more than an hour in that solitary 
 place, the Quaker talking in the friendliest way to his sullen 
 companion. When they came up again it was plain that the 
 man s dangerous mood was past, for the time, at least. 
 Presently it became the rule, whenever the final resources of 
 prison discipline failed, to send for Friend Hopper, whose 
 shrewd kindness prevailed in the end against the most dogged 
 obstinacy and malevolence. 
 
 All the children of this extraordinary man inherited his 
 spirit. But his second daughter, Abby, heard the " inner 
 voice" calling upon her to take up his peculiar work in his 
 peculiar way. Teaching in girlhood, and mothering the 
 younger children, left by their mother s long illness and 
 death to their elder sisters, she still found time to be her 
 father s constant aid and counsellor. 
 
 After her marriage and removal to New York cares came 
 upon her in battalions. With no home duty neglected, 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 319 
 
 and with an ever-demanding spirit of helpfulness, exerted, 
 not in sentiment, but instance by instance, the days were full. 
 Six children were born to the young couple. Money was 
 never plentiful, and the consequent claims upon the time, 
 strength, and ingenuity of the mother and housekeeper were 
 unending. But her wonderful management so systematized 
 affairs as to leave leisure for innumerable good works. 
 
 Fashionable ladies keep an " engagement-book," lest, in 
 the whirl of their days, some visit of ceremony, some over 
 due invitation, some civil message or arbitrary courtesy 
 should be neglected. The punctual Quakeress needed no 
 memorandum of social duties even more numerous and press 
 ing. For fifty years and more, five days of every week have 
 been " visiting days " with her. 
 
 Every Wednesday found her at the Tombs, that grim 
 Egyptian pile which is the city Bridewell. Only one 
 who has stood within the bounds of a prison can com 
 prehend the gloomy misery of the place, or the sclf-deni;:l 
 implied in frequent visits to its squalid inmates. The 
 bolts and bars ; the multiplied iron doors ; the narrow 
 guarded passages; the far grated windows just below the 
 ceiling, through which no ray of sunshine glances ; the chill, 
 and silence, and mocking neatness ; the stark, strait walls, 
 which, to affrighted fancy, seem ever to bo narrowing; the 
 unvarying routine of stagnant hours these things give one 
 a suffocating sense of living burial, and the human life 
 entombed there is horrible to see. Men and women, 
 debauched, quarrelsome, drunken, sickening to every sense, 
 and, to the common judgment, conscienceless as the beasts, 
 and incapable of reformation, sulk and complain in the dole 
 ful cells, which, after all, are less dreadful places than the 
 dens which fill them. Familiarity with such creatures natu 
 rally breeds indifference to them. Official justice naturally 
 confounds unhardened culprits with hopeless offenders. 
 
 Armed with discretion in the needed discrimination, the 
 Prison Association, whom Mrs. Gibbons represented, at 
 tempted to help those who were willing to help themselves. 
 
320 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 These philanthropists saw with what appalling pressure the 
 superincumbent weight of society bore down upon the crimi 
 nal mass below it. They saw, therefore, the necessity of 
 providing work and a fair chance for convicts, who, having 
 completed their term of sentence, too often found themselves 
 distrusted, isolated, and unable to obtain employment, and 
 finally driven back to their old haunts and their old ways. 
 
 Another purpose of the association, never lost sight of, 
 was the improvement of the condition of prisoners, whether 
 awaiting trial, detained as witnesses, or finally convicted. 
 
 When Mrs. Gibbons began her weekly visits to the Tombs 
 she found mere children arrested for vagrancy or held to 
 give evidence, herded with the most abandoned criminals. 
 She found young girls, accused of trifling offences, exposed 
 to the companionship of the lowest of their sex, and decent 
 men, more unfortunate than vicious, breathing the tainted air 
 of hideous immorality. 
 
 Through her instrumentality new rules provided a separate 
 shelter for the children, and made some sort of discrimination 
 between the various grades of crime. She inquired into the 
 previous life and associations of the female prisoners, 
 admonishing the dissolute, and encouraging the remorseful. 
 She lightened the utter chccrlessness of prison life with the 
 hope of better days to come. Felons besought her kindness 
 for their families, and murderers in the condemned cells sent 
 for her to counsel and assist them. 
 
 Yet with all her sympathy she had her father s shrewd and 
 sceptical judgment. No sham repentence, no interested 
 piety, no fictitious distresses, imposed upon her for an instant. 
 She had no sentimental counsels for wrong-doers. Hard 
 work, indomitable perseverance, patient endurance of distrust 
 and harsh judgment, she set before them as the hard condi 
 tions of readmission to the world of decent living. 
 
 A very brief experience among these prisoners convinced 
 her that the women must have some refuge in which they 
 would be safe from temptation on leaving prison. Helped 
 by a few other zealous souls, she established for them the 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 321 
 
 "Isaac T. Hopper Home," on Tenth Avenue, one of the 
 most useful and modest of the many charitable institutions of 
 New York. 
 
 " A few young women," said the directors, in one of 
 their reports, " may occasionally be found there, strangers 
 in the country, wanderers from their natural homes, who, 
 alone and friendless in this great city, have fallen, not 
 from vicious propensities, but through sheer misfortune ; and 
 a few there are, whom we have also found in your prisons, 
 the victims of wrong, suspicion and helplessness. All these, 
 after a short novitiate, we have restored to decent life and 
 productive industry. Some of our inmates are from Sing 
 Sing, convicts, who have been sent there for the lighter 
 class of crimes so punishable; but by far the greater part is 
 from the Tombs or Blackwell s Island persons committed 
 for petty offences, or merely for vagrancy. These are the 
 victims of intemperance." 
 
 During the forty years existence of the Home, more than 
 two-thirds of the women received many hundreds in all 
 have been restored to honorable and useful lives, some of 
 them marrying and making good wives and mothers, others 
 working faithfully in factories or families. Of the remaining 
 third, a few have been sent to hospitals or almshouses, and 
 a few, as was inevitable, have returned to their old life. 
 
 While in the Home the Women work diligently Avith a view 
 to acquiring those habits of industry, neatness, and thrift 
 which must be their sole future capital. And it is a touching 
 testimony to its usefulness that, among the contributions 
 received for the support of the institution, there often comes 
 a mite from some former inmate. Once a gift of twenty 
 dollars was received, with the message that it had been 
 honestly earned by hard work, and was given " as an act of 
 faith:" 
 
 Yet, though thus responding in heart and deed to the 
 sighing of the prisoner, Mrs. Gibbons always has believed 
 the prevention of crime and degradation to be the true policy 
 of society. Placing the children of the very poor, and es- 
 
322 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 pecially the children of foreign parentage, under better 
 influences than their wretched homes supplied, she considered 
 the first essential of an improved social order. It seems, in 
 looking over scores of records, as if every effort in this direc 
 tion had had her sympathy and help. For twelve years, a term 
 of arduous labor, she was president of a German Industrial 
 School for street children. The parents had come, usually, 
 from small villages, where they and their ancestors had lived 
 and toiled on the same spot, and in the same way, for gen 
 erations. Driven from this narrow round by hard necessity, 
 they found themselves, for the first time in their lives, 
 inhabitants of a city, and without money, language, or 
 friends. Unskilled in any trade, they lived by keeping beer- 
 shops, or by the lower callings of scavenger or rag-picker. 
 Herded together, and easily tempted and deceived in scenes 
 so strange, it was inevitable that they should fall into greater 
 misery than they had left. Even sunshine and fresh air were 
 too costl} r for them, for in a room nine feet by fourteen, 
 whose one small window looked out upon a noisome alley, 
 it was a common thing to find a family of thirteen persons, 
 sleeping, working, living or dying. The children were 
 driven into the streets for air and elbow-room, and the way, 
 through vagrancy, to the city prison, was pitifully short. 
 
 It was not pleasant work, nor easy, to gather pupils of this 
 order, and teach them something more of American ideas and 
 Christian practice than they were likely to learn from native 
 vagrants or police regulations. 
 
 The school opened with seven reluctant students. In four 
 months one hundred and two names stood on the register, 
 and fifty or sixty abecedarians came regularly. Nineteen of 
 them were so well connected that they could have a dinner, 
 such as it was, at home. The rest received a bowl of soup 
 and plenty of bread in the school-room, sixteen hundred and 
 eighteen of these " Christian evidences " being thus set forth, 
 at an average cost of two cents and a fraction each. The 
 children earned the garments they received by good marks, 
 which represented pennies. Begging and indiscriminate giving 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 323 
 
 were discouraged, as injurious to the thrift, industry, and 
 honest pride, which generally characterize the Germans. 
 
 A lady who visited the school on one of its annual exami 
 nation days thus wrote of it : " You should have attended 
 our matinee. It was more entertaining than the opera 
 troupe s. The audience was small, to be sure, and undeniably 
 dowdy. Those eccentric persons who give all their leisure 
 and most of their money to help the helpless over the hard 
 places of life do not, as a rule, recognize the vast importance 
 of English tailors and French dressmakers in the scheme of 
 human existence. A Quaker-like simplicity prevailed, not to 
 mention a certain meagreness, as shown in the whitened 
 seams of ancient overcoats, and the experienced air of bon 
 nets, several seasons old. I do not remember seeing a single 
 jewel, save that quaint decoration that St. Paul admired 
 the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which was very 
 generally worn by those present most of them helpers in 
 and workers for the school. 
 
 " The fifty performers were in full dress, of course. The 
 richest costume was a frock of vivid blue calico, trimmed 
 with pink galloon, worn above red woollen stockings, and 
 copper-toed shoes. This simple and elegant toilet was har 
 monized by a yellow flannel sack, and green ribbons, tying pale 
 flaxen hair. Naturally, such splendor could not be general. 
 The majority appeared in scanty raiment, evidently descended 
 through a long line of previous possessors. This entail, 
 though adding the dignity of history to each forlorn relic, had 
 the usual disadvantage of entails that it did not consider 
 the peculiar needs of the heir. Hence, an imposing array of 
 misfitting gowns and shoes distracted attention at first from 
 the more serious misfit of circumstances in which the little 
 creatures seemed invested. For at their age such atoms 
 ought to be playing with dolls and soap-bubbles. 
 
 "This school-room life is happiness, however, compared 
 with any other possible to these children. The} have been 
 gathered by kind women from the habitations which house 
 the most dangerous ignorance the ignorance which does not 
 
324 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 value knowledge. They would be selling matches and pins, 
 begging, sweeping the crossings, if they were not in school. 
 Most of them, indeed, pursue one or other of those trades 
 after school-hours. But in class they are taught sewing and 
 like industries, reading, singing, the simpler elementary 
 branches, and the virtues of cleanliness, order, civility, and 
 truthfulness. They bring slow brains to the learning, the 
 legacy of generations of dull disuse. But their wise teacher 
 does not hinder their progress with fetters of rules. 
 
 " Her system of object-teaching is most successful. And the 
 sharp attention which the whole school paid to a blossoming 
 rose-tree, and the thoroughness with which its nomenclature 
 and functions were learned an examination, at the end of 
 twenty minutes, proving that each child knew the name and 
 use of every part of the fragrant wonder seemed to show 
 that the system of primary instruction from books alone is 
 all awry. 
 
 "Here, as everywhere, it is the first step which costs. 
 These charity children have taken that step in learning to 
 use their eyes, their understandings, their powers of com 
 parison. All the rest follows if they have but opportunit} . 
 And these fifty little foreign dullards are already on the 
 straight road that leads to intelligent American citizenship." 
 
 Another charity dear to the heart of Mrs. Gibbons, and 
 for many years an exacting consumer of time and labor, was 
 the Infant Asylum. But no other work among children has 
 been more fruitful of relief and happiness than her self- 
 appointed mission among the waifs and strays of Randall s 
 Island. 
 
 On that lovely islet, in the East River, are gathered ten 
 or twelve hundred children of the city poor the motley 
 drift washed upon those quiet shores by the storm and wreck 
 of city sin. Some of them are nameless babies, born of 
 unknown fathers and miserable mothers, at the city hos 
 pital of Bellevue. Some are boys and girls given up by 
 their parents on account of the poverty which waits on 
 intemperance or crime. Some are the half-orphan children 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 325 
 
 of those whose occupations make it impossible to caro for 
 them at home ; cooks, seamen, soldiers, and the like, who 
 pay from three to five dollars a month. Some are foundlings 
 abandoned in the streets of the great city. 
 
 Of the twelve great buildings on the island, composing the 
 city of refuge for these oppressed, that which first receives 
 them is the Quarantine Hospital. Here they are detained 
 till it is certain that they bring no contagious disease from 
 foul rookeries and cellars. After this probation they are 
 transferred to the Boys School, the Girls School, or, sadly 
 often, to the Sick Hospital or the Idiot Asylum. Babies are 
 kept in the Foundling Hospital till they are four years of age 
 before being assigned to the school departments. In these 
 schools the children are well taught in the same branches 
 which the ward-schools of the city prescribe. 
 
 In time many of them are adopted, and the rest bound 
 out to responsible persons, who guarantee their support. 
 Even then they are regularly visited by trustees twice a 
 year, and if any are ill-treated or subjected to evil influences, 
 they are brought back to the institution, to be reapprentieed 
 under better conditions. 
 
 In the Idiot School there are, perhaps, one hundred 
 teachable and fifty hopeless idiots children of foreign 
 parents almost without exception. When these poor crea 
 tures come, most of them can discern no difference between 
 white and black, between a circle and a square, nor can they 
 articulate an intelligible sound. Under patient, tireless, re- 
 repeated drill they learn to talk, to sing, even to write and 
 cipher. More than these, they learn to put off the beast 
 nature, and put on the human, gaining perceptions more or 
 less clear of the need of decency in behavior. 
 
 In the Sick Hospital there are seldom fewer than two 
 hundred and fifty children, from two years old to fifteen. 
 They suffer from almost every known disease ; many of them 
 enduring chronic maladies which have maimed or lamed 
 them for life. All are the victims of parental vices, or of that 
 early exposure to cold, want, and hardship which saps the 
 
326 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 springs of life. Of the vast mortality among them, by far 
 the greater portion occurs during the few months following 
 their arrival, and among the youngest children. A very 
 brief residence on the island, with its pure air, good food, 
 and cleanly habits, wonderfully improves the condition of the 
 frail little creatures. 
 
 Neatness, order, and system are the law of the place. 
 Physicians, matrons, attendants, teachers, servants, are kind 
 to their troublesome charges, and astonishingly patient. 
 Contrasted with any life they have known, or can know, 
 elsewhere, the comfort and security of this fill the measure of 
 well-being, and promise a decent and useful future. Its 
 great Nursery, taken for all in all, is an institution of which 
 the city ma} well be proud. 
 
 And yet, there are few sadder sights under the sun than 
 these ranks on ranks of unchildish children, careworn and 
 anxious so far beyond their years. Even the babies in the 
 tidy nursery-house, where they are well fed, well clothed 
 and tended, seem to look out upon life with a dreary resigna 
 tion, dumbly pleading for that brooding mother-love which is 
 never to enfold them. And in the refectory, to see seven 
 hundred children four hundred in one room and three 
 hundred in another form themselves into ranks before the 
 tables at a given signal ; drop their eyes and bow their 
 heads simultaneously at a second signal ; repeat aloud in 
 singsong chorus an arbitrary " grace " at a third ; and at a 
 fourth, fall to work with spoon, knife, and fork, silent as 
 mutes, and obedient as machines, is to feel how drearily the 
 automaton-like precision and regularity of life in such a place 
 as this inevitable, indispensable as they may be press 
 down upon the natural joyousness and spontaneity of childhood. 
 
 Years ago Mrs. Gibbons, visiting the island in her kindly 
 round of duty, and reading the dumb, pathetic appeal in 
 these young-old faces, said to herself ," What these children 
 need is pleasure. They have care and kindness. They want 
 to feel that they are persons, standing in a human relation to 
 other persons, not mere unrelated members in the sum-total 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 327 
 
 of an Institution. " And she resolved that when the 
 approaching Christmas should bring its message of good-will, 
 every sick child, at least, and as many more as could be pro 
 vided for, should be comforted with a doll or a book. 
 Benevolent friends gladly helped. They appealed, through the 
 newspapers, for contributions of sample cards, scraps of gay 
 merino, silk, or ribbon, or gifts of dolls, books, or money to buy 
 them. A week before Christmas a committee of ladies met at 
 Mrs. Gibbons house, one bleak and boisterous afternoon, and 
 worked from three o clock to ten, to dress the dolls. Other 
 ladies, hearing of the matter, sent for dolls to dress at home. 
 And when Christinas morning came, and the fairy godmother, 
 with a few attending fairies by no means young, and very 
 plain in raiment, started to spend the day at Randall s 
 Island, the fairy gifts filled great clothes -baskets. 
 
 First to be remembered were the sick children in the 
 Hospital, so old, so careworn, so indifferent to life ! But they 
 were not indifferent to the joy of possessing something for 
 their very own. Boys, as well as girls, begged for a doll, 
 save a few who were old enough to prefer a book. Thoy 
 hugged, and kissed, and laughed over their new treasures. 
 One poor little creature, dying, and already sightless, pressed 
 her baby to her pallid face, and smiled with joy. "Good doll," 
 she whispered, and tenderly kissed it. They were the last 
 words she uttered. In the Quarantine nursery the children 
 danced for joy over their gifts. Even the slow idiot-minds, 
 prisoned, not housed, in their torpid bodies, felt pleasure, 
 most of them, and manifested gratitude. 
 
 It was a simple thing enough, the impulse of one motherly 
 heart, the labor of a few kindly hands, the expenditure of a 
 trifling sum. But the happiness it brought was so obvious 
 and abundant that the visit became a custom, and to this day 
 the doll festival is yearly celebrated. Other persons grew 
 interested, and Christmas trees, with glittering fruitage, now 
 spring in that arid soil. 
 
 Going these rounds year after year, Mrs. Gibbons had 
 often noticed a pale scrap of humanity, Ilobert Dcnyer by 
 
328 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 name, the appealing sadness of whose face touched her 
 kindly heart. He was but a stepchild of generous Nature ; 
 high-shouldered, humpbacked, with neck awry, and chest 
 misshaped, and with that weird look of old age so often seen 
 in the countenances of the deformed. In stature he was a 
 child of eight, in ago :i lad of thirteen, in experience of 
 sorrow a man. Year after year the good boys, with whom 
 alone he would consort, sturdy, strong-limbed, capable 
 fellows, were selected for adoption or apprenticeship, and he 
 was left behind. He was a good scholar, in his way, and 
 clever with tools ; but these talents were not marketable, and 
 nobody wanted the deformed dwarf. 
 
 One blessed day the faithful visitor, whom all the children 
 believed to be a saint, stopped at his chair, and said, " Robert, 
 I believe thee is an honest boy. Would thee like to make 
 me a visit, and do me a service at the same time ? We are 
 going to hold a fair for the benefit of the Home, and thee 
 would make an excellent doorkeeper. Thee can reckon 
 money, and give change quickly, and answer questions well, 
 lam sure. Would thee like it?" Like it! The heavens 
 seemed opening to the excited fancy of the child. To be 
 trusted, to be useful, to make a visit in the house which he 
 imagined the most beautiful in the world, for did not such 
 inexhaustible gifts and kindnesses pour out of it, he felt that 
 life could hold no higher joy. 
 
 The little custodian justified her trust. So smiling, so 
 happy, so helpful a manikin was never placed on duty. 
 Visitors came and came again for the pure pleasure 
 of seeing his delight in receiving another shilling for the 
 " Home," and, hearing his pathetic story from his friend 
 within, bought more than one trifle, to be laid aside for him. 
 But when the joyous excitement was over, and the homeless 
 little fellow had to face the bleak necessity of returning to the 
 island, his unspoken repugnance to the place was more than 
 his hostess could bear. 
 
 She sent for her brother, a busy lawyer in the city, and 
 always her ready right-hand and helper in good works, and 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 329 
 
 said to him: "John, I have a testimony for thee. This 
 Robert is no common child. Where he could have gotten 
 them, I don t know, but he has the instincts and even the 
 habits of gentle breeding. He is conscientious, modest, 
 truthful, and clean of speech. He is fond of music, and 
 pictures, and flowers. Thee can imagine what it must have 
 cost such a child to live in the Institution. I should keep 
 him if I had the time and means to do him justice. Now 
 thee has both, and thee has a kind-hearted wife, and a big 
 house. And I think it is the Lord s plain will that thee 
 should take him, and bring him up with thy own child, and 
 as thy own child." 
 
 "If thee think so, Abby, doubtless thee is right," 
 answered her brother. "I will do as thee desires." 
 
 From that moment the homeless child found a home not 
 only in an abode which delighted his starved sense of beauty, 
 but in a heart which gave him fatherly tenderness and cure. 
 In every way he was treated as a child of the house, and the 
 family name was added to his own. His health was delicate, 
 the vital organs laboring heavily to do their work in his poor 
 misshapen body. Because it fatigued him to walk, Mr. 
 Hopper bought a goat-carriage, whose gay equipments were his 
 delight. Because he could not go to school, private lessons 
 were arranged for him. But, though told that he might do 
 so, the lad, with that singular delicacy which characterized 
 him, never called his kind protectors "father" or "mother." 
 
 " I could not love them more if they were fifty parents," 
 he said to his teacher, " but I think it is better for them and 
 for Willy that I should say Mr. and Mrs. " " Willy " was 
 the only child, a beautiful boy of two or three, to whom 
 Robert showed a passionate devotion which never tired in his 
 service, and which was ardently reciprocated. 
 
 So sunny, so sweet, so helpful a presence in the household 
 was the quiet little figure, so loving in his ways, so high- 
 minded and unselfish, that he gave as much as he received. 
 "Thee might spare us, Bob, but we couldn t spare thee," Mr. 
 Hopper used to say, taking the lad in his strong arms, when 
 
330 ABUT HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 he was worn and discouraged. And the pinched little face 
 would glow with pleasure. He had a regular and generous 
 allowance of money, that ho might not feel dependent, hut he 
 spent all his little wealth in presents for the family, or for 
 some of the comrades he had left on the island. And when 
 he had permission to invite one or two of these to visit him, 
 and to go to the theatre, as his guests, he confided to his 
 teacher that he thought he must have experienced all the 
 happiness that this world could offer. 
 
 lie could not live long Avith the entire machinery of exist 
 ence out of gear. Four happy years of love and home were 
 his, and then, tired out with the vain effort to live, and glad 
 to be relieved, he laid down the heavy burden of mortality. 
 In constant pain, he never complained, and always answered, 
 "better, thank you," when asked how he was feeling. 
 
 During his last illness some unspoken anxiety seemed to 
 trouble him, and one day when they two were alone together, 
 he whispered, "Mr. Hopper, where shall I be buried?" 
 
 "Beside me, my dear, dear child," answered that tender 
 spirit, and from that hour the sick boy was serenely tranquil. 
 
 lie was laid to rest in the family lot in Greenwood, and 
 when, but a few months afterwards, Mr. Hopper suddenly 
 died, in the very prime of his beautiful life of blessing and 
 bount} r , the grave was widened, and the two sleep side by side. 
 
 When the war broke out new work devolved upon the 
 busy hands, which seemed already over-full. For the first 
 six months there was much to do at home in organizing 
 Relief Associations for the soldiers. But in November, 
 1801, Mrs. Gibbons, with her eldest daughter, went to the 
 front. First entering the Patent Office Hospital, at Washing 
 ton, they worked early and late to evolve order, system, and 
 comfort from the prevailing chaos. 
 
 The capital at that time was a vast camp, environed by 
 fortifications, the many divisions, brigades, and regiments 
 scattered over a wide area, each with its larger or smaller 
 hospital, half-organized, insufficient, and crowded with sick 
 and suffering men not yet inured to the hardships of army life. 
 
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 331 
 
 Driving one day with a friend, for a brief rest, to Falls 
 Church, ten miles below the city, Mrs. Gibbons found herself 
 in a small encampment of New York troops, their hospital 
 containing about forty men, most of them dangerously ill with 
 typhoid fever. One of these, hardly more than a lad, wasted 
 to a shadow, and too weak for the slightest movement, fixed 
 his eager, restless eyes upon the compassionate face bent above 
 him, and whispered, " Come and take care of me. If you do 
 not I shall die." It was impossible for the busy nurse to 
 stay. It was terrible to refuse. But she went back to duty, 
 carrying a memory of such need and wretchedness as she 
 had not before encountered, and feeling that this must be her 
 place. Falls Church was in a disaffected and dangerous 
 neighborhood ; no woman had ever entered its hospital ; the 
 only nurses were ignorant and blundering men, and the 
 death-rate was appalling. 
 
 As soon as she could transfer her charge Mrs. Gibbons 
 returned, with her daughter, to the fever hospital. The 
 young volunteer was still living, but too feeble to speak. 
 Again his eyes seemed to implore her care. The surgeon-in- 
 charge was ready to accept the services of the ladies, but 
 said that there was, literally, not a roof which would shelter 
 them. At last, the oifer of five dollars a week induced a 
 neighboring ff saloon-keeper " to allow them the use of a loft, 
 floored with unplaned planks, and furnished with a bedstead, 
 and a barrel, which served as table and toilet-stand. There 
 were then thirty-nine patients in the hospital, six lying un- 
 buried in the dead-house. Two or three others died. But 
 when the nurses left, six weeks later, all the rest had rallied 
 sufficiently to bear removal save three, who were slowly 
 convalescing. The young fellow who had fastened his hope 
 of life on their coming had been able to return to his home at 
 Penn Yan, and eventually he recovered. 
 
 From Falls Church the indefatigable nurses went to the 
 Seminary Hospital, at Winchester, devoted to the worst 
 cases of wounds. Four months in the constant service of 
 pain here were followed by a term at Strasburg, where they 
 
332 ABBY HOPPEK GIBBON S. 
 
 were involved in the famous retreat from that place, the 
 enemy seizing the town, and holding even the hospital nurses 
 prisoners, till the main body of their army had secured its 
 escape southward. 
 
 Point Lookout, Maryland, was the next post of these tire 
 less women, that vast caravansary of sick and wounded, 
 of released prisoners and destitute contrabands, Avhich was, 
 in some respects, the most sorrowful and awful of those wide- 
 spreading encampments of misery known as the hospital 
 service. Here, through summer heat and winter cold, cook 
 ing, nursing, encouraging the sick or comforting the dying, 
 they had labored for fifteen months, when news of the draft 
 riots in New York summoned them home. 
 
 On Monday, July 13, 1803, a mob attacked the office of 
 the provost-marshal, where the drawing of names for the 
 conscription was in progress, assaulted the officers in charge, 
 scattered the enrolment lists, and burned the building to the 
 ground. Growing in numbers and excitement, and finding 
 a recruiting station in every drinking-shop, the howling horde 
 spread Itself over the town, pillaging and burning as it went. 
 For four days the great city lay helpless under this reign of 
 terror. The militia companies were at the front. The police, 
 brave and faithful as they proved, were too few in numbers 
 to cope with the insurgent multitude. Street-cars and stages 
 were stopped. Unarmed citizens barricaded themselves within 
 their homes and places of business, going out stealthily and 
 in old clothes. All trade was at an end except the trade in 
 liquor, and a portentous stillness pervaded the town, save 
 where the yells and curses of the drunken mob, hounding to 
 death some harmless negro, or threatening mischief to some 
 obnoxious citizen, broke the appalling silence. By night the 
 sky was red with the glare of burning buildings, and every 
 hour the fire-bells sounded the vain alarm which the incen 
 diaries forbade the firemen to obey. 
 
 The " Tribune " newspaper was especially hateful to the 
 mob, from its vigorous support of the war and the odious 
 draft-measure. Its office was attacked, but found too strongly 
 
AI3BY HOrPEIl GIBBONS. 333 
 
 guarded for that easy conquest which a mob prefers. It was 
 whispered about, however, that Mr. Greeley lived in West 
 Twenty-ninth street, where he might be more safely pun 
 ished. On the afternoon of Wednesday a motley crowd, 
 made up, for the most part, of shrieking beldames and half- 
 grown boys, armed with guns, pistols, clubs, staves, paving- 
 stones, and knives, streamed down the quiet block called 
 Lamartine Place, in search of that kind and steadfast friend 
 of the ignorant and vicious, whom they thought their enemy. 
 Swaying uncertainly to-and-fro, up and down the street, and 
 unable to identify Mr. Greeley s lodgings, the rioters might 
 have passed on without further mischief had not a young 
 gutter-snipe, ambitious of distinction, pointed out Mr. Gib 
 bons house, some doors further on, as the doomed dwelling. 
 
 So fierce and sudden was the assault that the two young 
 daughters, with a servant, had hardly time to escape by the 
 roof before the door was battered in, the windows broken, 
 and fires set in many places. The arrival of the police drove 
 off the mob for the time, and neighbors extinguished the 
 flames. But under cover of night the vandals returned to 
 steal and violate. 
 
 When Mrs. Gibbons and her daughter reached the place 
 that had been home, havoc and devastation confronted them. 
 The panels of the doors were beaten in. Not a pane of glass 
 remained unbroken. The furniture was destroyed or stolen. 
 The carpets were soaked with oil and filth and trampled into 
 ruin by the feet of the struggling crowd. On the key-board 
 of the piano fires had been kindled. Everywhere were 
 scattered the fragments of books and valuable letters, the cor 
 respondence of a lifetime with the great minds of the country, 
 and all the papers and remembrances of Friend Hopper, w r ho 
 had died under his daughter s roof. 
 
 Eight years before this the irremediable sorrow of their 
 lives had befallen that tender household, in the sudden loss 
 of the only son and brother, William, then a young man at 
 college. In this noble youth were garnered up the promise 
 and power of generations. With rare mental capacity and 
 21 
 
334 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 an irresistible social charm that captivated all acquaintances, 
 he possessed a singular strength, sweetness, and purity of 
 character. The president of his university lamented him as 
 the strongest influence for good the college possessed ; his 
 classmates mourned long and truly for him as the best of 
 good fellows, tremendous in work and tremendous in play. 
 But to his mother, his most intimate and trusted friend, 
 his death was desolation. From her thoughts he was never 
 absent. One room in her house was sacred to his memory, 
 where were gathered the pictures he had loved, the gifts he 
 had received, the prizes he had earned, his desk and books, 
 the thousand trifles which love consecrates, and flowers daily 
 renewed as if upon an altar. 
 
 In this sanctuary the defiling mob had left nothing un 
 spoiled, and this sacrilege was the only disaster which bowed 
 the heroic spirit of the mother. Strange irony of fate it 
 seemed, that the woman who had spent her life in the service 
 of the very class which wrecked her home should be the 
 allotted victim of their blind fury ! But she said only, " It 
 was ignorance and rum. Their children must be taught 
 better." 
 
 The broken family was reunited under her brother s roof, 
 and, as soon as she could be spared, Mrs. Gibbons, with her 
 daughter, Mrs. Emerson, returned to camp and hospital, 
 moving from post to post, and remaining in service, with short 
 intervals of rest, till the close of the war. 
 
 With experiences such as these, and with the burden of 
 more than threescore years upon her steadfast shoulders, 
 another woman might have asked for rest. But the charitable 
 hands of this indomitable worker could not be suffered to fold 
 themselves. Her duties to the needy, the criminal, and the 
 unfortunate were promptly resumed, and new obligations 
 growing out of the war cheerfully recognized. Mission 
 schools and other helps were to be maintained for the colored 
 refugees, who, ignorant, destitute, and miserable, thronged the 
 city. The widows and orphans of soldiers were in great need, 
 and, fully convinced that the prevailing methods of relief 
 
ABBT HOPPER GIBBONS. 335 
 
 would tend to pauperize them, and that honest work and honest 
 wages were far more helpful than charity, Mrs. Gibbons 
 organized, on a plan of her own, a " Labor and Aid Associa 
 tion," hiring for a laundry a large house on Hudson street, 
 built by the actor, Burton. The noble apartment in which 
 that gentle genius gathered the first Shakspearean library in 
 America, and where he wrought out those marvels of comic 
 art which once convulsed the town with innocent mirth, 
 became the mangling-room. One could fancy the ghosts of 
 Touchstone and Dromio, of Bottom and Toodles, peering 
 about in the darkness, and marvelling at the strange trans 
 formation. In another room was the day-school, where little 
 creatures too young to work were taught simple lessons, 
 knitting, sewing, basket-making, and other light handicrafts. 
 The noon-meal was furnished them, and they were amused 
 and cared for while their mothers and elder sisters earned 
 the means to keep a home for them. A sewing-room and 
 hospital chambers were to increase the usefulness of the 
 establishment. But the health of the projector, seriously 
 impaired by the strain of army life and domestic grief, at 
 last gave way, and the plan of the association was abandoned ; 
 not, however, till the success of the self-helping system 
 was assured, and many a woman put in the way of a comfort 
 able livelihood. 
 
 The New York Diet Kitchen, for the relief of the sick poor, 
 is another charity which owes its prosperity largely to Mrs. 
 Gibbons fostering care. The association has opened kitchens 
 in various tenement-house regions of the city, where, on the 
 requisition of physicians, broth, milk, fruit, meat, and other 
 nourishments are distributed to the sick who are unable to 
 buy them. Every case of suffering reported to the society is 
 carefully investigated, and, in many instances, these investiga 
 tions lead to employment, and other efficient mitigations of 
 the miseries of the decent poor. The rate of mortality in the 
 city has been much diminished since these kitchens wen; 
 established, and, under the stimulus of proper food, those 
 who recover are so improved in condition that they work 
 
336 ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS. 
 
 better and earn more. So that the indirect benefit of the 
 kitchens is a greater thrift among the lower classes, as their 
 direct benefit is a greater comfort. 
 
 In so brief a sketch there is not room even to mention 
 efforts and experiences, merely incidental, which in a life 
 less busy than that of Mrs. Gibbons would have seemed 
 pivotal points. The better education of women, social 
 reorganization, the amelioration of punishments, the establish 
 ment of ragged schools, the relief of tho sufferers in Kansas, 
 Hungarian liberty, and the victims of Austrian despotism, 
 every humane cause for more than half a century has appealed 
 to this philanthropist, and none in vain. 
 
 It is not a brilliant episode these sixty years of self- 
 sacrificing labor in scenes and among people offending every 
 instinct of taste or morals. Yet humanity might better lose 
 the history of its conquerors than the record of heroic souls 
 like these. 
 
 Such deeds are not wrought in the sudden fire of a high 
 moment, but are the slow result of faith in human nature 
 and long-forbearing patience. They make frivolity and 
 selfishness seem despicable. They make luxurious worldli- 
 ness appear the poor pretence it is. They enlarge belief in 
 the reach of human virtue. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 BY HER DAUGHTER, MAUD HOWE. 
 
 1 Little Miss Ward " The Influences that Surrounded Her Early Life Her 
 Education Faculty for Acquiring Languages "Bro. Sam" Miss 
 Ward s First Visit to Boston Meets Dr. Samuel G. Howe Her Mar 
 riage Wedding Trip to the Old World Cordial Reception by Famous 
 People Declining Tom Moore s Offer to Sing Reminiscences of Euro 
 pean Travel Her Patriotism in the Days of the Rebellion "Madame, 
 You Must Speak to My Soldiers" Writing the Battle-Hymn of the 
 Republic The "Brain Club" A Many-Sided Woman The Woman 
 Suffrage Movement Mrs. Howe as a Public Speaker Reminiscences of 
 Her Life in Santo Domingo A Woman of Genius and Intellect. 
 
 - * N the year 1819, in one of the stateliest homes near 
 the Bowling Green, then the most fashionable 
 quarter of the city of New York, there was born 
 a little girl. The parents of the child, Samuel 
 Ward and Julia Cutler Ward, were young 
 people in strong and robust health. This little 
 girl, who was christened Julia, was the fourth 
 child which had been sent to them. The eldest, 
 a son, bore his father s name. The second child, a 
 daughter, named for her mother, died in infancy. 
 Next came Henry, the second son. A miniature painted 
 at about the time of the birth of this second daughter 
 
 O 
 
 represents Mrs. Ward as a very beautiful young woman. 
 The likeness was made in her twenty-first year, and 
 portrays a graceful, rounded figure and an expressive, 
 poetic face. The eyes are large and dark, the lips full 
 and sensitive, the brow high and intellectual. She came 
 of a family somewhat noted for beauty and talent, and 
 her inheritance in both was remarkable. Dvincr at the acre 
 
 / O O 
 
 of twenty-eight, she left six children, all of whom inherited 
 
 337 
 
338 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 something of the character and attraction which made Mrs. 
 Ward one of the most interesting women of her time. 
 
 The little Julia was but five years old at the time of her 
 mother s death. She was nevertheless distinctly aware of her 
 loss, and still remembers with its pain the lovely face whose 
 charm and comfort were so early taken from her life. 
 
 Mr. Ward s health had already been somewhat impaired by 
 his assiduous attention to business. The loss of his beloved 
 wife was a blow which laid him prostrate on a bed of sick 
 ness for many weeks. Recovering at length from the shock, 
 he addressed himself to the task of bringing up his motherless 
 family, feeling, as he was afterwards wont to say, that he 
 must now be mother as well as father to his little ones. The 
 immediate care of these was intrusted to Miss Eliza Cutler, 
 an elder sister of Mrs. Ward, who now came to reside with 
 her brother-in-law, and who proved a most faithful guardian 
 to her sister s children. When little Julia was in her tenth 
 year this aunt of hers was married to Dr. J. W. Francis, a 
 young physician, already eminent, whose skill had on one 
 occasion saved Mr. Ward s life, and to whom he was much 
 attached. Dr. and Mrs. Francis continued to reside for 
 many years with Mr. Ward, and only left his house when the 
 youngest of his children had attained the age of fourteen 
 years. Mrs. Francis was called the wittiest woman of her 
 time, and the quick, sudden flashes which illuminate the con 
 versation of the niece recall the brilliant sayings which made 
 her aunt famous. 
 
 Mr. Ward was a man of tall and stately figure, un 
 impeachable in character and exceptionally strict in his 
 views of language and deportment. No smallest neglect 
 of decorum was ever tolerated in his presence, nor did 
 he allow anything approaching to gossip or frivolous 
 conversation to pass unreproved before him. He was a 
 member of the well-known firm of Prime, Ward, and King, 
 which at that time held a high position in the financial affairs 
 of the city, and was the first president of the Bank of Com 
 merce. 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 339 
 
 From her earliest childhood the little Miss Ward, for so 
 she was always called, showed signs of an uncommon mind. 
 Her teachers were all struck with her remarkable memory 
 and faculty for acquiring languages. One of her lifelong 
 friends, in speaking of her youth, said to the writer not long 
 since : " Mrs. Howe wrote f leading articles from her cradle." 
 
 The exaggeration is not so great after all when we find 
 that at seventeen Julia Ward was an anonymous, but valued, 
 contributor to the "New York Magazine," then a leading 
 periodical in the United States. Her youngest sister pre 
 serves among the most precious relics of other days, a 
 charming poem of Mrs. Howe, written when she was sixteen 
 years old, in a careful, half-formed hand, called "The Ill-cut 
 Mantle." The same sister, among her many tender reminis- 
 censes of the days of their early youth, tells the following story : 
 One day the young poet chanced upon her two younger sisters 
 busy in some childish game. She upbraided them for their 
 frivolous pursuit, and insisted that they should occupy them 
 selves as she did in the composition of verses. Louisa, tho 
 elder of the two, flatly refused to make the effort, but the 
 little Annie dutifully obeyed the elder sister, and, after a long 
 and resolute struggle, produced some stanzas, of which the 
 following lines have always been remembered : 
 
 " lie hears the ravens when they call, 
 And stands them in a pleasant hall." 
 
 Since then the hand which wrote these lines has penned 
 many graceful verses, which unfortunately have never been 
 given to the public. 
 
 The atmosphere of Mr. Ward s house was one well calcu 
 lated to develop the talents of his children. It was the resort 
 of the most distinguished men of letters of the day. One of 
 the most prominent of these, Joseph Greene Cogswell, was 
 intrusted with the literary training of the strong young mind 
 of Mr. Ward s eldest daughter. The girl s thirst for know 
 ledge was not to be entirely satisfied by the literature of her 
 own language, and while still very young she became familiar 
 
340 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 with the German and Italian tongues. This early training in 
 the European languages has proved of the greatest value all her 
 life through. Not only has it given her access to the treasure- 
 houses of the literature of these languages, but the purity of 
 her pronunciation and the thoroughness of her knowledge 
 have made her at home in European society. 
 
 Though a very remarkable child, Mr. Ward s eldest 
 daughter had nothing of the prodigy about her. The 
 father saw at an early day that hers was a mind of un 
 common quality and ability, but its growth and develop 
 ment, though precocious, were not abnormal in character. 
 A portrait of her, made when she was about five years old, 
 represents the little girl looking out through a vine-clad 
 window, a favorite kitten clasped in her arms. The face is 
 very exquisite, and has certain traits recognizable even now, 
 after the lapse of more than half a century. Her hair, which 
 afterwards changed to a deep auburn color, was at that time 
 unmistakably red the color of deep-red gold, soft and fine 
 as the unspun silk of a chrysalis. This hair, which to-day in 
 one of her grandchildren is treasured as the greatest beauty, 
 was made a source of the bitterest mortification to the child. 
 From the early impression that her hair was a great personal 
 misfortune is to be traced the singular lack of vanity which 
 has always characterized Mrs. Howe. 
 
 With all her eagerness for study there was no lack of 
 childishness about the child, and one of her first griefs was in 
 the parting from her dolls. This heart-rending separation 
 took place on her ninth birthday, when her waxen darlings 
 were taken from her arms, and she was told that "Miss Ward 
 was too old to play with dolls any longer." 
 
 Her musical education was as thorough as were the other 
 branches which she pursued. Her masters were so much 
 impressed with her genius for musical composition that she 
 was urged by one of them to devote the greater part of her 
 time to it. Gifted Avith a fine, expressive voice, she sang her 
 own music with a dramatic power which easily gave her a 
 high place among the amateurs of her time. Mr. Ward, who 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 341 
 
 was for those days a very rich man, spared neither money 
 nor pains in bringing musicians to his home, and the musical 
 evenings at the Bond Street house are among the plensantest 
 memories of Mrs. Howe s youth. Here came every Thursday 
 evening the most eminent connoisseurs of the then small 
 society of New York, and listened to many excellent per 
 formances. Miss Ward was at that time a diligent student 
 of Beethoven, Mozart, and Hummel, and often played the 
 pianoforte part in the trios and quartets of these composers. 
 
 In 1835 the eldest son, Samuel Ward, Jr., came home 
 from Germany, where he had been pursuing his studies, 
 and where he had first met and travelled with Mr. Long 
 fellow. A friendship was then established between these two 
 remarkable men whose earthly bond was only broken by the 
 death of the poet. Brother Sam, or Bro. Sam, as he was 
 always called by his family, brought back with him from his 
 long European residence much that was fascinating to the 
 romantic mind of his sister, and the intercourse between 
 the two has always been one of the most valued features 
 in their lives. Brimming over with the poetry, the romance, 
 the music of Germany, the advent of this handsome, bril 
 liant son, with his fine tenor voice, was a great event in the 
 somewhat serious atmosphere of Mr. Ward s house, and its 
 effect upon the mind of his sister was very marked. 
 
 She now received a strong impression of the state and pro 
 gress of the social world outside of the limits within which 
 she had been carefully trained. Her interest in German 
 literature was much quickened by her brother s acquaintance 
 with it, and her proficiency in the language grew rapidly 
 through frequent conversations with him. Miss Ward was 
 greatly aided in her German studies by Dr. Cogswell. The 
 influence of Teutonic thought naturally modified in her the 
 views derived from the narrow religious training which she 
 had received. 
 
 The brother and sister sang together the music of the great 
 German composers, and always conversed in the language, 
 which they then preferred to all others. Mrs. Howe has 
 
342 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 always preserved this early taste, and to-day a well-worn 
 volume of Kant lies upon her writing-table, and is taken up 
 by her for half an hour every day. In the twilight children s 
 hour when " the ring of jewels," her grandchildren, gather 
 about her at the piano and beg for a song, it is often one of 
 the old sludenten-lieder learned all these years ago from 
 Bro. Sam, that the sweet silver echo of a voice sings for 
 them. 
 
 In the year 1833, previous to the return of his son from 
 Germany, Mr. Ward built his great house on the corner of 
 Broadway and Bond street. When he first removed his resi 
 dence to the latter street he was told that he was going alto 
 gether out of town, and that the city would never grow up to 
 his new house. Ten years ago, before this house was torn 
 down, it was a noticeably stately edifice, standing by itself, 
 with a garden on one side. It was built in the simple, dig 
 nified style of the time, of red brick, with white marble 
 entrance, steps, and columns. At that time it made more im 
 pression than do the houses of all the Vanderbilts on Fifth 
 Avenue to-day. The picture gallery was one of the most 
 interesting apartments in the house. Mr. Ward had made a 
 very valuable collection of foreign pictures in order that his 
 children might have some knowledge of art. To this house, 
 which was made attractive with every luxury, and graced by 
 three lovely daughters, came many men whose names have 
 been identified with their country s progress. Of suitors for 
 the three maidens there was no lack, but the father was a 
 somewhat stern man, and dealt with all of these summarily. 
 
 The writer has dwelt on these early days in the life of Mrs. 
 Howe, feeling that their influence was such as greatly to affect 
 her later years. The exceptional education which she re 
 ceived, the early formation of her tastes, the studious atmos 
 phere in which she passed her first score of years, laid the 
 foundation for the solid structure of worth and attainments 
 which she has so faithfully builded into her life. The 
 habit of study thus acquired has not been lost. In all 
 her later years, when the cares of society, wifchood, mother- 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 343 
 
 hood, and public works, came in turn to be laid upon her, the 
 " precious time " to be devoted to her books has never 
 been relinquished. In the times when her brain has been 
 most actively creative, she has never let slip the power of re 
 ceiving the thoughts of other minds, and the volume of 
 Kant has for its companions the works of the great Greek 
 and Latin authors, whose writings she peruses in the lan 
 guages in which they were written. Translation is the pho 
 tography of letters. The form of the thought is preserved, 
 but its color is lost in the process. Thrice happy is that per 
 son who plucks the fruit of literature on the soil where it 
 originally grows, and not in the transplanted garden of for 
 eign language. 
 
 In the sudden death of her father, while in the prime of 
 life, Julia Ward felt her first serious grief. She was deeply 
 attached to him, and between the father and daughter there 
 existed the closest aft ection, though the awe with which she 
 had in childhood regarded her only parent never quite left 
 her. After their father s demise his children left the great 
 house at the corner, and went to live with their uncle, Mr. 
 John Ward, who proved a second father to them in the ten 
 der devotion which he bestowed upon them during his life 
 time. 
 
 Not long after the sad event which left her an orphan Miss 
 Ward made the first of a series of visits to Boston. Here she 
 met Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, and a man who was of this band of thinkers 
 and workers, through whom she was destined to join their 
 ranks. Dr. Samuel G. Howe was the most picturesque, and 
 one of the most prominent men of that phalanx of reformers 
 which came into the world with the new century, and which 
 won for Massachusetts the place which she has until lately 
 held undisputed, of leadership in the thought and progress of 
 the nation. Accustomed to a society of learned men whose 
 whole energy was given to thought and speculation, what 
 wonder that the character of the chivalrous man who thought 
 and worked out his thought w r ith an enthusiasm and steady 
 
344 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 persistence which compelled success, should .attract the sensi 
 tive, romantic young girl who had lived hitherto in an atmos 
 phere of speculative thought. Here was a man who theorized 
 and made his theories into practical facts. 
 
 The rare combination of a passionate, romantic nature, 
 with a strong executive power, and a magnetism which over 
 came all those who fell within its influence, made Dr. Howe 
 a formidable rival to the other suitors for the hand of Miss 
 Ward. The prize of which he was all-worthy was won by 
 him, and in the year 1843, in the twenty-fourth year of her 
 age, Julia Ward and Samuel Howe were married. 
 
 The two youngest sisters were intrusted with all the pre 
 paratory arrangements for the marriage, and it was with diffi 
 culty that the bride-elect could be induced to express a 
 preference as to the material of her wedding dress, so little 
 was her mind occupied with the concerns of the wardrobe. 
 
 Shortly after their marriage Dr. and Mrs. Howe made a 
 trip to Europe, accompanied by the bride s younger sister, 
 Miss Annie Ward, This wedding journey was the first 
 glimpse of the Old World that the sisters had enjoyed, and 
 has always been remembered by them as one of the delight 
 ful experiences of their lives. 
 
 The English and American world had then recently been 
 startled by the story of Laura Bridgman, as told by Charles 
 Dickens in his " American Notes." The interest thus excited in 
 the English community insured to Doctor Howe and his wife 
 a cordial reception in London society. At this period Eng 
 lish society was in one of its most brilliant epochs, and the 
 names of some of the men and women whose acquaintance 
 Mrs. Howe made at that time have remained famous until 
 this day. Charles Dickens, Thomas Moore, John Forster, 
 Sir Robert Harry Inglis, Samuel Rogers, Lord Morpeth, 
 Thomas Carlyle, Monckton Milnes, the Duchess of Suther 
 land, and Sydney Smith, all received the American travellers 
 with hospitality. Sydney Smith, in alluding to Doctor Howe s 
 remarkable achievement in educating Laura Bridgman, spoke 
 of him as " a modern Pygmalion who had put life into a statue." 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 345 
 
 Tom Moore was much struck with the beauty and charm of 
 Miss Annie Ward, whom he met one night at a dinner-party, 
 and in his diary there is a tribute to the lovely young Amer 
 ican girl. He asked Mrs. Howe if he should not come to 
 their lodgings and sing for them, to which she naively replied 
 that she regretted deeply that she had no piano ! Only too 
 late did she realize the pleasure which she declined, and the 
 ease with which the difficulty could have been obviated by 
 hiring an instrument for the occasion. 
 
 After leaving England the trio of travellers started for an 
 extensive tour on the continent. In those days there were 
 few railroads. The great tunnel of the Mont Cenis had not 
 been dreamed of. The diligence or the more luxurious sys 
 tem of posting \vere the only resources of the traveller. The 
 rapid tourist of to-day did not then exist. In their own 
 comfortable carriage Dr. and Mrs. Howe, with their sister 
 Miss Ward, made a long journey through the Netherlands 
 and along the Rhine and Moselle rivers. Europe was already 
 familiar to Dr. Howe, but to the two sisters everything in it 
 had the enchantment of a tirst impression. Many delightful 
 weeks were spent by the travellers in Switzerland, Styria, 
 the Tyrol, and Southern Germany. At Milan a month was 
 passed, and many brilliant and interesting acquaintances were 
 made through the introductions given by Miss Sedgwick and 
 by Signor Castiglia, whom Mrs. Howe had known in New 
 York. 
 
 Every stage of this journey had its own measure of delight, 
 and each step brought the pilgrims nearer to Rome. It was 
 with a feeling of awe that the young woman, poetic, passion 
 ate, and full of reverence for the " golden heart" of the Old 
 World, approached the place which she has called " The City 
 of my Love." 
 
 The poem of which the title has just been quoted is one of 
 the loveliest blossoms in the vivid garland of Passion Flow 
 ers " which sprang from the heart of the young poet. Several 
 of the verses here given will show the deep feeling with which 
 the Eternal City inspired her : 
 
340 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 " She sits among the eternal hills 
 
 Their crown thrice glorious and dear, 
 Her voice is as a thousand tongues 
 Of silver fountains gurgling clear. 
 
 Her breath is prayer, her lips are love, 
 
 And worship of all lovely things, 
 Her children have a gracious port ; 
 
 Her beggars show the blood of kings. 
 
 She rules the age by beauty s power, 
 As once she ruled by armed might, 
 
 The Southern sun doth treasure her 
 Deep in his golden heart of light. 
 
 Awe strikes the traveller when he sees 
 
 The vision of her distant dome, 
 And a strange spasm wrings his heart 
 
 As the guide whispers, " There is Rome." 
 
 Five months were passed in Rome, and it was in this city 
 that the crown of motherhood was laid upon the brow of the 
 young wife. 
 
 In the spring of 1844 our travellers turned their faces 
 homeward, carrying with them a little daughter, who received 
 the name of Julia Romana, in remembrance of her Roman 
 birth. They now made some stay in Paris, and crossed 
 thereafter to England, where their time was fully occupied 
 by a series of visits in the country after the mode of hospitality 
 which still exists. One of these visits was to the venerable 
 Dr. Fowler of Salisbury. Another was at Atherston, the 
 residence of Charles Nolte Bracebridge. Mrs. Bracebridge 
 was very intimate with the family of Florence Nightingale, 
 and through her it was arranged that Dr. and Mrs. Howe 
 should visit Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale at their country seat in 
 Hampshire. Miss Nightingale was at that time contemplating 
 the philanthropic career in which she afterwards so greatly 
 distinguished herself. She consulted Dr. Howe on the ad- 
 
 (7) 
 
 visability of devoting her life to the professional care of the 
 sick. To the family of the high-born young woman the idea 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 347 
 
 was at the time unwelcome ; but from the philanthropic 
 American she met with every encouragement. 
 
 After their return to America Dr. and Mrs. Howe took up 
 their abode at the Institution for the Blind, of which Dr. 
 Howe was then, and continued to be until the time of his 
 death, the director. The charming estate of "Green Peace" 
 was soon afterwards bought, and here many years were spent. 
 The great garden, with the famous fruit-trees and conserva 
 tories, was a constant source of delight to Dr. Howe. The 
 summers were passed at Lawton s Valley, one of the most 
 beautiful spots on the island of Newport. During the first 
 few years of her married life, that busiest time of young 
 wifehood and motherhood, Mrs Howe had little time to give 
 to her favorite occupation of writing, and though she never 
 gave up her habit of study, she produced little literary work 
 of importance. 
 
 In the year 1854 she published anonymously her first 
 volume of poems, "Passion Flowers." The little volume 
 made a great sensation in the literary world of Boston, and 
 was easily laid at the door of its brilliant author. ft There is 
 no other woman in Boston who could have written it," was 
 the universal verdict, and an all-unsought reputation was won 
 for Mrs Howe by this her first serious literary venture. 
 
 The recognition which "Passion Flowers" obtained was 
 of the highest kind. The brother and sister poets whom she 
 addresses in the opening salutation stretched forth to her 
 welcoming hands. Emerson, Whittier, Longfelknv, Bryant, 
 and Holmes admitted her gladly as an honored member of 
 their glorious guild. 
 
 After the publication of her first volume, Mrs. Howe 
 became deeply interested in the question which at that time 
 divided all society under the two heads of Pro-slavery and 
 Anti-slavery. Dr. Howe early identified himself with the old 
 Free-Soil party, which later developed into the Anti-slavery 
 body. That chivalrous soul, who, before boyhood was left 
 behind, had gone a knight-errant to the help of the Greeks, 
 and had suffered danger and imprisonment in aid of the 
 
348 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 cause of freedom, WHS pledged to the party which had 
 resolved that the fetters should be stricken from the wrists 
 of the slave. With that band of workers, which numbered 
 in its ranks John Andrew, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, 
 and Theodore Parker, Mrs. Howe was thrown in constant 
 contact. That her woman s wit and poet s pen helped on the 
 cause with all courage and enthusiasm is not to be wondered at. 
 The "Boston Commonwealth" was at that time a paper almost 
 exclusively devoted to the anti-slavery cause. For some time 
 Dr. and Mrs. Howe edited this journal, and Mrs. Howe con 
 tributed much that was brilliant to its columns. 
 
 " Words for the Hour," a volume of poems printed in 1855, 
 a year after the publication of "Passion Flowers," contains 
 many poems which at that time failed not to produce an 
 effect. The thunderous rumblings which foretold the storm 
 were in the air, and in the cadcnced numbers of "The Ser 
 mon of Spring," " Tremont Temple," " Slave Eloquence," 
 " An Hour in the Senate," " Slave Suicide," and " The Sen 
 ator s Return," there rings a sterner motif than in the stanzas 
 of the preceding book. 
 
 These verses seem now to be but the prelude of the great 
 poem of the " Battle-Hymn of the Republic." The soul of the 
 patriotic woman changed colors with the progress of the 
 nation, and when our land was stained with the blood of its 
 defenders, and the war bugles rang through the country, her 
 voice took up the cry and echoed back a war pa?an, a " Battle- 
 Hymn," grand enough for the march of the Republic to its 
 greatest conquest, the victory of self. 
 
 It was in the first year of the war that Dr. and Mrs. Howe, 
 Governor and Mrs. Andrew, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Whipple 
 made their memorable journey to Washington. Their visit 
 was full of a deep interest, and every moment brought with 
 it some new experience of the terrors of war which shook the 
 seat of government. One afternoon the whole party drove 
 out to the camps outside of Washington to visit Colonel Wil 
 liam Greene. During the visit their host turned to Mrs. Howe 
 and said : " Madame, you must say something to my soldiers." 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 349 
 
 To a woman who had never made a speech in her life this 
 request, almost like a command, was indeed startling. Three 
 times she ran away and hid herself, but the colonel found her 
 each time and persisted that she should speak to the soldiers. 
 Finally she yielded to his solicitation, and made a short address 
 to the company of men. 
 
 Some days after this Mrs. Howe and her friends were 
 present at a review of troops, which was interrupted by a 
 movement on the part of the enemy. Reinforcements 
 were sent to a party of Union soldiers in the neighborhood 
 who had been surprised and surrounded. The review was 
 abandoned for the day, and the troops marched back to their 
 cantonments. The carriage in which Mrs. Howe rode 
 moved slowly, surrounded by what seemed a river of 
 armed men. To beguile the time she began to sing the 
 John Brown song, on hearing which the soldiers shouted ; 
 "Good for you." Mrs. Howe now spoke to her friends in 
 the carriage of the desire which she had felt to write some 
 words of her own which might be sung to this stirring tune, 
 saying also that she feared she should never be able to 
 do it. Her wish was soon fulfilled. She lay down that 
 night full of thoughts of battle, and awoke before dawn 
 the next morning to find the desired verses immediately 
 present to her mind. She sprang from her bed, and in the 
 dim gray light found a pen and paper, whereon she wrote, 
 scarcely seeing them, the lines of the poem. Returning to 
 her couch, she was presently asleep, but not until she had 
 said to herself: "I like this better than anything I have ever 
 written." 
 
 One of Mrs. Howe s most interesting literary productions 
 is " The World s Own," a five-act drama in blank verse. 
 This was played at Wallack s Theatre in the year 1855. The 
 tragedy is a very powerful and terrible one, and has high 
 literary merit. The leading rdle was played by Miss Ma 
 thilda Heron, then one of our most popular actresses. Mr. 
 Edwin Sothern, at that time a member of the Wallack p 
 company, played one of the minor parts. 
 22 
 
350 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 "A Trip to Cuba," published in 1860, is a charming vol 
 ume, embodying the experiences of a winter passed in the 
 tropics. The outward voyage was made in company with 
 Theodore Parker, one of Mrs. Howe s warmest friends, Mrs. 
 Parker, and Miss Hannah Stevenson. In the narrative of 
 the voyage Parker is spoken of as " Can Grande," and the 
 descriptions of the great man are among the most interesting 
 passages of the brilliant, breezy little book. The humorous 
 account of the voyage to the beautiful island, the picture of 
 Nassau, and the landing in Havana, bring the reader to the 
 capital of the West Indies in as good spirits, and as eager to 
 explore its beauties and mysteries as was " Hulia Protes- 
 tante" herself on the day when she first set foot on Cuban 
 soil. The visit to the Jesuit College is vividly pictured, and 
 the Padre Doyaguez and the younger, more interesting 
 Padre Lluc are drawn to the life. From the former of 
 these worthies the writer received the quaint title of " Hulia 
 Protestante," by which she speaks of herself all through 
 the book. In the parting with Parker, whom they were 
 never to see again, there is a prophetic melancholy run 
 ning like a dark vein across a bright piece of glistening 
 marble. 
 
 " A pleasant row brought us to the side of the steamer. 
 It was already dusk as we ascended her steep gangway, and 
 from that to darkness there is at this season but the interval 
 of a breath. Dusk, too, were our thoughts at parting from 
 Can Grande the mighty, the vehement, the great fighter. 
 How were we to miss his deep music here and at home ! 
 With his assistance we had made a very respectable band ; 
 now we were to be only a wandering drum and fife the 
 life particularly shrill, and the drum particularly solemn. 
 ..." And now came silence and tears and last embraces ; 
 we slipped down the gangway into our little craft, and look 
 ing up saw bending above us, between the slouched hat and 
 silver beard, the eyes that we can never forget, that seemed 
 to drop back in the darkness with the solemnity of a last 
 farewell. We went home, and the drum hung himself 
 
JULIA WAUD HO\VE. 351 
 
 gloomily on his peg, and the little fife shut up for (ho 
 rest of the evening." 
 
 " Later Lyrics," a volume of poems published in the year 
 I860, contains some of the most beautiful of Mrs. Howe s 
 compositions. Those which relate to the loss of her little 
 boy, who died in the year 1863, are poems which mothers 
 cannot read without a tribute of tears. " In My Valley " is a 
 prophetic vision of her later years, which has been strangely 
 fulfilled : 
 
 "Thou shalt live for song and story 
 
 For the service of the pen, 
 Shalt survive till children s children 
 Bring thee mother joys again. 
 
 " To my fiery youth s ambition 
 
 Such a boon was scarcely dear, 
 Thou shalt live to be a grandame 
 Work and die devoid of fear. 
 
 " Now as utmost grace it steads me, 
 
 Add but this thereto, I said, 
 On the matron s time-worn mantle 
 Let the poet s wreath be laid." 
 
 Though Boston is only the city of her adoption, Mrs. Howe 
 has become a Bostonian of the Bostonians. In the years 
 of her early married life in this city she felt not only 
 her removal from the familiar scenes and the friends of her 
 youth, but also a certain formality and coldness in her sur 
 roundings which were in strong contrast to the easier hospi 
 tality of her own city. 
 
 With her peculiar magnetic charm she quickly drew about 
 her a circle of people ; and her house has always been the 
 resort of men and women interesting for other reasons than 
 the magnitude of their bank accounts, or the extravagance of 
 their toilette. 
 
 The so-called "Brain Club" ow r es the origin of its brilliant 
 existence to three ladies, Mrs. Apthorp, Mrs. Quincy, and 
 
352 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 ?vlrs. Howe. This association was formed with an idea of 
 bringing together the most intellectual society people, for 
 mutual entertainment and benefit. The Club met at the 
 house of one of its members once in ten days during the 
 winter season, the lady who received the Club being respon 
 sible for its amusement or instruction. How often was Mrs. 
 Howe called upon to assist in these entertainments, and how 
 brilliant were the evenings lighted up by her fantastic humors. 
 Charades there were which will never be forgotten by those 
 who witnessed them. One of these, which Mrs. Howe can 
 never recall without a paroxysm of laughter, included 
 amono- its actors Mr. William Hunt and Mr. Hamilton 
 
 O 
 
 Wilde, who fought a mock combat with hobby-horses. For 
 this Club were written "Parlor Macbeth," and "Mrs. Some- 
 Pumpkins at Court," two brilliant comic monologues which 
 have never been printed. 
 
 At the very time when these comic fantasies were indulged 
 in Mrs. Howe was engaged in a serious study of philoso 
 phy. These brilliant essays of wit and frolic-fancy were 
 like the sparks which the smith strikes out from the anvil 
 whereon lies the iron ploughshare which he is forging. To 
 the crowd of children and idlers gathered about the door of 
 the smithy, the shower of shining scintillations is all that is 
 seen in the darkness of the forge. But the smith works away 
 with ringing blows, shaping the implement which shall harrow 
 up the soil, and make wa} r for the seed and its fruit. He is 
 glad of the delight which the children feel in the red golden 
 rain of the iron, and he can laugh with them in their thought 
 less merriment. 
 
 This ebullition of what she herself calls "nonsense" has 
 always been one of the rarest and most fascinating qualities 
 of this many-sided woman ; it is one which has made her a 
 welcome guest in gay as well as in serious society. The 
 making of fun seems the necessary and natural relief -which 
 her nature claims after heavy and continued thoughts and 
 productions. It is the safety-valve of an intense and energetic 
 temperament, and the delicate wit and fine satire are not the 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 353 
 
 least among the weapons given her to combat and take captive 
 those with whom she has been thrown in relation. 
 
 Mrs. Howe s philosophical researches led her to a more 
 careful study of society than she had hitherto made. The 
 results of this were embodied, by her in a series of essays 
 upon practical ethics, in writing which Mrs. Howe had in view 
 a possible audience. In the winter of 1862 she collected this 
 audience in the parlor of her house in Chestnut street, by 
 commissioning ten of her personal friends to invite each the 
 same number of their friends. These parlor lectures bore 
 the following titles: "How not to Teach Ethics, "Liberty, 
 Equality, Fraternity,"" Doubt and Belief," "Proteus, or the 
 Secret of Success, ""Duality of Character." In these lectures 
 Mrs. Howe hovered on the borders of metaphysical speculation, 
 to which she has devoted some years of labor. In this direction 
 were conceived her essays on " Polarit} r ," " The Fact Accom 
 plished," on "Limitation," on Ideal Causation," and others. 
 
 Mrs. Howe was soon invited to read these essays be 
 fore the general public, and in doing so became aware that 
 she had passed somewhat out of the sphere of the average 
 audience. While intensely enjoying this part of her work, 
 she still felt the necessity of returning to methods of thought 
 and expression which should bring her into more immediate 
 sympathy with the world around her. At this period Mrs. 
 Howe also contributed three papers to the "Christian Exam 
 iner," of which the first was entitled " The Name and Exist 
 ence of God," while the others treated of " The Ideal State," 
 and " The Ideal Church." These essays made a profound 
 impression at the time of their publication, and were justly 
 considered as valuable additions to theological philosophy. It 
 is work of this order that has placed Mrs. Howe on a level 
 with the eminent thinkers of her time. Her friendship has 
 been sought by men like Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, 
 Liebcr, Hedge, Lowell, Agassiz, Stimner, and Parker, "who 
 judged her," in the words of not the least distinguished of 
 these, "as their peers." Her intellectual conscience is of the 
 most sensitive order, and has never been satisfied with work 
 
354 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 which fell short of being the best she could make it. Fowler, 
 the phrenologist, remarked on her great love of approbation, 
 which was, he said, r restricted by the desire only of the 
 approbation of the best." 
 
 In the year 1867 Mrs. Howe crossed the Atlantic for the 
 third time, in company with her husband and two of her 
 daughters, Julia Romana, her eldest born, and Laura, the 
 third daughter. The trip was one of great interest, and was 
 undertaken by Dr. Howe in order to carry aid to the Greeks, 
 the brave struggle of the little island of Crete against the 
 unholy Turkish bondage being then at its height. The coun 
 try for which half a century before he had ventured his young 
 life, again claimed the help of all Philhellcnes, and enlight 
 ened men and women. Dr. Howe, though then nearing three 
 score years and ten, raised a large sum of money, and with 
 it purchased supplies, which he carried to the refugees from 
 the heroic isle. England, France, Germany, and Italy were 
 revisited, and a long sojourn was made in Rome, at the 
 delightful home of Mrs. Howe s sister, Mrs. Terry. The 
 notes of this journey were embodied in a charming book of 
 travel, "From the Oak to the Olive," published after Mrs. 
 Howe s return to America, in 1869. 
 
 It was at this period that the subject of this sketch first 
 became interested in the movement with which she has since 
 become so widely identified. The advance of her kind in all 
 ways Mrs. Howe had always had at heart, but only at that 
 period did she conceive the woman suffrage movement to be 
 the foremost question of the time. Once convinced of the 
 importance of giving the franchise to woman, she became an 
 avowed and powerful champion of tjie cause. Heart, soul, 
 and mind were devoted to furthering the movement, which 
 acquired through her an additional dignity and importance. 
 Nothing has been more important in America than breeding. 
 That security which rests upon good manners, that modera 
 tion belonging to refined natures, are the bridges between the 
 reformer and the public, which suspects the mere intellectual 
 adventurer. 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 355 
 
 The philosophical character of Mrs. Howes mind, and her 
 recognition of principles, have made all that she has said in 
 connection with the suffrage movement logical. With the 
 enthusiasm of a late convert to the cause she has combined 
 the results of her studious life. Of the merits of the much- 
 vexed question this is not the occasion to speak. The writer 
 would, however, bear testimony that even among those who 
 are most firmly convinced that its success would not conduce 
 to the well-being of the women, children, and men of the 
 country, Mrs. Howe s disinterested and ardent advocacy is 
 admired and respected. 
 
 The establishment of the New England Women s Club in 
 the year 1869 was a new departure in the woman s move 
 ment. Mrs. Howe was one of those with whom orijji- 
 
 O 
 
 nated the plan of the association, of which she has long 
 been president. This club of some two hundred ladies 
 has pleasant parlors in Park street, in the house origin 
 ally built by Mr. Francis Gray, and afterwards occupied 
 by ex-President Quinc}^. The rooms are always open and 
 warmed, and the regular weekly meeting brings a large pro 
 portion of its members together to listen to a paper from 
 some eminent person. The club is not a suffrage club, 
 though a large proportion of its members are interested in 
 the cause. Many of the subjects there discussed relate to the 
 education and the general welfare of women. 
 
 As a speaker Mrs. Howe has had much experience since 
 the year 1870. Her lectures are interesting, and touch on 
 many topics, some of which are germane to the reform she 
 has had so warmly at heart. Her gentle voice and powers 
 of oratory are by no means the least of her gifts. The ex 
 quisite modulations of her tones, the perfectly chiselled enun 
 ciation of the words, make her voice carry to a great distance, 
 and she has frequently been heard to advantage in the Bos 
 ton Music Hall and Tremont Temple, and has also spoken in 
 the Royal Albert Hull in London. 
 
 In the year 1872 Dr. and Mrs. Howe, with their } r oungest 
 daughter and a party of friends, passed three of the winter 
 
350 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 months in the island of Santo Domingo, the queen of the 
 tropics, the garden of the world. Dr. Howe had been 
 appointed a member of the commission sent down by President 
 Grant to investigate the advantages of the proposed annexation 
 of the island to this country. The report was one very favor 
 able to the scheme, and of all the commissioners none was more 
 enthusiastic for the annexation than Dr. Howe. The Samana 
 Bay Company made Dr. Howe one of its directors, and Pres 
 ident Baez received him with the greatest cordiality. The 
 winter passed in the picturesque gray-walled town of Santo 
 Domingo, where Columbus had so long lived, was one full 
 of a romantic interest. The wonderful resources of the 
 island were explored, and journeys into its interior were 
 made on horseback. The hospitality of the inhabitants 
 was cordially extended and greatly enjoyed by Dr. and Mrs. 
 Howe. The great white-marble house or palace, as it was 
 called by the natives where they lived was garrisoned day 
 and night by a military guard of honor. The soldiers drew 
 for this and all other military duty the incredibly small pay 
 of ten cents a day. The payment was made in United Stales 
 silver. The army was dressed. very sketchily in uni 
 forms a large part of which bore the familiar letters U. S. 
 The life in the great cool palace, with its open courtyard and 
 wide marble corridors, its view of palm groves and orange 
 orchards, was idyllic. The perfect climate, the beautiful 
 landscape, the simple, pathetic people, longing for a civiliza 
 tion which we have declined to help them achieve, all made a 
 strong impression on Mrs. Howe. 
 
 From Santo Domingo she sailed for Europe, where she 
 remained several months. The object of this visit was the 
 furtherance of the cause of peace by a direct appeal to the 
 sympathies of women. In the year of the Franco-Prussian war 
 Mrs. Howe had become much impressed with a feeling that the 
 women of the civilized world could, by uniting their efforts, 
 do much to destroy the prestige of military glory and to pro 
 mote the settlement of international difficulties by arbitration, 
 based on recognized principles of justice. So strongly was 
 
JULIA WARD HOWE. 357 
 
 Mrs. Howe moved by this view that she composed and issued 
 a circular addressed to women of all nationalities and degrees. 
 This brief circular was translated into several languages, and 
 was distributed in countries as various. 
 
 Her visit to Europe in 1872 was made in pursuance of this 
 appeal, and in the hope of assembling a Women s Peace 
 Congress in London, the metropolis of the world. To this 
 end Mrs. Howe remained in England some two months, 
 where she was employed mostly in the public advocacy of 
 the measure which she had so much at heart. The time was 
 not, and is not yet, ripe for such a congress as Mrs. Howe 
 sought to assemble. Her efforts, however, were recognized 
 by many eminent persons, and her "Peace Crusade" of 1872 
 has always remained one of her happiest remembrances. 
 A second visit to Santo Domingo was made by Dr. and 
 Mrs. Howe in the year 1873. This time the little town of 
 Samana, lying cradled at the foot of a range of hills, washed 
 by the beryl-green waters of the bay, was their headquarters. 
 In a cottage high up on the mountain-side Dr. and Mrs. Howe, 
 with one faithful black attendant, France, a Dominican, 
 passed a quiet winter. The simple folk of the village grew 
 to love the strange lady who took such interest in their homes 
 and children. When at last Dr. and Mrs. Howe were obliged 
 to leave the island, and the flag of the Samana Bay Company 
 was lowered, it was with real grief that they parted with their 
 humble friends, who still cherish a grateful memory of the 
 visitors who sojourned for so long among them. 
 
 On the 9th of January, in the year 1876, Dr. Samuel G. 
 Howe died after a short illness. For several years previous 
 to his death his health had been greatly shattered, and in the 
 last year especially he became very dependent upon his wife. 
 Her care of him was tender and unfailing. 
 
 In the spring of the following year Mrs. Howe made a 
 voyage to Europe with her youngest daughter. She remained 
 abroad for more than two years, and visited in this period 
 England, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, 
 Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Greece. With Greece she was 
 
358 JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 already familiar, but the delights of the Orient had until 
 then been unexplored by her. 
 
 Genius is of a twofold order. That which springs only 
 from the intellect is like the wonderful spectacle of the 
 aurora borealis, which flames across the face of heaven. It 
 will challenge the admiration of mankind. It may illuminate 
 the spheres of the present and the future, solving their 
 problems and revealing their secrets ; but while its brilliant 
 play transfigures sky, sea, and land, it warms no living 
 thing. There is a quality of genius which is of the heart, 
 and which works mainly for the comforting of humanity. 
 Through every thought and action of him who possesses this 
 spark of the Divine love is felt the glow of the Promethean 
 fire. 
 
 It is a strange fact that most women of genius hate 
 possessed the genius of the intellect. Those of Eve s daugh 
 ters who have claimed and found admittance to the Olympian 
 heights of greatness have more often been admired than 
 loved. Their feminine nature seems often to be hateful to 
 them, and in their striving for fame and glory they lose that 
 quality which should most endear them to their kind. Men 
 are their competitors, and it is from them they must wrest 
 the unwilling admission of equality. The heavier burden 
 which is Jaid upon their shoulders handicaps them in the race 
 of life, and their sex becomes a grief to them. 
 
 How different has been the spirit by which Mrs. Howe has 
 been animated through life. How has she striven to maintain 
 the dignity of womanhood, and to lift her sex to the high 
 level which she has attained. 
 
 To those who have lived nearest to the deep heart, its 
 warmth has overcome the griefs and disappointments of the 
 world. To those who from a distance can only judge of the 
 woman by her works, the glow of her genius is a beneficent 
 and helpful light. As poet, philosopher, reformer, she is 
 known by the world ; to her own she is dearest as woman, 
 friend, and mother. 
 
CHAPTER XYI. 
 CLAKA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 Clara Louise Kellogg s Birth and Parentage Girlhood and Early Education 
 
 Her Extraordinary Musical Genius Its Early Development Intuitive 
 Knowledge of Tone and Pitch Marvellous Execution Patient Study 
 
 ami Unwearied Devotion to Her Art Beginning of Her Career An 
 Unusual Compliment at Rehearsal First Trial in Opera Ucr Debut 
 
 Carrying the Audience Captive Wild Enthusiasm Triumphant 
 Success Verdict of the Critics Visits Europe D^but in London 
 A Brilliant and Enthusiastic Audience Acknowledged to be the Queen 
 of Song Return to America Reception in New York Triumphal 
 Tours Her Charity and Kindness Personal Appearance and Charac 
 teristics. 
 
 T would be difficult to imagine a stronger con 
 trast in any life than that existing between two 
 nights in the life of Clara Louise Kellogg. In 
 the one, at the very end of the Italian opera 
 season, in the city of New York, a girl of 
 seventeen, slight and pale, so nervous that she 
 could hardly move her rigid lips, so frightened 
 that she could hardly command her young 
 voice, came before a calm and critical audience, 
 under the shadow of a powerful Italian clique, who 
 sat in cool judgment, oblivious of the fact that 
 warmth of manner and generosity of applause would stimu 
 late the singer as sunshine stimulates the budding stem, 
 essayed to sing the part of Gilda in " Rigoletto," both the 
 dramatic and the musical portions of which she had studied 
 faithfully for nine months, and fainted under the cruel ordeal 
 when the curtain had fallen at the end. In the other, some 
 few years later, in London, before a house crowded from 
 floor to ceiling with the best culture of the British empire, 
 
 359 
 
360 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 with dukes and duchesses flinging her their flowers, with the 
 heir of the throne, and other royal princes, applauding in the 
 royal box, sure of herself and of her audience, mistress of 
 her art and of the stage, she sang triumphantly the role of 
 Violetta, was tumultuously called five times before the cur 
 tain, and half smothered in the wreaths and offerings of a 
 superb triumph. 
 
 In the interval of these two nights, what arduous labors, 
 what industry, what abnegation of a young girl s pleasure, 
 what effort to overcome the timidity of a press and a public 
 that dared not admire anything not yet gilded with a Euro 
 pean endorsement, what patience to outgrow the influence of 
 the intrigues of jealous foreign artists, what struggle, what 
 determination ! There was on the first night the same woman, 
 the same genius, the same will, as on the last; but in the 
 last all these things had come to the full flower of their 
 beauty. 
 
 Clara Louise Kellogg was born in the year 1845, in Sum- 
 terville, South Carolina, where her parents had gone the year 
 before, her father, George Kellogg, at the head of a school, 
 and her mother playing the organ of the church there. Her 
 father was a man of original talent, a deep thinker, with great 
 powers of perception and reason, familiar with the most in 
 timate principles of mechanics, a student of the fine arts, a 
 performer on the flute, remarkable for precision and richness, 
 and an inventor, who shared the ill-fortune of most invent 
 ors, in seeing other people acquire wealth by his own unpaid 
 labors. He was the inventor of type-distributing, chain- 
 making, and other machines, and of improved surgical instru 
 ments ; and it was he that introduced into England machinery 
 for making hats, hooks and eyes, and a variety of other 
 articles. Going further back, one of our prima donna s 
 grandparents was a person of very uncommon mathematical 
 attainments ; and another was an excellent violinist, who, 
 moreover, in the beginning of the cotton manufacture, super 
 intended the erection of a valuable invention of her own in 
 most of the large cotton mills ; a parentage, it may be seen, 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 361 
 
 from which something far more than usual might bo expected 
 to result. 
 
 Mr. Kellogg, convinced that the musical ear becomes de 
 praved when hearing music out of tune or off the true pitch, 
 carefully kept the piano in tune and up to concert pitch dur 
 ing all of his daughter s childhood, which accounts, in some 
 degree, for the unvarying nicety and spontaneity of her musi 
 cal ear. Her father, in addition to his other accomplish 
 ments, was a philosophical short-hand writer, and lie took 
 care to educate his daughter in the elementary sounds which 
 constitute the basis of every language ; possibly this drilling, 
 before the study of any foreign tongue, had to do with mak 
 ing her one of the most extraordinary linguists on the stage, 
 one who can master the lines of her part in less than three 
 days, as well as the music. "More than thirty years 
 ago," says a leading clergyman, " I stood side by side with 
 George Kellogg in the Wesleyan University, from which we 
 graduated together in 1837. It was there, in the regular ex 
 ercises of the class-room, that I first detected his musical 
 genius, which, however, appeared as a peculiar capability, 
 rather than as anything already fully developed. Passing 
 into the chapel for prayers, one day, he remarked that the 
 casting of the bell was imperfect, for he observed that the 
 sounds were not in accord. At his recitations in acoustics, 
 or in psychology or physiology, whenever any point Avithin 
 the range of the science of music came up, although he was 
 not a proficient in these things by study, he yet seemed in 
 stinctively to know all about them. lie was married to a 
 Middletown lady after his graduation, and it was commonly 
 understood that the young couple had been attracted to each 
 other by their common musical affinities." 
 
 Mrs. Kellogg, the mother, is herself one of the most nota 
 ble women of the generation. She is possibly the one most 
 thorough!} alive woman I have ever met. She is still young, 
 is good, kind, and wise, and might have made a great mark 
 on the artistic world if she had not so forgotten and ab 
 sorbed herself in her daughter, that hers might be called 
 
3fi2 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 a case of suppressed genius. * Her brain is large, and her 
 nervous system remarkably sensitive and susceptible," was 
 written of the mother at the time of the daughter s 
 dSbut ; "and from the first we have thought she possessed 
 more natural dramatic power than almost any woman we 
 ever knew. In ordinary conversation she has the faculty 
 of imparting to her speech such emphasis, action, and ex_ 
 pression of countenance as to give to the listener the most 
 vivid and lasting impression of the subject in hand. And 
 she is one of a thousand for the scope and brilliancy of her 
 intellect, and especially for the sparkling fascination of her 
 wit and imagination. A bright, enthusiastic woman, she 
 seems to learn everything with grasping rapidity, bordering on 
 intuition ; yet, with these, she has a strong and logical mind." 
 She is a woman, moreover, with an irresistible impulse in 
 the direction of art. She plays, sings, draws, and models, 
 and all decidedly well, while her painting is something 
 merely marvellous. " We have a vivid remembrance of an 
 illustrative incident that occurred many years ago, in which 
 her singular success came under our own observation," writes 
 another raconteur. "At a gathering of several friends, Mrs. 
 Kellogg noticed a cameo of beautiful design and exquisite 
 workmanship, worn by one of the ladies in the company. 
 After a careful examination of the cameo, she quietly re 
 marked it might be possible for her to cut one like it, if the 
 proper implements were only at hand. Observing that her 
 friends were incredulous, she at once determined to make the 
 experiment, and, accordingly, borrowed the cameo. The next 
 morning she started out in pursuit of a suitable shell and the 
 necessary tools. The artisan of whom she purchased her 
 materials and implements, on learning that she had never re 
 ceived the least instruction in the art of cameo-cutting, sug 
 gested the impossibility of success in the proposed experiment. 
 But, still confident of her ability, she returned home, and com 
 menced her novel and difficult task. She was fortunate in 
 the selection of a shell of the same color ; and in a few days 
 the work was finished. Strange to say, she had duplicated 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 363 
 
 the cnmeo so perfectly that even a practised observer could 
 scarcely distinguish the original from the copy." 
 
 It was from the force and quality of such natures that the 
 genius of Clara Louise Kellogg was created, and all that was 
 in them was bent to her formation and education. Her pa 
 rents returned from the South to their home in New Hartford, 
 Connecticut, while she was yet in her infancy, and there they 
 lived, their daughter growing up familiar with the world of 
 woods and waters, a child of nature, until, in her fifteenth 
 year, they removed to New York, where, subsequently, Mr. 
 Kellogg received a position in the custom-house, which he 
 held for several years. 
 
 Louise received the usual education of young girls at Ash 
 land Seminary, among the Catskills, studying there with the 
 faithfulness that has always marked her course ; modestly 
 conscious of her gifts, and of her duty in their trusteeship. 
 She w r as at home with her mother, singing at the piano, when 
 a gentleman, Colonel Stebbins, the brother of Emma Steb- 
 bins, the sculptor of the "Lotus-Eater," who had occasion to 
 visit the house, heard, on mounting the stairs, the wonderful 
 shake of a young fresh voice on an upper note, like that of a 
 bird in the blue sky. The result of his inquiries was that he 
 undertook the musical education of what he considered a 
 prodigy, because spreading the royal wings of genius at an 
 age when the common flock preens its feathers without a 
 thought of flight. In accepting the future thus opened to 
 her, the child knew well what she was doing, that she was 
 to forego most of the pleasures and pursuits of girlhood, the 
 companionship of young associates, the fascinations of easy 
 social life ; that she was, in short, to make an almost entire 
 abandonment of the desires and inclinations of youth. But 
 besides the development of her natural powers, she now had 
 the reward of those who believed in her powers to aim for, 
 and her fidelity and application were equal to their belief. 
 Her first teacher was Professor Millet ; he was succeeded by 
 Signer Albites and Signor Manzochi ; and there were three 
 years under the guidance of Signor Rivarde, to whom she 
 
364 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 owes much of the correctness of her style. At a later period 
 Signor Muzio gave her a few lessons, and in London Signor 
 Arditi did the same, although, with the education she acquired 
 in America, she had already accomplished the height of her 
 fame, and must have taken the additional lessons only through 
 complaisance. Perhaps she owes as much to the unfailing 
 supervision of her mother, in all her suggestions, her dis 
 cipline, and her sympathetic genius, as to any other teacher. 
 Her mother has been her constant companion, confidante, and 
 manager, designing all her costumes, superintending her 
 dressing, standing behind the scenes with a wrap ready to 
 fold round her as she leaves the stage, having in many years 
 never seen her from the front, shielding her in all her concert 
 and stage experience before the public as carefully as a 
 daughter could be shielded in a mother s drawing-room. 
 
 Clara Louise Kellogg s musical development seems to date 
 from her birth. She has no knowledge of how or when she 
 acquired the art of reading music, being unable to recall the 
 time when she was not mistress of all the symbols of the 
 divine art. When but nine months old, and yet in arms, she 
 began to warble a tune that had pleased her baby fancy, and 
 accomplishing the first part, but failing to turn it correctly, 
 she ceased, and was not heard to attempt it again till just 
 before the completion of the year, when she broke out in joy 
 and sang the whole air through. At two years old certain 
 songs would occasion her showers of happy tears ; and there 
 was other music that could not be played or sung in the 
 house on account of the nervous paroxysms into which it 
 threw her. It may be judged from this how keen was her 
 musical susceptibility. Her musical ear, also, as I have said, 
 has always been of the finest. She was not three years old 
 when, some one touching the keys of the piano and asking 
 their names, unseen, the little Louise cried out from an 
 adjoining room, where, of course, the key-board was in 
 visible to her also, "I know which one it is, mamma. It s 
 the little white one between the two black ones," which it 
 was. Nothing could better demonstrate how positive is her 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGO. 365 
 
 sense of sound. Something always to be noticed in her 
 singing is this absolute knowledge of tone and accuracy in 
 rendering it. Other singers may be heard to strike the note 
 just off the true pitch, by a shade, an almost inappreciable 
 trifle, thus sliding to the correct tone ; but with Louise 
 Kellogg it is always the pure and perfect touch at the first 
 instant, without faltering or uncertainty, sure as the dart of 
 a sunbeam. Her ear, her voice, and her genius are the 
 gifts of abundant nature, but all the rest of her achievement 
 is the result of solid work. She has accomplished nothing 
 without persistent and untiring labor, before which others 
 might well recoil ; and her marvellous execution, in which 
 she is not only unrivalled but unapppoached by any other 
 singer, has been acquired only by un ceasing effort. After 
 every triumph, she has said to her mother, in whom she was 
 so sure of perfect comprehension and sympathy, " But better 
 next time ! " A notable critic has said of her, " Miss Kellogg 
 came to her work divinely attuned. Her natural advantages 
 were many and large. She possessed that nature which 
 could not only carol but could conquer. She was gifted with 
 musical apprehension which even in infancy was looked upon 
 as something marvellous. Her ear was not merely superior 
 to many others in its delicacy ; it was absolutely unlike any 
 other in its unerring fidelity to a positive standard of purity 
 and pitch. It could designate and analyze all the subdi 
 visions of the gamut before the child had learned the names 
 of the notes. She seemed, indeed, to have been born with a 
 positive and not a relative sense of tone ; and the fortunate 
 advantage of the purest associations and the best training 
 during childhood developed and strengthened it. This is the 
 basis of that subsequent purity and accuracy of execution 
 that have been the admiration of masters and composers in 
 two hemispheres ; and it explains the somewhat remarkable 
 statement made by one of the best musicians in America, to 
 the effect that Miss Kellogg was the only vocalist in the 
 country who never, under any circumstances, sang out of 
 tune. To this gift of an ear so exquisitely sensitive that it 
 23 
 
366 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 could detect the faintest departure from the pitch, was added 
 a vocal function of very remarkable quality and power." 
 
 An interesting illustration of this extraordinary musical 
 organization, with its instinctive knowledge of a positive 
 standard of pitch, was afforded by an occurrence one night 
 during her first visit to London, when Colonel Mapleson was 
 brimnn out "The Water-Carrier," with Madame Titiens in 
 
 ?""> O 
 
 the title rdle. Two renowned musical critics sat in the front 
 of the box with her, each with his full score of the opera, 
 ready to note his criticisms as the work proceeded. Sud 
 denly Miss Kellogg exclaimed : " Ah, what singular harmony ! 
 That chord was so and so," naming the different notes that 
 composed it. " There it goes into another strange bit of 
 harmony," she exclaimed, quite excited, and again giving the 
 separate notes. "You are familiar with the opera," said one 
 of the gentlemen. "Not at all," she answered; "I never 
 read a note of it, or saw a score." He turned, and looked 
 at her in blank amazement. "How is it possible," he ex 
 claimed, "for you to repeat this harmony under such condi 
 tions?" "I cannot tell you how I know it, nor why I know 
 it," she answered. But she went on, to his delight and 
 astonishment, as he looked at the score and she listened to 
 the music, giving page after page of the important chords, 
 sometimes so fore-feeling the necessity to come, with her sense 
 of nice adjustment, as to give a bar or two in advance, nearly 
 to the end of the opera. I have never known of another 
 person" with such a phenomenal poAver. 
 
 When at last, in her seventeenth year, it was decided that 
 she was to be given a trial in opera, under the management 
 of M. Grau, she surprised even those who had believed in 
 her the most. " Do you know," said some one to Mr. 
 Kellogg, as the orchestra, at her rehearsal, laid down their 
 instruments and applauded her, "that the orchestra has just 
 paid your daughter the most unusual and extraordinary com 
 pliment?" And it is musicians, the world over, who have 
 been and still are her most ardent apprcciators. Of her 
 dtbut that night N. P. Willis wrote: "As she overcame her 
 
CLARA. LOUISE KELLOGG. 367 
 
 notation and regained command of her voice, she astonished 
 her hearers with her force and execution ; " and Charlotte 
 Cushman, who was present, and who, fully appreciating her 
 dramatic genius, took in her the liveliest interest, declared 
 her acting to be that of an incipient Rachel. She bore then, 
 by the way, a strong resemblance to Rachel, chiefly in the 
 shape of her face and her dark and deep-set eyes ; but her 
 happy open smile and her changing color give her a luxuri 
 ance of womanly beauty to which the slim Hebrew, classic 
 and white and lustrous as a statue, was a stranger. 
 
 In one sense this debut of hers was entirely satisfactory ; 
 it assured her that she was right in her aspirations, and that 
 she was capable of success; and the word "fail" was no 
 more in her vocabulary than in Richelieu s. She had scorned 
 to adopt the precaution of timid debutantes by singing a great 
 part in the smaller places before attacking it in the metropo- 1 
 lis, and had plunged boldly in to conquer or die. She sang 
 a second time in New York, and then made her debut in 
 Boston, in "Linda di Chamounix." Of her effort in this rtile, 
 on the night of a terrific rain storm, the New York "Com 
 mercial Advertiser," had said : " We unhesitatingly pronounce 
 the result of her appearance in this second role to be a 
 redoubled conviction that she is one of the first geniuses that 
 has yet appeared on our lyric stage. Any woman who can 
 so enter into the very life, both acted and vocal, of the mad 
 passages in Linda, who can grade the infinitely delicate 
 departings and returnings of reason with such subtle accuracy, 
 has established her right to be considered ... a genius ade 
 quate with patience to all the most difficult parts in the 
 operatic field." In Boston she took her audience captive, was 
 called twice before the curtain at the close of the second act, 
 and was a^ain recalled at the end of the opera and overwhelmed 
 with flowers. All the newspapers next day were enthusiastic 
 over her voice, her clear and crisp execution, and her mag 
 netic power. Said the " Transcript " : " Her vocalization 
 was fragrant with bloom and beauty. She sang the music 
 of the first act with the natural enthusiasm of youth, and yet 
 
368 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 with artistic skill and finish. In the duet with Brignoli there 
 was a gush of song that carried delight and admiration to a 
 high pitch in the audience." Meanwhile, Dwight s " Journal 
 of Music," perhaps then the highest authority in this or any 
 other country, said of her : " We have rarely had occasion to 
 record a more complete and genuine success. An entire 
 novice upon the stage, having appeared only some half dozen 
 times in all, coming to us almost unheralded and unpuffed, 
 indeed almost unknown, she has stepped into the position of 
 a public favorite at a single bound. In person she is slender 
 and graceful, with a pleasing face, intelligent and intellectual 
 rather than beautiful, capable of the most varied expression. 
 Her voice is a pure, sweet, high soprano, of that thin and 
 penetrating quality that cuts the air with the keen glitter of a 
 Damascus blade, wanting now, of course, in that volume and 
 power which age and time will give, yet sufficient for all 
 practical purposes; of course, furthermore, not so full in the 
 lower register as it will be in time. She reminds us much of 
 Adelina Patti, as to the quality of her voice, and indeed in 
 her execution, which is finished and thoroughly artistic, 
 savoring little of the novice, but worthy of the experience of 
 a longer study and a maturer age. Everything attempted is 
 done with admirable precision, neatness, and brilliancy that 
 leave little to be desired. In the opening cavatina, O luce 
 di quest anima, she exhibited at once these qualities, giving the 
 ajr in a way that brought down the house in spontaneous 
 applause. As she proceeded, she evinced a rare dramatic 
 talent, and an apparent familiarity with the business of the 
 stage that was truly remarkable. The grace and simplicity 
 of manner that mark her are, however, native and not ac 
 quired, and seem a real gift of nature. Through all the 
 changes of the opera she showed herself always equal to the 
 demands of the scene ; so that, as an actress, we should set 
 her down as possessed of a rare instinct, if not, indeed, of 
 positive genius." 
 
 She had an equal success in " La Somnambula ; " but the 
 war ended the season abruptly. She was re-engaged for the 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 359 
 
 next year, and in 1863 she signed a contract for the following 
 three years. In 1862 she assumed the part of Violetta 
 in " La Traviata," and the " Albion " remarked of her appear 
 ance : " Miss Kellogg, whose dramatic aptness has been a 
 most noticeable trait of her career so far ... in the final 
 scene, by clear, steady vocal flights, placed herself above 
 almost every Violetta we have heard ; " while another 
 authority said : " Her song seems an outburst of the fulness 
 of melodious life, and as if she could no more help singing 
 than the song-sparrow which fills the leafless woods of early 
 spring with its thrilling notes." Of her Amina, at this 
 period, the "Home Journal" said: "She carries the realism 
 which specially characterizes certain interpretations of here 
 to the fullest extent in the action of the part. Her sleep 
 walking never swerved from the strange rhythmical step of 
 the actual somnambulist. The method of her vocalization is 
 throughout that of the unconscious talker in sleep. Her 
 waking scenes are deliciously sung, and in point of passionate 
 acting inimitable." 
 
 The hold that she had now acquired upon the public was 
 shown w r hen, in 1863, we find the Boston "Journal," saying 
 her "Ah, non giunge was an exhibition of vocalism, and of 
 acting as well, that makes the heart of an American swell 
 with pride." The " Post," after speaking of her finish and 
 force, said of her Lady Henrietta that she " was all sunshine 
 and music. She sang with heart, and acted with spirit, and 
 was charming in a thousand and one nameless by-plays. Her 
 sparkling eyes, vivacious manners, and buoyant spirits told 
 effectively on her audience. The Last Rose of Summer 
 was sung with exquisite sweetness and grace." And again 
 the same critic said : " As Linda she is magnificent ; and so 
 thought an audience that sat enraptured under the exhaustless 
 melody of her rich, sympathetic voice." Of her Zerlina in 
 " Don Giovanni," the " World " of New York, said she " ob 
 tained the most artistic success of the evening, acting well 
 and singing better; her Batti* Batti, gained her a universal 
 recall." And the Philadelphia "Press" declared: "She 
 
370 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 carried her audience away with her. She was born and will 
 remain a dramatic songstress. Her career in America has 
 been most unequivocally successful. Her sway over an 
 audience is a sceptre." I have made these quotations because 
 they are words carrying far more authority than any opinion 
 of my own, and because they show the drift of contempo 
 raneous feeling. The pride and satisfaction which the people 
 felt in her was manifested by a constant iteration of the fact 
 that she was a purely American product, and had received 
 none of her education, musical or histrionic, elsewhere than 
 in America, and that she was a living refutation of all foreign 
 impertinences in relation to us as crude and ignorant in the 
 direction of art. 
 
 It was in 1864 that she put the crown upon her perform 
 ances in the creation of the part of Marguerite in " Faust," 
 which she sang twenty-eight times in one season. To create 
 a part is the work of a great artist, and few are the prima- 
 donnas of the day that have done so. "Faust "had never 
 been played in this country, and in Europe only by its origi 
 nal interpreter, Mdme. Miolan-Carvalho. Miss Kellogg was 
 obliged to interpret the role without the benefit of instruction 
 or tradition. She had no model or teacher of any kind, not 
 even the hearsay of older artists ; her own genius and inspi 
 ration gave it birth. She had then sung not quite three years. 
 There was an almost universal concern felt in the fact when 
 it was learned that she was studying the part ; the country 
 seemed full of an affectionate personal interest in the young 
 girl. During her study, one would say, everybody wished to 
 do something to help her success ; she received, both from 
 people she knew and from strangers, copies of various edi 
 tions of Goethe s poem, and numberless illustrations of it also 
 by famous artists ; hints and suggestions poured in upon 
 her from the most unexpected sources ; the excitement was 
 more intense than it has ever been over any similar event ; 
 and when at last she appeared before the footlights of 
 the Academy of Music in New York, in the presence of 
 a most notable audience, in this most poetical of all the 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 371 
 
 parts prima-donna ever sang, her triumph was tremend 
 ous. 
 
 As much as her success had been anticipated, it remained a 
 matter of wonderment that a girl reared in the puritanical 
 traditions of New England, who had neyer been out of her 
 own country, who had been kept from all that knowledge of 
 the world which brushes the bloom from the young nature, 
 had been able from her own imagination to present the ideal 
 of so subtle a character as that of Goethe s heroine. It 
 would not have been so surprising in a European peasant ; for 
 something of the atmosphere of old legend would reach even 
 the peasant of those meridians. There were not two opinions 
 about her success. " The portrait," wrote Mr. Wheeler in a 
 leading periodical, " had the instant cogency of a homogene 
 ous work, artistically conceived and poetically colored. The 
 music exhibited for the first time the quality, fluency, com 
 pass, and culture of an exceptional voice. The critics who 
 desired the sensuous mellifluence of Grisi, the power of Cata- 
 lani, and the execution of Persiani, in the debutante, were 
 willing to acknowledge in Gretchen a vocal excellence distinct 
 
 o O 
 
 and even new. What Miss Kellogg s voice at this time 
 lacked in color and breath, it made up in fineness and purity. 
 What her impersonation wanted in organic ardor it supplied 
 in accuracy, delicacy, and finesse. She may not have shown 
 in Gretchen the force of an impulsive, mimetic nature, but 
 she evinced the possession of a chaste, creative imagination 
 and a subordinating intelligence. There was reason no less 
 than sentiment ; and it is worth noting that no artist who has 
 since essayed this same part for us has so succeeded in deli 
 cately conveying what seems to bo the poet s ideal. . . . 
 With Miss Kellogg there was, throughout the performance, 
 an exquisite reference to the supernatural character of the in 
 fluences that were surrounding her. This spirituality lifted 
 the role at once out of the purely objective domain of melo 
 drama into the region of poetry, where Individual facts are 
 of less import than general truths. I have seen, wrote 
 to Berlioz, a celebrated virtuoso, who was here at the time, a 
 
372 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 young girl, who is little better than an amateur, enact the 
 part of Marguerite in M. Gounod s recent setting of " Faust," 
 and I have been both surprised and charmed by the delicious 
 skill with which she has apprehended and made obvious those 
 subtler nuances of the poet which I believed were beyond the 
 reach of lyric or mimetic art. " Of this wondrous impersona 
 tion the critic of the " Tribune," an exacting one, declared 
 that " she literally warbled the delicious music, so liquidly the 
 notes fell from her lips. Perfect purity of intonation, light 
 and well-articulated execution, the utmost purity of taste, and 
 a naive, delicious, and impassioned manner, distinguished her 
 personation of Marguerite. We have seen nothing more 
 maidenly, tender, and delicately passionate than her whole 
 bearing in her interview with Faust. It was a flash of pure 
 nature, touching at once the sympathizers of the audience and 
 calling forth murmurs of irrepressible admiration. It was a 
 masterpiece of lyric and dramatic power." Another musical 
 connoisseur felt obliged to say, in more charming compliment 
 than singer ever had before, that, "The exquisite quality and 
 purity of her voice, its sweet and gentle character, and its 
 thrilling sympathetic power, are so aptly united to a faithful 
 rendition of this part, that it would seem as though both the 
 poet and the composer had written it for her in place of her 
 having created it for them." The newspapers, over and above 
 their own critical remarks, were besieged with more commu 
 nications than they could print, respecting the excellence of 
 the rendition, one correspondent calling it the greatest dra 
 matic triumph since Miss Heron woke to find the city at her 
 feet ; and another sending a little jeu d esprit : 
 
 " When Kellogg sat and spun 
 
 And sang the song of Thule, 
 
 We felt the lifelike tale begun, 
 
 The key was struck so truly. 
 
 "If Goethe s soul could view, 
 
 With us, the passing glory, 
 He d see the Margaret that he drew 
 Rise, living, from his story ! " 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 373 
 
 From one end of the country to the other, wherever she 
 appeared, the air rung with plaudits. In Boston the audi 
 ences were wild with eagerness ; ladies crowding the aisles 
 and standing through the entire opera were no infrequent 
 sight there, and hundreds were turned away from the doors, 
 as they had been in New York, where, at the dense matinees, 
 throngs of ladies appeared frantic for either seats or standing- 
 room. The modest little girl who sang Gilda to icicles three 
 years before would never have supposed it could be herself 
 causing such animated scenes in Irving Place, before the 
 opera, when coachmen and policemen and an army of car 
 riages depositing their gay loads, made outcry and confusion 
 for an hour or more. "The interpretation of Goethe s Mar 
 garet by Miss Kellogg has caused Faust to be the most 
 attractive opera of the season, and filled the house to over 
 flowing on each night of its representation," wrote the Boston 
 correspondent of the "Evening Post." " But it is Margaret 
 who holds in her slender hand the chain which, encircling the 
 vast audience, strikes through thousands of hearts the electric 
 spark of sympathy. The innocence, sweetness, and pathos 
 of Margaret could only be fitly represented by one whose 
 own nature corresponded to all those elements, and as in the 
 first act the gentle and lovely presence passed over the stage, 
 shrinking from the contact of the crowd, uttering only a few 
 notes, we acknowledge Sure, something holy lodges in that 
 breast. Through all the succeeding scenes Miss Kellogg s 
 insight into the nature of Margaret never fails. The element 
 of holiness is always present to our thoughts, even amid her 
 direst temptations and darkest trials, while the musical tones, 
 tender, trustful, agonized, come to us as the true source 
 of such emotions. . . . Miss Kellogg restored to us the 
 meaning of the poem, that there is an innate power in 
 innocence to put down Satan under her feet ; for although 
 Margaret dies on the floor of a dungeon, as a criminal in the 
 eyes of the world, it needed not the visible presence of angels 
 to assure us that the pure in heart shall see God." Mr. 
 Longfellow, in fine, expressed the sentiment of everybody 
 
374 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 when, in a note to Mr. Fields, which she keeps as an auto- 
 raph, he said : " Her Margaret was beautiful. She reminded 
 me of Dry den s lines : 
 
 " So poised, so gently, she descends from high, . 
 It seems a soft dismission from the sky. " 
 
 Subsequently, and when the charms of all rival prima-donnas 
 had been tested, the Goethe Club, at the dedication of a statue 
 of the poet, choosing William Cullen Bryant as the orator 
 and Bayard Taylor as the poet of the occasion, requested her 
 assistance, saying they were emboldened to make the request 
 by the fact that the greatest of Goethe s feminine ideals had 
 found through her its truest and most inspired interpretation on 
 the lyric stage. 
 
 *- o 
 
 At the close of her season in New York, this triumphant 
 year, as Miss Kellogg came before the curtain in answer to 
 repeated calls, M. Maretzek stepped after her, and presented 
 her, in the name of the stockholders of the Academy, as evi 
 dence of their appreciation of her as an artist and a lady, 
 with a ring and bracelet of superb diamonds. Such testi 
 monials, however, the traditional treasure of prima-donnas, 
 became a common thing as she went on. The St. Louis 
 people gave her, when singing in "Don Giovanni," a massive 
 gold chain and inscribed medallion, after ovations of floAvers ; 
 and in New York, while singing "L Etoile du Nord," a bunch 
 of white roses was tossed to her, among which nestled a 
 humming-bird holding a diamond cross in his bill. Later 
 were offerings of still costlier jewels from the Princess of 
 Wales and other foreign dignitaries, while bouquets and bas 
 kets and pyramids of flowers, some of them, as the news 
 papers delicately said next day, costing from fifty to two 
 hundred dollars, were the events of every appearance. She 
 had already valuable possessions in her stage paraphernalia, 
 among them a crown of amethysts set in a fragile gold fili- 
 grane, to which a romantic, history is attached. In this opera, 
 "L Etoile du Nord," she exhibited an exquisite purity and 
 melodiousness of voice, an irreproachable method, and a 
 surprising brilliance and facility of execution. 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 375 
 
 It was now acknowledged that Miss Kellogg had one of 
 the purest high soprano voices on any stage, and was a bravura 
 singer surpassed by none living or dead ; that her ear was 
 precisely correct, and that she was ruled by no false ambi 
 tions, but by a lofty love of her art ; that, in short, as it has 
 been beautifully said of her, she was less a lyric queen than 
 a lyric priestess ; her domain the boundless one of pure 
 music, and that she rested her claim to recognition on no per 
 sonal graces or attractions, but on conscientious and complete 
 work alone. The purity of her musical method, which never 
 allows her to overload a measure with ornament not to the 
 purpose, is only equalled by her fidelity to detail in action 
 and in dress. It may be trivial, but it demonstrates this 
 peculiarity of hers, to relate that when, on a benefit night, with 
 a programme in which scenes from "Traviata" and "Faust" 
 followed one another, and she was obliged to change her 
 toilet rapidly, laying aside the gorgeous ball-robes of Vio- 
 lelta for the peasant s dress of Marguerite, whose russet leather 
 shoes had been mislaid, she was in a terror lest she should be 
 late, and some one suggested that she should retain VioletlcCs 
 pale-blue satin shoes, which really matched the border of 
 Marguerite s dress, and were net very noticeable. " Who ever 
 heard," she cried, "of a burgher maiden going to church in 
 satin slippers?" Miss Kellogg s memory, moreover, was as 
 prodigious as her work was faithful ; she knew not only her 
 own part but the whole opera, and was wont to conduct, as 
 one might almost say, a large measure of the performance 
 herself, prompting, suggesting, and maintaining the key, a 
 thing remarkable for its unselfish devotion to art itself instead 
 of the usual devotion to personal success alone. 
 
 I remember her well at this happy period of her life. 
 Success had not spoiled her, as it never can spoil her. She 
 was but a trifle turned of twenty, modest, natural, and 
 unaffected to a degree, radiant with simple happiness, receiving 
 admiration that was almost adoration with a sort of surprised 
 sweetness, taking a girlish interest in the delayed affairs of 
 youth ; all alive and tingling, too, with her music, singing 
 
376 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 to friends on the off-nights of the opera as if she were the 
 obliging ballad-singer of any parlor, and obedient to her 
 worshipping but far-sighted mother as a child of ten might 
 be. It was only an example of her happiness overflowing in 
 abundant kindness towards everybody, when one night, as 
 
 she sans "Trovatorc," with an abandon that was a revelation of 
 
 o 
 
 unexpected power, returning to the prima-donna s room, she 
 saw another singer, one who had once reigned supreme in that 
 room herself, whose fame had been world-wide, but from 
 whom years had robbed her glory, turn to go upstairs, and 
 she sprang after the fallen queen, and insisted she should 
 reoccupy her old quarters with herself; a trifle, to be sure, 
 but showing the same generous spirit that has poured plenty 
 into the lap of more than one poor singer s family, and never 
 whispered of the act. She had just produced her second 
 creation, the part of Annetta in " Crispino e la Comare," in 
 which she displayed a rare capacity for comedy, playing most 
 piquantly, and singing the gay music, in which is a gondola- 
 song in the Venetian dialect, so charmingly as to be applauded 
 to the echo. There was something exceedingly satisfactory 
 in the sight of her innocence and joyousncss, and the thought 
 of her faithfulness to the obligations of her genius, a genius 
 that sparkled in the light coquetry of the Zerh na of " Fra 
 Diavolo," glowed with a superb strength of flame in the 
 passionate Leonora, and, as Mr. Wheeler asserted, com 
 passed in its splendor, when she sang the Zerlina and the 
 Donna Anna of " Don Giovanni," or the Filina of " Mignon, 
 all the distance between the immortal song and joy of Mozart 
 and the temporary pleasures of Ambroise Thomas. 
 
 It was in 1867 that she signed an engagement to sing for 
 Mr. Mapleson in Her Majesty s Theatre, London, sailing in the 
 * Russia." She made her dtbut there as Marguerite ; at once, 
 by the deed, throwing down her challenge to the lyric world ; 
 for in this part she had to confront recent recollections of 
 Patti, Lucca, Miolan-Carvalho, Nilsson, and Titiens. The 
 house that night was crowded, brilliant, and enthusiastic ; the 
 applause was deafening ; the Prince of Wales congratulated 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 377 
 
 her, and the impression she made was immense as a brilliant 
 singer and a consummate actress. " Her voice," said the 
 authoritative critic of the "Standard," "is a high soprano of 
 the most brilliant and sympathetic quality, as fresh ns a lark s, 
 and invariably in tune ; " and elsewhere the same critic wrote : 
 " She possesses a voice of rare quality, silver-bright, liquid, 
 and emotional to a degree. She sings with art, feeling, 
 judgment, and supreme taste." The " News " asserted that her 
 performance compared with that of any of her predecessors, 
 and that she was an example of finished training in the best 
 school ; the " Era " assured her that she need fear no com 
 parison ; the " Review " pronounced her bravura singing in 
 florid, ornamental passages to have a distinctness and com 
 pleteness of style seldom realized, while her shake was 
 irreproachable in closeness, evenness, and intonation ; and 
 Mr. Davidson, the severe and unapproachable critic of the 
 "Times," declared that, coming so entirely without the con 
 ventional puff preliminary, the dtbut was in the strictest 
 sense legitimate, and she had achieved a brilliant and unquali 
 fied success; that, emotional, impassioned, and strikingly 
 picturesque, she exhibited a high order of dramatic talent ; 
 that her voice was a true soprano resonant, flexible no less 
 than sympathetic and telling, boasting the precious quality 
 of being invariably in tune, with extreme sensibility in canta- 
 bile phrases. " Then her articulation of the words, her sense 
 of accent, her balance of phrase alike in tempo giusto, and 
 in tempo rubato in the strict division of time, and in its 
 measurement at discretion, are irreproachable ; while last, 
 not least, her pronounciation of the Italian language is so 
 uniformly correct and musical that she might almost be taken 
 for an Italian-born. . . . When Mile. Kellogg sings the 
 house is crowded ; and now that Mr. Mapleson has got hold 
 of the young and fair American, he must retain possession 
 of her, as of Falernian wine, under a hundred keys." 1 
 
 In " Traviata " her success even exceeded that in " Faust," 
 and she followed it by "Lady Henrietta" with a facile 
 brilliancy of execution, and by " Linda," of which the " Times " 
 
378 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 said her performance was, with few exceptions, " probably 
 the best that has ever been witnessed on the Italian or any 
 other stage/ And Mr. Srnallcy sent word home, "She has 
 filled the opera-house;, carried her audience by storm, and 
 delighted the critics. Her triumph is more decided than was 
 that of Patti in her first appearance, and is not less complete 
 than that of Christine Nilsson, who came over from Paris 
 last season." 
 
 It was the Americans in England who were more rejoiced, 
 if possible, than Miss Kellogg was herself, by this proud 
 success. They thronged to her representations, they loaded 
 her Avith flowers, they overloaded her with cordial expres 
 sions. Mrs. General Dix, Mrs. Charles Francis Adams, the 
 wife of our Minister, and others of prominence congratulated 
 her by letter. Many Americans, indeed, felt that although 
 it was with them that the growth and expansion of the 
 dramatic genius of Maria Felicia Malibran took place, and 
 although it was they who first recognized the talents of P>osio 
 and of Patti, nevertheless, Kellogg was the first American 
 singer whoso whole antecedents and instruction belonged to 
 their shores, and who, born at one end of the country, 
 educated and brought out at the other, and half idolized 
 throughout its extent, was utterly American and theirs, and 
 their gratified pride gave her something like an international 
 position. 
 
 The burning of Her Majesty s Theatre brought the season 
 to a close, but Miss Kellogg was re-engaged for the next 
 year. She opened in " Traviata," and created a furore. Of 
 her Violetta at Drury Lane the English critics said she robbed 
 the part of repulsiveness, and set the cacJiet of innate 
 refinement on all she did. Of her Gild a they maintained 
 that it was not perfect merely, but a new revelation, and there 
 was certainly no Gilda now to be seen so tender, so engag 
 ing, so truly pathetic. In " La Somnambula," they asserted 
 her mingled terror and grief to be as genuine a display of 
 true passion as the lyric stage had seen for many a day ; and 
 of " Le Nozze di Figaro," that a more sprightly, arch, and 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 379 
 
 eminently graceful Susanna, distancing all competitors, as 
 near perfection as can be conceived, was not to be found, 
 nor had the garden-song been given with purer vocalization 
 and truer taste. They had to thank the American prima- 
 donna, too, they acknowledged, for the revival of a racy 
 example of the Italian style of half a century back in the 
 ambitious part of Ninetta, in " La Gnzza Ladra " ; and in 
 " La Figlia del Reggimento " they found her singing beyond 
 all praise : " Gay or sad, hopeful or depressed, the music 
 was poured forth like a nightingale s, or as unpremeditatedly 
 as that of Shelley s Skylark." Her Lucia, meanwhile, was 
 pronounced a very perfect effort, in which " she not only sur 
 mounted every difficulty for which the composer is account 
 able, but introduced cadences and ornaments that only the 
 most finished executant could attempt." Said the " Standard," 
 in conclusion : " Mile. Kellogg s success could not possibly 
 be greater. She was recalled after every act, and was received 
 each time with genuine enthusiasm. At the fall of the cur 
 tain, when she was summoned before the footlights, the stage 
 was literally rained on with bouquets, and the scene forcibly 
 reminded one of a night during the Jenny Lind/wore, when 
 the operatic excitement was at the fever height." 
 
 During these seasons she sang repeatedly in private con 
 certs under the patronage of the royal family and members 
 of the nobility, before the queen at Buckingham Palace, and 
 at the great Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace, where, 
 before an audience of twenty-three thousand people, and 
 with such singers as Titiens, Lemmens-Sherrington, Nilsson, 
 Sainton Dolby, Carola, Sims Reeves, and Santley, her 
 rendering of "Oh, had I Jubal s Lyre ! " was pronounced one 
 of the best and most legitimate specimens of llandelian 
 singing of the day. " The old llandelian fire was mainly felt 
 when Mile. Kellogg sang the noble air from Joshua, " said 
 a writer in " Harper s Magazine," in describing the occasion. 
 " Dear Miss Kellogg," wrote Mr. John Hay to her from 
 Vienna, "I believe you do not read the Vienna papers, and 
 BO will not see what the Fremdenblatt says of you this 
 
380 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 fine May morning. It is so hearty, and yet so naive, that 
 I send you a literal translation : f Miss Kellogg is the star of 
 the opera in England. The enthusiasm for this young artiste 
 is indescribable. Miss Kellogg, a most poetical apparition, 
 eighteen years of age, is a non plus ultra bravura singer, 
 and strikes the Patti with her masterly song formally dead. 
 With her singing unites this artiste a so sublime play that one 
 through the same is moved to tears. Fraulein Tietjens, who, 
 as well, in the same opera in which Miss Kellogg appeared, 
 collaborated, namely in Mozart s "Don Juan," was, through 
 the splendor of the young stranger, completely eclipsed. " 
 
 During this really colossal success, Patti and Lucca were 
 singing at Covent Garden, and Titiens and Nilsson at Drury 
 Lane. With these latter artists Miss Kellogg alternated 
 appearances, and in the performances of " Don Giovanni " and 
 of the "Nozze di Figaro," she sang in conjunction with them ; 
 in the one playing Zerlina to Titien s Donna Anna and Nils- 
 son s Elvira; and in the other, Susanna to Nilsson s Cherubino 
 and Titien s Countess. Her repertoire now numbered thirty- 
 four parts, as she sang in " Poliuto," " Rigoletto," " Som- 
 nambula," "Lucia," "Linda," " Traviata," " La Figlia del 
 Reggimento," "Un Ballo in Maschera," "L Etoile du Nord," 
 "Don Giovanni" (both Zerlina and Donna Anna), "Puri- 
 tani," "Marta," "Crispino," "Roberto," "Le Nozze," "La 
 Gazza Ladra," "II Barbiere," "Faust," " Fra Diavolo," 
 "Les Noces de Jeannette," "Trovatore," "Carnival of Ven 
 ice," "Pipelde," "Don Pasquala," "Mignon," "Talisman," 
 "Lily of Killarney," "Bohemian Girl," "Flying Dutchman," 
 " Aida," "Huguenot," "Carmen," and "Lohengrin." Offers 
 were made her to sing at Paris, Florence, St. Petersburg, 
 and Madrid, but she had already signed an engagement to 
 sing in America under the management of Mr. Strakosch, and 
 she returned home to receive a welcome which showed her 
 how her country-people felt she had taken off their reproach 
 in the eyes of the world. 
 
 The Academy held an immense audience on the night of 
 her reappearance in New York, and as she came down the 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 381 
 
 stage the falling bouquets almost hid her from view. It was 
 several minutes before she could cease her acknowledgments, 
 mid it was beyond her power alone to clear the stage, even 
 by armfuls, of the flowers that were sent up in pyramids, 
 columns, baskets, and wreaths, with doves scattering tube 
 roses, and canaries rivalling the prima-donna. After this she 
 made a triumphal tour through the land, a sort of royal 
 progress. In the next year she sang in opera with Mdme. 
 Lucca, and in 1870 she organized a concert tour of her own. 
 Every movement she has made has been an upward one, 
 even when it seemed as if there were no further for her to 
 go. " She has gained every step by industry and study. 
 There has been no sentimental nonsense expended on her. 
 She has won honestly and fairly the first position, and occu 
 pies it to the acceptation of every one. No one has tried to 
 write her up. There has been but a single effort to write her 
 down, and it failed. What she possesses to-day she owes to 
 herself." When, in 1870, she played Paulina, in "Poliuto," 
 the public acclaim verified the critic s statement, that her 
 acting throughout was " truthful and impassioned ; she did 
 not lose sight of the situation for an instant, but kept the 
 cord tightened until the strain of irrepressible enthusiasm 
 severed the strands, and her heart poured out in a burst of 
 passionate song the words: Oh, Santa Melodia! Celeste 
 volutfaf So finely and truthfully was that rendered that it 
 excited a furore of admiration, and it had to be repeated amid 
 shouts of brava and thunders of applause. It was a supreme 
 moment both for the artists and the public. Miss Kellogg s 
 gestures were purely classic ; they demonstrated the emotions 
 with striking fidelity ; every movement was rounded and 
 beautiful. Her poses were classic and graceful, and in some 
 cases as beautifully statuesque as those of Rachel. She sang 
 the music splendidly, from the first note to the last ; she 
 threw into it all the passion it required ; her phrasing and 
 emphasis were admirable. Her finish is most elaborate ; it 
 is hardly possible to select a blemish in her intonation, articu 
 lation, or execution. It was pure, beautiful, and honest 
 24 
 
382 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 singing, from the beginning to the end, and we were gratified 
 to hear the repeated and irrepressible murmurs of brava, 
 brava, which greeted her as point after point of refined 
 beauty of execution and interpretation appeared in strong 
 relief. Her voice is in superb order; it is full, melodious, 
 and sympathetic, and rang out in passages of force with 
 metallic power which surprised while it delighted. We must 
 name Pauline as the grandest of all the successes that Miss 
 Kellogg has yet achieved." 
 
 In the succeeding years she has never allowed herself to 
 rest. In 1872 she enjoyed another triumphant season in 
 London, when Campanini made his debut, singing Edgardo 
 to her Lucia. The " Atlantic Monthly" said of her, shortly 
 afterward : " The pure, penetrating quality of her voice seems 
 more beautiful, if possible, than in past seasons. As a 
 singer, so far as purity of style and method and fine sympa 
 thetic musical expression go to make one, we should rank 
 her even above Madame Lucca or Miss Nilsson. Her singing 
 is, in fact, almost absolutely faultless." In the winter of 
 1875 she sang one hundred and twenty-five nights. In 1880 
 her success in Vienna, where she alone of all the troupe was 
 allowed to sing in Italian, German being the prescribed 
 tongue, was colossal. And meanwhile she has been at the 
 head of an enterprise, which has been as fertile in results as 
 anything in her life, for the introduction of English opera, 
 which she has made familiar to the American public. "Into 
 this enterprise," says the Rev. O. B. Frothingham, "she 
 threw herself with all her accustomed energy, aided by a 
 deep confidence in the musical appreciation and enthusiasm 
 of the American people, assuming the direction of the pieces, 
 the training of the singers, the translation of the libretti from 
 the French or Italian, and in general the conduct of the 
 business." 
 
 But great as Miss Kellogg is in her art, a large affection is 
 given her for the equally great qualities of her heart. She 
 has never been known to condemn a rival. Of Miolan-Car- 
 valho she wrote home : " I don t think I ever heard anything 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 383 
 
 more perfectly rendered than her singing of the waltz " (in 
 "Romeo and Juliet"). When a bouquet was once thrown, 
 after the curtain fell, upon the stage where she was singing 
 with Lucca, the curtain rose upon her clasping Lucca s hand 
 with the flowers between them in the clasp. Everybody 
 knows of her goodness to debutantes , of her patronage of 
 Lisa Harris and others when she was quite young herself; of 
 her efforts to place above want the family of young Conly, 
 one of the singers of her company who was drowned ; of her 
 kindness to the superannuated beneficiaries of the stage. 
 She was singing one night in Toledo, when a young woman 
 made her way to the anteroom where M. Strakosch was, and 
 begged him to afford her a hearing, that she might have some 
 support in the path she had undertaken, believing that she 
 had a voice and determined to do something with it, at present 
 making her way by singing to her guitar in parlor concerts at 
 one hotel after another, till she should obtain money enough 
 to take lessons, being totally unacquainted with written mu 
 sic. After the concert Miss Kellogg and the company listened 
 to her, and found a wonderfully powerful but crude voice, 
 sustaining, even in its untrained condition, the second B flat 
 above and the C below ; and that night Miss Kellogg took 
 her homo to the hotel in the carriage, and the next day sent 
 her to the best masters of New York for an education at her 
 own expense. 
 
 How often has not that generous voice been heard in chari 
 ties ; and how often in gracious acts, as when, Charlotte 
 Cushman playing Queen Katharine, the voice that sang to 
 the dying woman was Louise Kellogg s, that voice like a 
 " silver bell struck with a velvet hammer," or as it was heard 
 at Mr. Greelcy s funeral. " There was a pause for a moment 
 before the organ was heard again, and a sweet and ringing 
 voice broke out in that grand song of faith and tenderness 
 and triumph, I know that my Redeemer liveth. It was 
 Miss Kellogg, who paid this last touching tribute to one 
 whom she had long known as a dear personal friend. . . . 
 He had conceived a strong regard for this estimable lady ; 
 
384 CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 
 
 he spoke of her in warm terms of praise, and during his 
 sickness, only a little while before he died, talking of remark 
 able women whom he had known, he mentioned especially 
 two of whom his opinion was very high. These were Mar 
 garet Fuller and Clara Louise Kellogg. It was no mere 
 artistic sentiment, therefore, which Miss Kellogg threw into 
 the divine song which she poured upon the ears of that great 
 audience. There was grief at her heart, for there were tears 
 in her voice. When she ceased a sense of inexpressible 
 tenderness seemed diffused over the whole house." 
 
 Miss Kellogg has never married. I will confess that I 
 have thought a strong and tender passion, an experience of 
 that great school of life to be found in marriage, would enrich, 
 deepen, and fortify her genius and her art. But the only pas 
 sion she has ever acknowledged is the love of her music. 
 Her home, originally in New Hartford, was afterwards for 
 many summers at Cold Springs, on the Hudson, on the estate 
 of Clarelmrst, a delightful spot which she has beautified 
 through the ample resources of the wealth she has accumu 
 lated, lying on a mountain side opposite West Point, under 
 the shadow of huge oaks and hickories, and where the view 
 outside is as full of color and splendor as the house inside is 
 of music and all the sweetness of domestic life. Latterly 
 she has spent more time at the Clarendon Hotel in New York, 
 which has been her home to all intents and purposes. 
 
 The career of Miss Kellogg is one that it is a pleasure to 
 contemplate, and mention of which I leave with reluctance. 
 It seems to me that it will be of immeasurable use in the 
 future, a wise and lofty and beneficent example. Greatly 
 endowed by nature, she has yet had great difficulties to mas 
 ter. That she was an American has militated against 
 her, except in temporary bursts and spasms of public feeling. 
 She had a cabal of critics always to overcome, chiefly foreign 
 ers attached to the great newspapers, who would not believe 
 good could come out of Nazareth, otherwise America. No 
 newspaper was ever approached with a consideration in her 
 behalf, and she had been more than a dozen years on the 
 
CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG. 385 
 
 stage before she met any of these people personally. She 
 had, moreover, a natural manner, wanting in the repose of 
 indifferentism, full of a certain nervous restlessness, that 
 afforded these critics ground for accusing her of a vanity and 
 conceit absolutely foreign to her being. In truth, Clara Louise 
 Kellogg is totally without conceit. She never admits that she 
 has done anything so well that it might not have been done 
 better. She never goes on the stage without her heart in her 
 mouth. Cruel words have cut her to the quick ; she has 
 needed the kindest. Encouragement has always warmed her, 
 and more encouragement would have fired her to yet happier 
 heights than she has reached. With all her signal success no 
 audience has yet got the best from her, that best which she 
 could give if she felt herself sustained in their strong sym 
 pathy to the point of her courageous aspiration ; if they would 
 forget that she did not belong to the terra incognita of the 
 foreigner, with its charms of the unknown. To-day an audi 
 ence will raise the roof with thunders of applause ; to-mor 
 row, she knows, its caprice will hesitate to dare to say she is 
 better than the best because she is one of themselves. She 
 herself never had a caprice ; she is an embodied conscience ; 
 she is amiability itself; she has carried on the stage, if not in 
 such precise facts, yet in their spirit, the rearing of a Puritan 
 girl whose piano, before she went to New York, was closed 
 on Saturday night and not opened till Monday morning. Ex 
 posed to every danger, there has never in all the years while 
 she has been in the blaze of the public eye, " in the fierce 
 light which beats about a throne," been a blemish on her fair 
 fame, nor has the breath of blame blown over her. When 
 will the influences of the universe combine about a w r onderful 
 throat again in such self-denying industry and earnestness 
 and will, such unsullied spotlcssness, such intelligence and 
 spirit, in short, in another Clara Louise Kellogg? Let us 
 be thankful for her while we may ; for she is an honor to her 
 household, a delight to her friends, a glory to womankind I 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 MAEY A. LIVERMORB. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 Mrs. Livennore s Ancestry Stories of Her Childhood The Little Minister 
 
 Her Marriage Journalistic Experiences The War of the Rebellion 
 Loyalty and Devotion to the Union The Northwestern Sanitary 
 Commission Army Experiences Incidents of Hospital Life Won 
 derful Nerve and Ready Resources in Emergencies A Remarkable 
 Achievement Mighty Work for Union Soldiers Their Love and 
 Reverence for Her "Mother" to them All Touching Story of a Sol 
 dier s Ring A Thrilling Incident of Chicago Life An Errand of Mercy 
 
 Terrible Death-Bed Scene Labors after the War Her Christian 
 Life and Influence Work as a Reformer F.imeasan Orator Personal 
 Appearance Home Life A Grand and Noble Woman. 
 
 HERE is still fossil poetry left in the too familiar 
 phrase, " representative " man or woman. 
 
 Our own country, yet young and prophetic, is 
 pre-eminently the ground of experiment. " Your 
 land of the future," George Eliot called it, 
 " America, is the nursery and seed-ground of 
 new ideals, where they can expand in a better, 
 freer air than ours." 
 
 In looking over the list of great and gracious 
 women whose achievements are recorded in the 
 pages of this book, it may be doubted if there is one w T ho 
 will be found fifty years hence more broadly to re-present 
 the spirit of the last twenty years of American story than 
 her whose name heads this commemorative sketch. 
 
 I am enabled to give, in the words of one near to Mrs. 
 Livermore, a few facts about her early life, which are of so 
 much interest as indicating the prophetic cast which strong 
 natures often take on in childhood, that I can only wish I had 
 threefold the space which can be spared to them. 
 380 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 387 
 
 Science teaches us nowadays that in order to save a man 
 we must convert his grandfather ; and gives us, in its own 
 despite, the strongest proofs we possess of the value of relig 
 ious character as a social factor. Nothing so illustrates the 
 persistence of force as the continuity of spiritual fibre. We 
 all freshly remember the religious molecules in the brain of 
 Emerson, who was the result of eight generations of Christian 
 ministers. 
 
 This most womanly story of a noble woman adds another 
 to the long list of instances in which a believing stock has 
 been preservative of intellectual vigor. 
 
 "The parents of Mrs. Livermore," I am told, "were very 
 devout, indeed stern in their ideas of morality and religion. 
 Her ancestry on her father s side were Welsh, on her mother s 
 side English, her maternal grandfather having been born at 
 London. He was an East India sea-captain. Her father 
 was bred a Berkshire farmer in Massachusetts." Further back 
 in the ancestral line we find the clerical environment. " I 
 have the blood of six generations of Welsh preachers in my 
 veins," is the significant testimony of the woman who packs 
 Boston Theatre on Sunday evening when she talks on Immor 
 tality. 
 
 " Mary was born in Boston. She was most rigorously 
 trained from her earliest infancy in habits of industry and 
 economy, in morals, and in the severe theology of the day, 
 after the belief of the Close Communion Baptist Church ; 
 while the very best education was given her that the schools 
 of Boston and the educational facilities of New England at 
 that time afforded for girls. She does not remember a time 
 when she was not vitally concerned in all matters pertaining 
 to religion, eager for knowledge and ambitious for study, 
 while there was no possibility of her shirking her daily allot 
 ment of work in her father s household. 
 
 " The oldest surviving child of a family of six, she always 
 exercised a mother s care over her younger sisters. Before 
 she was ten years old she was harassed by wakeful nights 
 of anxiety for them, when she would arouse her parents in the 
 
388 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 middle of the night, asking thorn to pray for these little sisters 
 that they might become good women and be eternally saved 
 in heaven. When asked if the same prayer should not b<5 
 made in her ojvn behalf, she gave this characteristic answer : 
 "Tisn t any matter about me ; if they are saved I can bear 
 anything. " 
 
 Pretty stories are told us, too, of the little girl s being 
 followed to and from school, by a procession of timid chil 
 dren, the weak, or sick, or poor and ill-dressed, or otherwise 
 " unfit," who were worsted by the ridicule or insult of their 
 rougher and tougher mates. Mary s presence was " hands 
 oft*" to the biggest bully, and protection to the feeblest of her 
 dependents. " She took the law into her own hands, and 
 was judge, jury, and executioner to the unlucky boy who 
 attempted any insult to her dubious procession of ragged and 
 unkempt children." 
 
 These little tales read like a legend from the annals of 
 chivalry ; or like a prophecy from the Old Testament pre 
 ceding the Gospel of a beautiful life. What wonder that a 
 friend says of her to-day : "It is doubtful if there is another 
 woman of the day who is more sought by forlorn and friend 
 less women women needing comfort, encouragement, 
 assistance ; women bankrupt in character, charged with 
 crime, and awaiting trial ; women who are called outcast, 
 and who are on the verge of suicide than the subject of 
 this sketch. . . . It is literally true of her that never 
 yet in her life has she turned away either man or woman who 
 had sought her in distress." 
 
 The favorite amusement of the little Calvinist was playing 
 at meeting, and she who to-day holds an audience from the 
 platform or pulpit, better perhaps than any other living 
 woman, began to train herself for her vocation by practising 
 (in default of other hearers) on the sticks and logs arrayed 
 in her father s wood-shed. She writes now and then from 
 some point in her yearly lecturing tours that she " has met 
 some members of one of her old wood-shed audiences, but 
 has not always been sure whether these were blockheads or 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 391 
 
 lager-beer barrels." Her father used to say : "If you had 
 only been a boy I would have educated you for the ministry." 
 
 We read, it is true, of one secular encroachment upon 
 these "sad amusements," in the shape of a wax doll which 
 did duty as a worldly diversion for a time. But a little heap 
 of ashes was discovered one day in the back-yard, where, it 
 was learned, the recantation of Cranmer had been enacted be 
 fore admiring spectators. The archbishop met the fate of a 
 heretic Avith great historical accuracy and religious fervor, 
 but the unfortunate five-dollar French doll was missing from 
 the scene of her brief domestication in that family. 
 
 An impressive account of the "Play of the Resurrection," 
 one of the diversions out of which the sternly-reared child 
 managed to wring her unyouthful pleasures, has seemed to me 
 too interesting to be set aside. It is thus described : 
 
 " In order to reach the play it was necessary that one of 
 the children should be taken sick, and the usual programme 
 follows. The doctor was summoned, the pulse and tongue 
 were examined, medicines were prescribed and taken without 
 any benefit ; the doctor finally abandoned all hope, and amid 
 well-counterfeited grief that sometimes became so real as to 
 lead to violent weeping, the little patient died. Then came the 
 preparation for burial. The eyes were closed and the lids 
 weighted with coins, the hands folded on the breast, the body 
 arrayed in a long night-dress, and all moved about solemnly 
 and sadly. 
 
 " Then came the funeral, Mary officiating as the minister, 
 with prayer and addresses. All sang a dolorous hymn to a 
 dolorous tune, and the procession was formed, which marched 
 slowly and tearfully through the chamber to a back square 
 bedroom given up for a play-room. It had a large wide fire 
 place closed with a fire-board, and its windows were dark 
 ened by green shutters, a heart-shaped aperture in the top of 
 each admitting the only light. The fireplace had been cleansed 
 and painted black for the children s convenience, for the fire 
 place was the tomb where now the pretended dead child was 
 buried, all the ghastly formalities of the times being faithfully 
 
392 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 copied, and then with great grief the fire-board the door of 
 the tomb was put in its place, and the funeral procession 
 returned to the front of the house in the order in which it had 
 come. 
 
 "All this was preliminary. Now the real play began. 
 The green window-shutters were tightly closed, even the 
 heart-shaped apertures for lights were shaded the room was 
 made as dark as possible, and then, all being ready, one of 
 the boys at the upper stairway gave the signal, a prolonged 
 blast on a trumpet. This was Gabriel, announcing the end 
 of the world, and the coming resurrection. Nearer came the 
 trumpets louder grew the blast and as it entered the 
 darkened room the window-shutters were suddenly thrown 
 back with great clatter, the fire-board was dashed down with 
 great noise at the same moment by the occupant of the fire 
 place, who, arrayed in the burial garments, sprang into the 
 middle of the room, whither now all the children sprang, 
 with arms and eyes uplifted, all bursting out into a jubilant 
 song of welcome, which grew louder and faster as the ex 
 citement increased, and their emotions became more vehe 
 ment. 
 
 "I have heard Mrs. Livcrmore say that no spectacular play 
 she has ever witnessed, has thrilled and excited her as did 
 this Play of the Resurrection in her childhood." 
 
 The child s devotion to her parents, and fear of making 
 trouble, were almost unchildlike. We hear of her as secretly 
 engaging slop-work, and sewing flannel shirts at night (until 
 parentally discovered), to earn a few shillings towards her 
 own support ; and as collecting and controlling a vacation 
 school of fifty little pupils, at twcnt} r -five cents a week, to 
 meet the expenses of her own education. Here shows the 
 organizing fibre which afterwards carried the Sanitary Com 
 mission of the great Northwest upon its broad shoulders. 
 
 Her intellectual vigor early developed. At a tender age, 
 we hear of her being shut up by her schoolmaster with no 
 thing but a dictionary, and required to write an impromptu 
 thesis on " Self-government," by way of proof that her extraor- 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 393 
 
 dinary compositions had not been plagiarisms. The result 
 acquitted her fully and finally, in the mind of that teacher. 
 At fourteen she graduated at the Hancock School with the 
 highest honors. 
 
 O 
 
 When Mary was seventeen years old, an event occurred 
 which more than any other one allccted her inner and outer 
 life. A younger sister, greatly beloved, after a lingering 
 illness, died. The life of this child had been one of sin 
 gular purity and loveliness. In character she seems to 
 have been one of the natural saints, or at least of the early 
 matured for the moral results of death one of those rare 
 souls whom the Master " beholding," would have " loved." 
 But according to the theology of the family, she was not 
 " converted," and by the logic of theology she could not be 
 saved. 
 
 The self-sacrificing sister faced this fact with an anguish 
 nothing less than maternal. No comfort approached her de 
 spair. She bore it, as intense girls bear such things. The 
 little sister was in hell, and she, Mary, who would have gone 
 there in her stead as unhesitatingly as she would dispose of 
 the bully who abused a child that trusted her at school, she 
 could not lift a muscle or use a heart-throb to prevent this 
 moral outrage. So much purity so much punishment 
 how much God? 
 
 She faced her problem in the solitary way that befalls 
 strong young natures. The wise and tender word which 
 should have " read his righteous sentence" otherwise to the 
 desperate mourner was not spoken. No one gave her a 
 sane gospel. No one taught her that when the conflict struck 
 between essential Love and accidental creed the odds were 
 not in favor of the creed. Human device had pitted itself 
 against Divine tenderness ; and there was no religious good- 
 sense at hand to convince the tortured creature that God 
 Almighty loved the dead child better than her father s min 
 ister. The inevitable consequences racked the strong soul 
 and body of the growing girl. Years of agony left traces 
 which can be seen to this day in the trembling lips and solemn 
 
394 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 appeal of the grave eye, with which this epoch in life is 
 alluded to. She left home the better to fight her fight in the 
 loneliness which such moral emergencies demand, and for two 
 years taught as governess in a desolate Virginia plantation, 
 seeking to throw the turmoil of her nature into active and 
 incessant work. 
 
 It was upon her return from this Southern trip that chance 
 threw her in the way of a young Universalist preacher, to 
 whose ears the story of her experience was carried by troubled 
 friends. This was a case which peculiarly appealed to the 
 sectarian zeal of the minister, and it is easy to sec that the 
 strong sweetness and sweet strength of the woman must have 
 presented more complicated problems to the man. The sub 
 ject of eternal punishment was replaced by that of eternal 
 blessedness, and Mary Ashton Rice became the wife of Rev. 
 Daniel P. Livermore. 
 
 The elder Dumas, I think it was, said of Michael Angelo 
 painter, architect, poet, and sculptor that he had four 
 souls. We need not climb as high as Angelo to meet a com 
 manding versatility that can be best described by some such 
 phrase. The greatest difficulty in dealing with a subject like 
 that which is crowded into the limits of this sketch, lies in the 
 variousness of this woman s claims to public interest. 
 
 Beyond question the first, if not the strongest of these, is 
 to be found in Mrs. Liverrnore s magnificent war-record. 
 
 The years immediately preceding and succeeding her 
 marriage were full such a life could never be empty of 
 those tentative efforts which strong youth puts forth to find 
 its footing. Women longer than men, (and women more 
 helplessly then than now), throw out their intellectual an 
 tennae, groping after the " wherefore " of individualism. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore. taught and wrote, as other gifted girls 
 teach and write, because these were the only outlets for 
 superfluous life then possible to the " ever-womanly." She 
 was for some time associate editor, Avith her husband, of " The 
 New Covenant," a religious paper published at Chicago. Her 
 newspaper and magazine work was industrious, almost inces- 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 305 
 
 sant, and kept in practice that mental muscle destined later 
 to find its true athleticism. All this balancing of the emo 
 tions by reflection disciplined the young feminine exuberance, 
 and prepared the way for the future power ; it was like the 
 prelude which it has become usual to place before certain lec 
 tures so much mental exercise before the real business of 
 the day begins. 
 
 It should be remembered that during these early years of 
 her married life, Mrs. Livermore was also occupied, like 
 other women, in the cares of home-keeping, and in the rear 
 ing of her young family. She is the mother of three chil 
 dren ; one of whom is no longer living. 
 
 So far as the public is concerned, Mrs. Livermore s life 
 began with her career in the War of the Rebellion. 
 
 It was a grand history. It is twenty years since that 
 clarion sounded which should " never call retreat," and our 
 hearts are growing a trifle dull to the old war-stories. Half 
 a million of the men we sent forth from North and South are 
 in their graves ; and the dead take no trouble to remind us of 
 themselves. Those who returned to us are beginning to drop 
 out of the ranks fast enough, and in the press of life we do 
 not turn lo see who falls. Often the erect shoulder and the 
 direct eye, all the signs left of the soldier whom we gave w T ith 
 tears and welcomed with huzzas, pass us without raising so 
 much as an association with the sacrifice which w r e have ac 
 cepted at his hands. The widowed wives and the widowed 
 girls with whom the war saddened the broad land, are already 
 "entering into peace" that of eternity, or that of time, and 
 if neither has comforted them, who stays to ask? Thus too, 
 with the army woman, she who did what the rest of us desired, 
 and carried womanhood so soldierly, yet right womanly, to 
 the very front of war how more than easy we have found 
 it to forget her in these prosperous years. How once we 
 honored her, sought her, envied and loved her, leaned on her 
 strength and hung on her words. How frivolous seemed our 
 idle lives beside her own, how small our motives and poor 
 our achievement ; above and beyond all else how great our 
 
300 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 debt ! In looking over the record of the deeds of women in 
 the nursing and sanitary service of the war, one is sometimes 
 blinded by tears that come from the bottom of the heart, at 
 chancing upon some now forgotten name, some " ex-lioness " 
 of a once grateful public, who compressed into those four 
 short years poetry, pathos, glory, and sacrifice enough to 
 make the staple of any dozen whole lives such as we are 
 living, and are not ashamed to be content with in these later 
 days. 
 
 Few women in the long, heroic list did a better, braver, 
 sounder work than Mary Livermore. It should be remem 
 bered that she gave her clear head, no less than her strong 
 hands and warm heart, to the emergency. "The columns of 
 her husband s paper," we are told, " furnished her the oppor 
 tunity she desired of addressing her patriotic appeals to the 
 country, and her vigorous pen was ever at work, both in its 
 columns and those of other papers open to her. During 
 the whole war, even in the busiest times, not a week passed 
 that she did not publish somewhere two cr three columns 
 at the least. Letters, incidents, appeals, editorial corre 
 spondence always something useful, interesting head and 
 hands were always busy, and the implement mightier than 
 the sword was never allowed to rust in the inkstand." 
 
 In an article of Mrs. Livermore s, published soon after the 
 fall of Fort Sumter, we find this vivid reminiscence of those 
 fateful days : 
 
 " But no less have we been surprised and moved to admira 
 tion by the regeneration of the women of our land. A 
 month ago we saw a large class, aspiring only to be leaders 
 of fashion and belles of the ball-room, their deepest anxiety 
 clustering about the fear that the gored skirts and bell-shaped 
 hoops of the spring mode might not be becoming, and their 
 highest happiness being found in shopping, polking, and the 
 schottische pretty, petted, useless, expensive butterflies, 
 whose future husbands and children were to be pitied and 
 prayed for. But to-day we find them lopping off superfluities, 
 retrenching expenditures, deaf to the calls of pleasure, swept 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 397 
 
 by the incoming patriotism of the time to the loftiest heights 
 of womanhood, willing to do, to bear, or to suffer for the 
 beloved country. The riven fetters of caste and conven 
 tionality have dropped at their feet, and they sit together, 
 patrician and plebeian, Catholic and Protestant, and make 
 garments for the poorly-clad soldiery. An order came to 
 Boston for five thousand shirts for the Massachusetts troops 
 at the South. Every church in the city sent a delegation of 
 needle women to Union Hall, a former ball-room of Boston ; 
 the Catholic priest detailed five hundred sewing-girls to the 
 pious work ; suburban towns rang the bells to muster the 
 seamstresses ; the patrician Protestant of Beacon street ran 
 the sewing-machines, while the plebeian Irish Catholic of 
 Broad street basted and the shirts were done at the rate 
 of a thousand a day. On Thursday, Miss Dix sent an order 
 for five hundred shirts for the hospital at Washington on 
 Friday they were ready." 
 
 It is with the work of the United States Sanitary Commis 
 sion that Mrs. Livermore, it will be remembered, was most 
 closely identified. Many a brave woman found her way, in 
 the teeth of shot and shell and surgeons opposition, to the 
 chartered nursing service along the lines. Many a noble 
 woman, sheltered in her own home, kept there, perhaps, to 
 guard the children whose father she had sent to the front, 
 served the Commission in the quiet ways without which no 
 great undertaking can be supported knit the stockings, 
 made the clothes, picked the lint, rolled the bandages, packed 
 the boxes, collected the money those "home ways" whose 
 name was legion, and whose memory must not die. Mrs. 
 Livermore s work seems to have been a combination of home, 
 commissary, and hospital service. 
 
 At the beginning of the year 1862 the Northwestern 
 branch of the United States Sanitary Commission was organ 
 ized at Chicago. It was an influential body. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore, with Mrs. A. H. Hoge, a well-known 
 army worker, were appointed agents of the Northwestern 
 Commission, and went to work as two such women would. 
 
398 MART A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 Upon them fell the yoke of organization often that heaviest 
 of the hard, in crises where the strain upon the sympathies 
 can only be eased by a quick stroke and immediate response. 
 Throughout the great Northwest Mrs. Livermore travelled, 
 arousing, instructing, and vivifying the people by the painstak 
 ing patience which is the final sign of strength in excitement. 
 The Sanitary Aid Societies sprang up under her departing 
 feet like shadows ; the enthusiasm, the ignorance, the ardor, 
 and heart-break of women were ordered and utilized, and 
 so the great Commission, with the precision of the Corliss 
 engine, got to work. 
 
 In December of 1862 the National Commission called a 
 council at Washington, and appealed to the Branch Commis 
 sion at the North to send two ladies practically familiar with 
 the work, as delegates to this convention. Mrs. Livermore 
 and Mrs. Iloge were detailed for this errand. There was 
 need of it, and of them. 
 
 This was the time when sanitary supplies had fallen off, 
 and the demand for them desperately increased. ff One 
 and one," says the Oriental proverb, "make eleven." The 
 strength of union in the Commission, as in the ranks, car 
 ried the hour over the need, and the results of this council 
 were felt throughout the land like an accelerated pulse. 
 
 It was on this Washington trip that Mrs. Livermore 
 visited the convalescent camp at Alexandria, known as Camp 
 Misery. Here, from improper drainage, from actual lack of 
 fuel, clothing, and food, our soldiers were slaughtered like 
 slaves in an amphitheatre. But here was one woman to " keep 
 the count." When she found that eighteen sick soldiers died 
 at that camp in one night, from cold and starvation, the 
 country heard of it. Her unresting pen flew to the help of the 
 aroused Commission, and " carried the story of these \vrongs 
 all around the land." 
 
 It was early in this year that Mrs. Livermore was ordered 
 to make a tour of the hospitals and military posts on the 
 Mississippi river. This brought her into yet more direct 
 contact with army sufferings. One may doubt which was 
 
MARY A. LIYERMORE. 399 
 
 more to the purpose, among the wounded, homesick, 
 neglected boys, her chartered power to relieve them, or her 
 womanly presence among them. She was a fortress of 
 strength and a fountain of comfort. She was one of the rare 
 
 o 
 
 women who know how to make feminine sympathy tell with 
 masculine force. Her emotions never bubbled over into 
 froth ; they swelled a current of practical and practicable re 
 lief, as inevitably as healthy breath flowed from her broad 
 lungs, or magnetic vigor radiated from her massive frame. 
 
 o * o o 
 
 Mrs. Livermore always worked largely ; small motives and 
 small results seem as foreign to her career as small feelings. 
 One s impression in reviewing her army record is that she 
 served like a General. She had the broad sweep of eye, the 
 reserve of expedient, and the instinct of command. These 
 Mississippi tours, for instance, resulted in an organized attack 
 upon the scurvy, which was threatening the ranks to an extent 
 unstayed, and even unknown by the military authorities. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore and Mrs. Hoge, having observed the 
 mischief while serving as agents at Washington, kept their 
 woman s eyes well open, and were quick to detect both the 
 premonitory and actual symptoms of the dreaded disease at 
 Vicksburg camps and hospitals. They personally explained 
 to General Grant the facts with which his surgeons had not 
 acquainted him. But this was not enough. These two 
 women did not shift the responsibility upon the shoulders of 
 the man, but made, themselves, trips up and down the river, 
 whose object was to arouse practical excitement upon this 
 matter. Their appeals, their circulars, their enthusiasm, 
 their persistence, and their personality resulted in an out 
 burst of immediate relief. In three weeks over a thousand 
 bushels of potatoes, onions, and other vegetables were sent 
 to the scurvy-threatened army, and by their prompt distribu 
 tion the danger was averted. 
 
 On one of these tours up the river, Mrs. Livermore dis 
 covered twenty-three sick and wounded soldiers, who had 
 been left at a certain station, with the most insufficient care, 
 and not a loop-hole of escape by which,, they could get back. 
 25 
 
400 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 to die among their friends. Their descriptive lists were with 
 their regiments ; their regiments were in the field ; no one 
 had authority to discharge them ; home, with its last comforts 
 or its desperate chance of life, was denied ; a knot of red 
 tape tied them down. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore took in the case at a glance, and presented 
 herself immediately at the headquarters of General Grant. 
 Without waiting so long as to take the chair he offered her, 
 she hastened to tell her story in a few soldierly words, briefly 
 intimating that she had chartered power from the Sanitary 
 Commission, and adding : 
 
 "General, if you will give me authority to do so, /will 
 agree to take those twenty-three wounded men safely 
 home." 
 
 The General eyed her in silence a tremendous look. 
 
 Many and varied were the types of women who came 
 down the river in those days on errands sometimes more 
 enthusiastic than rationally available. Mrs. Livermore was 
 a stranger at headquarters, and, as the officer s eye asked, "Is 
 she lying ? " the woman s eye silently replied. When the mute 
 duel was over, the General, still without comment, called his 
 chicf-of-staff. 
 
 " This lady is Mrs. Livermore of the Sanitary Commission. 
 She finds twenty-three wounded soldiers Avho cannot get 
 home for lack of their descriptive lists. She agrees to take 
 them herself." 
 
 Then followed the .necessary order, which empowered her 
 for her extraordinary venture ; and as quickly as will could 
 act she was under way with her twenty-three soldiers. 
 Their homes were scattered all over the West, but the trans 
 portation service at her command was equal to the emer 
 gency, and her pluck to anything. It had not occurred to 
 her, however, that a power more silent and greater than the 
 General could get her into difficulties for which he had pro 
 vided no authority ; and when, the first day up the river, one 
 very sick man died, she had nothing more or less to meet 
 than the fact that she could not get him buried. 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 401 
 
 The Sanitary Commission, to which she appealed, through 
 its nearest agent, was compelled to reply that its power 
 dealt with the living, not with the dead ; that it had no 
 money for burying men ; that she must go to the govern 
 ment. But the government authorities declined with equal 
 decision. The man was discharged. He was no longer a 
 soldier. He was now a civilian. The nation could not bury 
 civilians. So, back and forth in vain from one to the other, 
 the question passed. 
 
 Meantime the soldier remained un buried, and the captain 
 of the steamer, being Southern in his sympathies, as most of 
 his calling were, peremptorily declared that if that man were 
 not buried by sundown his body should be put on the levee 
 and left there. At this, Mrs. Livermore, returning in des 
 peration to the military authorities, besieged them by argu 
 ments from which there was no appeal. Such an outrage 
 would be the property of the newspapers in three days. 
 The whole land would ring with it. She presented the case 
 in such colors that the official yielded, and agreed to give the 
 man burial, stipulating that the surgeon in charge of the 
 party should fill out the necessary blanks. 
 
 How tell him there was no surgeon in charge? And the 
 fact was the last thing to be thought of that twenty-three 
 wounded men were in the sole care of one woman for trans 
 portation to their twenty-three several homes in the broad 
 Northwest. The woman left the military presence without 
 remark, herself filled out the poor fellow s blank, regiment, 
 company, name, cause of death, whatever items she knew, 
 and they were few enough, and after a moment s desperate 
 hesitation loyally appended to the paper, for humanity s sake 
 and the country s, M. A. Livermore, M.D., so buried her 
 soldier like a patriot, and quietly went on her way with her 
 twenty-two. Verify that title, Union soldiers ! M. A. Liv 
 ermore, Ma Donna, let her be forever I 
 
 Probably the thing most closely connected with her "army 
 name" was the great Northwestern Sanitary Fair, which oc 
 curred in Chicago in 1863. 
 
402 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 This undertaking, in which, of course, the labors of many 
 women must not be forgotten in the prominence of the few, 
 is conceded to have been the inspiration of Mrs. Livermorc. 
 She suggested, urged, and carried the immense experiment 
 through. She supplied the faith, the will, and the fire. Her 
 co-laborers, at first timid and reluctant, fell in with her pur 
 poses, and the thing was begun and done as if failure were an 
 impossibility and success a divine right. This fair was the 
 first of the series of great fairs organized throughout the 
 North for the benefit of the Commission. It netted almost 
 one hundred thousand dollars. 
 
 A contributor to Dr. Brockett s "Women of the Civil 
 War," who was present at a convention of the women of the 
 Northwest, summoned to Chicago to consider the feasibility 
 of that undertaking, gives forcible testimony to the remark 
 able influence of Mrs. Livermore : "A brilliant and earnest 
 speaker, her words seemed to sway the attentive throng. 
 Her commanding person added to the power of her words. 
 ... As all know, this fair, which was about three months 
 in course of preparation, was on a mammoth scale, and was 
 a great success ; and this result was no doubt greatly owing 
 to the presence of that quality, which, like every born leader, 
 Mrs. Livermore evidently possesses, that of knowing how to 
 select judiciously her subordinates and instruments." 
 
 We are able to give, in Mrs. Livermore s own words, a 
 few clear-cut pictures from her experience as agent of the 
 commission. This, clipped from a letter from Louisiana, in 
 April, 1863, says: 
 
 "As the Fanny Ogden was under orders, and would be 
 running up and down the river for two or three days on 
 errands for General Grant, we determined to accept the invi 
 tation of the Chicago Mercantile Battery, encamped at Milli- 
 ken s Bend, and try tent-life for a day or two. So we were 
 put ashore at the landing, and in the fading twilight picked 
 our way along the levee to the camp. What a hearty wel 
 come was accorded us ! What a chorus of cheerful, manly, 
 familiar voices proclaimed the gladness of the battery at our 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 403 
 
 arrival ! Forth from every tent and shebang swarmed a 
 little host of the boys, all bronzed to the color of the * Atlan 
 tic Monthly covers, to use one of their own comparisons; 
 all extending eager hands, . . . hearty, healthy, impatient 
 to hear from home, . . . Here they were, our boys of 
 whom we took sad and tearful leave months ago, when we 
 gave them to God and our country at the altar of the sanc 
 tuary, when they alone were brave, calm, and hopeful. Here 
 they were the same boys, but outwardly how changed. 
 Then they were boys, slender, fair, with boyish, immature 
 faces ; now they wore men, stalwart, fuller and firmer of 
 flesh, the fair, sweet boyish look supplanted by a strong, 
 daring, resolute expression. . . , We told all the news, and 
 still the hungry fellows asked for more. . . . We examined 
 photographs of dear ones at home. ... A plain dress-cap 
 fell from our travelling basket ; the boys instantly hailed it as 
 a home affair; it seemed natural to see it, as their mothers 
 had heaps of such female toggery lying around at home, 
 they would have it ... and the cap was accordingly donned, 
 greatly to their satisfaction. . . . 
 
 " General McClernand a army corps is encamped at Milli- 
 ken s Bend, and the next day we called at his headquarters, 
 and informed him that the Fanny Ogden, laden with sanitary 
 stores, Avould be at the Bend In the afternoon. He ordered 
 immediate notice of the same to be sent to every chief sur 
 geon of the regiment or battery, which brought them out in 
 full force on the arrival of the boat. . . . The pleasure was 
 exquisite when we went to the hospitals, most of them miser 
 able affairs, intended for temporary use, and beheld the grate 
 ful emotions of the sufferers. 
 
 "Ale, eggs, lemons, codfish, condensed milk, tea, and but 
 ter were among the articles we furnished. . . . Many insisted 
 on paying for them ; they could hardly be made to under 
 stand that they were the gift of the Northwest. In ward 
 after ward we repeated the story that the people had sent 
 these supplies to the Commission, to be distributed to the 
 sick in hospitals. . , . This evidence of kind feeling seemed 
 
404 MARY A. LIVEHMORE. 
 
 of itself to send a wave of healing through the entire wards. 
 . . . And so they don t forget us down here? That s good 
 news. Wo were afraid from what we heard that they were 
 all turning secesh, and that we d got to pint our guns tother 
 way, said one Missouri boy. 
 
 " And here let me say, that in all my intercourse with our 
 soldiers, in camp and field and hospitals, in the East, West, 
 and Southwest, from the commencement of the war to the 
 present time, I have never encountered the least disrespect 
 in word, manner, tone, or look from officer or private. Had 
 I been what the sick men in hospitals have so generally called 
 me, mother to them all, their manner could not have 
 been more wholly unexceptionable. I cannot nor do I be 
 lieve any woman can say the same of the surgeons. . . . Of 
 course there are noble exceptions to this statement. . . . My 
 observations have also forced upon me the conviction that 
 our men in the army do not deteriorate morally as greatly 
 as is represented. I do not believe they are worse than at 
 home." 
 
 She testifies, also, that of the uncounted deathbeds of sol 
 diers which she has attended, not one instance can be recalled 
 where the dying man did not believe in immortality. Upon 
 being asked how many such death-scenes she witnessed, she 
 replied that it was impossible to tell. " I wrote seventeen 
 hundred letters for soldiers in one year." Among the men to 
 whom death and life were such tremendous facts, she invari 
 ably found the expectation of a world to come more or less 
 clearly fixed. " There was none of this prevailing indiflerent- 
 ism : this I don t know anything about it spirit ; it may be 
 one way, and it may be another ; nobody can prove it, and 
 why should I trouble myself? 
 
 She also says, that of them all she knew but one who was 
 afraid to die. This was a moving story. The end was near 
 at hand, the man uncontrollable, not with physical so much 
 as mental agony. "I can i: die," he cried. "I can t die! I 
 have been a wicked man 1 A wicked, wicked man ! I am 
 afraid to die." 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 405 
 
 He fluno- himself from side to side of the mattress on which 
 
 O 
 
 he lay upon the floor. He tossed his arms wildly and 
 writhed for relief from the soul-wound that hurt so much 
 more than the mangled body. 
 
 " He won t last half an hour," said the surgeon, " if he is 
 not quieted. You must calm him some way." 
 
 The best was done, but the raving continued unchecked. 
 The man demanded a minister ; " he had been a church-mem 
 ber once," he said, "and that was the trouble with him; he 
 must see a minister." With great difficulty a clergyman was 
 brought, but when he got there he could do nothing with the 
 maniac sinner, and was retreating, baffled, from the sickening 
 scene, when Mrs. Livermore, who saw that the poor fellow 
 was going, for want of a little nerve-control, to pass on un- 
 comforted, and that all too soon, herself made a bold stroke. 
 
 She got upon the mattress, kneeling beside him, and taking 
 both his arms, held them like iron in her own. Looking the 
 dying man straight in the eyes, she sternly said : "Now stop/ 
 Stop this, the whole of it. You can keep quiet, and you 
 shall. Lie still, and listen to what this man has to say to 
 you." 
 
 " But I m afraid I ve got to die ! " wailed the terrified 
 creature, "and I have been a wicked man." 
 " And what if you have got to die ? " rang the womanly 
 voice which had melted over him so tenderly, now stiffened 
 into the sternness of a rebuking mother. " Then die like a 
 man, not like a baby ! You ve sent for this minister. Lie 
 still, and hear what he has to say to you." 
 
 Like a child in her arms the man obeyed ; the tortured 
 nerves grew calm ; the soul gathered itself to meet its fate 
 and its God. The poor fellow listened gently and intelli 
 gently to the sacred words, and passed quite reconciled. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot better bring to an end the most imperfect 
 and brief account which time allows me to give of Mrs. Liver- 
 more s war record than by relating a beautiful story (already 
 told in the " Youth s Companion "), which spans, like a slender 
 golden bridge, the distance between that glorious past and 
 
406 MART A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 this earnest present, between the sacrifices of war and the 
 consecrations of peace. 
 
 Upon a recent lecturing tour, in Albion, Michigan, Mrs. 
 Livermore was approached after the evening s lecture by an 
 elderly woman, white-haired, and with a face that time had 
 sadly graven. 
 
 "Mrs. Livermore," she began at once, "Do you remem 
 ber writing a letter for John of the One Hundred and 
 
 Twenty-seventh Michigan Volunteers, when he lay dying iu 
 the Overton Hospital at Memphis, during the spring of 1803, 
 and of completing the letter to his wife and mother after ho 
 had died?" 
 
 Mrs. Livermore was forced to reply that she could not 
 recall the case, she wrote so many such letters during the 
 war. The gray-haired woman drew the letter with trembling 
 hands from her pocket. It had been torn at the folds, and 
 sewed together with fine stitches ; it was greatly worn. Mrs. 
 Livermore recogni/ed her own hand, and silently re-read the 
 forgotten pages. The first four were dictated by the soldier, 
 as he lay dying shot through the lungs. After the lips 
 were still which gave the message to mother and wife those 
 precious "last words" on which the two had lived for twenty 
 years, the writer herself had added to the sacred letter 
 such suggestions as her sympathy wrung from her, in consola 
 tion to the inconsolable. 
 
 "I think," said the w r oman, lifting her worn face to the 
 strong one above her, " my daughter-in-law and I would have 
 died when we heard that John was dead but for that letter. 
 It comforted us both, and by-and-by when we heard of other 
 women similarly afflicted, we sent them the letter to read, till 
 it was torn into pieces. Then we sewed the pieces together, 
 and made copies of the letter, which we sent to those of our 
 acquaintances whom the war bereft. 
 
 " But Annie, my son s wife, never got over John s death. 
 She kept about, and worked, and went to church, but the life 
 had gone out of her. Eight years ago she died. One day, 
 a little before her death, she said : 
 
MARY A. LIVERMOHE. 407 
 
 wt Mother, if you ever find Mrs. Livcrrnorc, or hear of her, I 
 wish you would give her my wedding-ring, which has never 
 been off my finger since John put it there, and will not corne 
 off till I am dead. Ask her to wear it for John s sake and 
 mine, and tell her this was my dying request. 
 
 "I live eight miles from here," added the woman, "and 
 when I read in the paper that you were to lecture here 
 to-night I decided to drive over, and if you will accept 
 it to give you Annie s ring." 
 
 Too much moved to speak, Mrs. Livermore held out her 
 hand, and the lonely woman put the ring upon her finger with 
 a fervent and solemn benediction. 
 
 From war to peace, there may be as I say, a golden 
 bridge ; or there must be a gaping chasm, in individual, as in 
 public story. When the thrill is over, when the stir is 
 stilled, when emergency has given place to routine, excite 
 ment and event to calm and monotony, then a life is put 
 upon its true mettle. Peace has her soldiers no less than 
 war. That is strength which still finds in the leisure of 
 daily commonplace its military rank. It were easy to suffer 
 the collapse of the strong nerve and hot resolve, and so sink 
 into the mere selfishness of well-earned ease. It were easier, 
 perhaps, to become the victim of a fatal displeasure with 
 ordinary conditions, and to find no more the glorious in the 
 necessary ; to slide off into second-rate ideals and their correl 
 ative motives, and pass one s days in the fretful inaptitude of 
 a nature which has wrung one supreme hour from life, and 
 never found or never sought another. 
 
 O 
 
 A friend, once asked for material for Charlotte Cushman s 
 memoir, said : "I have no data. There is only the continuity 
 of love." So, in dealing with the subject of this sketch, we 
 seem to have only the continuity of power. Any notice of 
 Mrs. Livermore would be seriously incr.mplete which should 
 not give emphasis to her value in social movement,, She has 
 pre-eminently the record of a reformer, and this is the more 
 interesting because the exuberance of her intensely womanly 
 nature might have easily deflected her course into quieter 
 
408 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 choices. When the demands of the war are over, her clear 
 eyes see the fl duty nearest," in directions which still appealed 
 to the old chivalrous instincts. Now we do not find her con 
 tented with the sewing-circle and the newspaper letter and 
 neighborhood celebrity. It is not enough to relate past army 
 exploits to admiring vestries, and to ibid the hands over a 
 pleasant reputation for patriotism. 
 
 What is the next crisis? Who are the most defenceless? 
 Where is the coming battle-field? Which is the authoritative 
 reveille? What now most needs the sympathy and sense of a 
 strong woman? Who so keenly, who so promptly as her 
 own sad sex? Who so darkly, who so deeply as the tempted 
 and the outcast? 
 
 One of the most touching incidents ever found in woman s 
 work for women is related of Mrs. Livermore while she was 
 living in Chicago. 
 
 One night while she was busy with her children, a sharp 
 ring at the door summoned her on a strange errand. The 
 messenger came from a house "whose ways take hold on 
 death." A woman, an inmate of this place, lay dying, and 
 had sent for her, desiring her presence as a spiritual adviser 
 through the final agony. 
 
 "Go," said the husband, "you will be safe enough. And 
 I will see that the police look after you. You d better 
 go." 
 
 Mrs. Livermore returned the simple and beautiful answer 
 " that she was putting her children to bed, and would come 
 as soon as this was done." 
 
 Don t wait for that," pleaded the messenger, " or the girl 
 may be gone. She s very low, and has set her heart on 
 seeing you." 
 
 So, without delaying to hear the " Amen " to "Now I lay 
 me," the mother kissed her babies, and went out from her 
 Christian home upon her solemn errand. She was received 
 with great respect in the house of sin. The poor girl was 
 dying of hemorrhage of the lungs ; she was far sunken away, 
 but in mental distress that stoutly held death off. She be- 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 409 
 
 wailed her sins, she feared her future, she clung to the pure 
 woman with desperate arms. Mrs. Liverinore got upon the 
 bed beside the girl and held her firmly. 
 
 " Who are you, and where are your friends? Can you tell 
 me?" 
 
 " I ll never tell you ! I ll never tell anybody. They don t 
 know where I am. They ve advertised for me all these 
 years. My father and mother are respectable people. They 
 dont know I care, and they never shall know. I won t dis 
 grace them so much as to tell you." 
 
 The visitor asked if she should not send for a minister, but 
 the girl clung to her, crying : 
 
 " I want you, you ! I want nobody but you ! " 
 
 So the pathetic scene went on : " Do you want me to pray 
 for you?" "Can t you trust in Christ to forgive your sins? 
 God is your Father. Don t be afraid of your Father ! Can t 
 you believe that He will save you? Listen, He is glad to 
 save you. Christ died to save you" 
 
 As she prayed the girl interrupted her with piteously hum 
 ble cries: "Oh, Lord, hear what she says!" "Yes, God, 
 listen to her." "Oh, God, do ! " " Do, do ! "as one who 
 dared not lift up so much as her eyes unto heaven for herself. 
 After her death, which occurred quickly and quietly, the face 
 wore, it was said, one of the most pathetic expressions ever 
 seen upon the dead, " as if she were about to break into tears." 
 It was afterwards learned that the poor creature was the 
 daughter of a Methodist minister. 
 
 Into the work for the elevation and enfranchisement of 
 women, and into the temperance movement for the salvation 
 of men, Mrs. Livormore, after the Avar released her, turned 
 her leisure and her force. Both of these movements have 
 found in her one of their ablest champions, and the leaders in 
 these causes know what singularly reliable influence they 
 have found in her, and know how to value it as only toilers 
 in " causes" can. 
 
 Perfectly fearless, thoroughly equipped, as strong as the 
 hills, and as sweet as the sun, she has stood serenely in the 
 
410 MART A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 front of every movement against oppression, vice, and ignor 
 ance, with which she has identified herself, observing in her 
 selection a wise reserve, which has given her influence its 
 remarkable value. " Reform " is a hot-headed charger, drao-- 
 
 o O 
 
 ging at its chariot-wheels a hundred eccentricities. Quiet 
 people look on warily at the cranks and quips, the mixed 
 motives, the disorder, the crudeness and rudeness, the ignor 
 ance and mischief which often follow the onrush of progress. 
 The term "agitator" has crystallized the popular distrust of 
 effort in which there is so much more gust than seems neces 
 sary to keep the weather sweet. One such sound, sane life 
 as Mrs. Livermore s does more to create public confidence in 
 genuine social improvement, and in the figures that stand 
 unselfishly in its foreground, than it is possible to over 
 estimate. One does not find her mixed in all the " ins " and 
 "outs." We never see her with the intellectually maudlin 
 or the morally dubious. Some of us, debarred by circum 
 stances from investigating the merits, not of principles 
 (which must be our own affair), but of applications, are 
 accustomed to depend on her judgment as we would on a 
 magnet, in the vexatious decisions which must be made by 
 the least who has given heart and hand to any philanthropic 
 or social movement. 
 
 What are the merits of this association ? What is the value 
 of that step? Who compose the " ring" behind such a vote? 
 Which is the safe, wise, delicate way to tread? Where is 
 the sense of this thing? From the study, or the sick-room, or 
 the nursery, the remote or busy woman looks off, weighing 
 perhaps conscientiously the value of her modest name, or 
 contribution, and hampered by her inevitable ignorance of the 
 machinery of the world. At a few firm figures she glances 
 with assurance. Mary Livermore is one of these guide- 
 boards. Her name on an appeal is a synonym for its wisdom. 
 Her appearance on the platform of a society is a guarantee of 
 its good sense. To "follow this leader" is always safe. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore s labors as a reformer have been greatly 
 facilitated, and of late years chiefly expressed, through her 
 
MARY A. LIVEHMORE. 411 
 
 career as a public speaker. And here we come to the tardy 
 but magnificent development of her essential gift. Unques 
 tionably her genius is the genius of address. She is one of 
 the few women as yet come to the front of whom we can 
 safely say that she is a born orator. 
 
 As is so often the case, the discovery of the niche for this 
 statue came late in life. She was almost fifty years old when 
 the fame of the platform found her. She has brought to it, 
 therefore, ripe womanhood, the very harvest of experience, 
 the repose which comes only when the past begins to tip the 
 balance against the future. Her popularity as a public 
 speaker is one of the marvels of lyceum annals. Tried by 
 the Midas touch which cannot be escaped as a test of success, 
 it will be remembered of her that during the year when 
 lyceum lecturing as a " business " was at a height which it 
 will never reach again, she was one of four lecturers who 
 were most in demand, and made the largest terms with the 
 bureaus ; the other three were men of world-wide fame. 
 
 She has delivered more than eight hundred temperance ad 
 dresses, nearly a hundred of these in Boston. She lectures five 
 nights a week for five months in the year, and has done so 
 for many years. She travels twenty-five thousand miles 
 yearly, besides keeping vigil late into the night, often into 
 the morning, to hold her immense correspondence afloat. 
 This gives some idea of the steady strain upon brain and 
 body which this woman of iron and fire sustains. 
 
 In addition to the regular fulfilment of her contract with 
 her bureau, and the work as above described, she constantly 
 receives, and almost as constantly accepts, invitations to 
 speak on Sunday in the pulpits of Congregational ist, Presby 
 terian, Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, and Universalist 
 churches, invited usually by the ministers of these churches 
 to " deliver her message." Often this message is a temperance 
 address. Sometimes it is called a sermon. 
 
 Another of the demands made upon her is from schools, 
 colleges, and literary institutions for Commencement and 
 other educational addresses. Her summer vacation is never 
 
412 MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 free from these extra labors. Political conventions and Sun 
 day-school conventions add their clamor to the list. " She is 
 always at work," a friend says of her ; " never flags, takes little 
 recreation." Her summers are spent at her own home in Mel- 
 rose, or in the mountains, or in Europe with her husband. 
 
 Mrs. Livermore s manner as a speaker is noticeable for its 
 dignity. She has a deep, rich voice, of remarkable compass, 
 capable of filling any audience-room, trained, and flexible. 
 She begins quietly, but has a grip on the house from the first. 
 At times she rises to impassioned fervor. There is no femi 
 nine squeak or frivolity. The register of her voice is rather 
 low, reminding one of Mrs. Kemble, or of Charlotte Cushman, 
 who said, "All I inherited from my grandmother w r as this 
 voice. It was my capital in life." 
 
 Mrs. Livermore s personal appearance adds to her power 
 on the platform. She is tall and large, with a fine figure 
 and dignified carriage. She is eminently well-proportioned, 
 and one gets a sense of power from every motion. Of her 
 face, which is very fine, quite beyond any portrait which I 
 have seen, it is not easy to say the right word. Regular 
 features, and grave, gray eyes, and the warmest smile in the 
 world stay by the memory, but chiefly this : that one has 
 seen the most motherly face that the Lord ever made. As 
 she pleads for her own sex, crying patience with its weak 
 ness, and justice for its wrongs, and compassion on its woes, 
 her expression rises to one of inspired solemnity, then melts 
 into a strong tenderness, which reminds one of what was 
 said of the face of George Eliot, that she " looked as if she 
 bore the sorrow of all the earth." 
 
 The subjects of Mrs. Livermore s lectures are : "What Shall 
 we Do with our Daughters ? " " Women of the War " ; " Queen 
 Elizabeth " ; "Concerning Husbands " ; " The Reason Why " ; 
 "Superfluous Women"; "Harriet Martineau"; "The Moral 
 Heroism of the Temperance Reform" ; " The Coming Man" ; 
 " Beyond the Sea " ; " Our Motherland " ; "The Boy of To-day." 
 
 It is doubtful if there is any other public speaker who so 
 wins his way, or hers, to the hearts of their opponents. Many 
 
MARY A. LIVERMORE. 413 
 
 of her audiences disagree with Mrs. Livcrmore s views ; few 
 can be found to disagree with Mrs. Livcrmorc. 
 
 I remember once to have heard her on the platform of a 
 conservative, Calvinistic girls seminary, where I was not 
 sure of her hearty welcome. She had lectured in the village 
 the evening before on some topic connected with the political 
 enfranchisement of women, and she was the wife of a Univer- 
 salist clergyman. I anticipated that her reception, though 
 courteous, might be a trifle chilly. I might have spared myself 
 my fears. In five minutes every woman in the room listened 
 to her like a lover, and when, at the close of her talk to the 
 girls, she was invited by the pious principal to "lead in 
 prayer," who was there to ask if she prayed orthodoxy? 
 She prayed Christianity, and she took us with her to the 
 very heart of Christ. Rarely have I heard a prayer which 
 moved me as that one did. She swept away everything 
 between the soul and God herself was cancelled she 
 was no more an individual whose personality impinged on 
 our consciousness ; she w r as an appeal, an outcry from hu 
 manity to Divinity. All our mixed motives, and shallow 
 thoughts, and frail feeling went down before the power of 
 her religious nature and her religious life. It was impossible 
 to hear her, and not say, "That is the voice of a consecrated 
 soul. Take me, too; take me up thither." 
 
 "Of all the speakers who have ever been brought to our 
 institution," said a trustee of a large charity at the north end 
 of Boston, " Mrs. Livermore, to my mind, without excep 
 tion, made the best address that has ever been made to our 
 poor people. They never listened to any one else in the way 
 they listened to her. She never talked down to them ; she 
 always said we. Most speakers sa} you to such audi 
 ences. She never once forgot herself; it was always we. " 
 
 " I would pay the price of a ticket to her lecture any 
 time," said a lady, listening to this conversation, " to hear 
 that woman s voice." 
 
 Time urges, the pages slip, my task is all but done, and I 
 have as yet said nothing of the domestic life of this woman 
 
414 MART A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 whom the public clclighteth to honor. The army commis 
 sariat, the reformer, the orator, have had their "three souls" 
 expressed in this one rich life. What of the fourth, which 
 is the vital one after all? What of the woman behind this 
 power? What of the home behind the career? What is the 
 story beneath the glory? 
 
 It is with a feeling of peculiar pride and thankfulness that 
 those who would fain believe that public usefulness for a 
 woman need not imply private usclcssncss, are able to point 
 to the symmetrical and beautiful domestic history of one who 
 for twenty years has given herself so ably to important pub 
 lic services. We may be permitted to step across the sacred 
 threshold of what it is safe to pronounce one of the happiest 
 homes in the land, so far as to say that we shall never find a 
 fireside at which the wife and the mother is honored with more 
 pride and devotion than at this. The very lone of the voice 
 in which the materials of this sketch were given me, by the 
 husband of " this great and good woman," was enough. I 
 needed to ask no questions . The manly pride in womanly use 
 of human power was itself worth 11 vinit to that homo to see. 
 Be sure that she who has "mothered" half the land that she 
 who can mother half the land is the last of all living 
 women to put by the finer grace of the dearer life, or dull in 
 the heart of child or husband the sacred vision of the mother 
 and the wife. 
 
 After all is said, it is true, and we are glad it is, that the 
 great natural gifts of the subject of this sketch have been 
 run in that best and broadest mould which is given by the full 
 development of a wholesome natural life. 
 
 It is good to have her power, her wisdom, her influence, 
 and her fame. It is better to have her tenderness, her self- 
 oblivion, her human happiness, and her home. It is best 
 to know that she has been able to balance these qualities and 
 quantities with a grace which has not fallen short of greatness, 
 and that she has accomplished greatness without expunging 
 grace. 
 
CHAPTER XYIII. 
 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 BY MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 A Happy Name Lucy Larcom s Childhood First Literary Venture 
 Removal of the Family to Lowell Lucy s Mill-life The Little "Dof- 
 fer" A Glimpse of the Daily Life of a Lowell Mill Girl The 
 Lowell "Offering" First Meeting with the Poet Whittier His Life 
 long Friendship Removal to Illinois Pioneer Life Teaching a Real 
 " Deestrick " School Incidents in Her Life as Teacher Mysterious 
 Disappearance of one of Her Pupils An Amusing Incident Return 
 to Old New England Work as Teacher in Wheaton Seminary Her 
 Loyalty During the War Editing "Our Young Folks" Work that 
 will Endure. 
 
 UT what is her real name ? " 
 "That." 
 
 "Lucy Larcom? I always thought it was her 
 pen-name." 
 
 " So it is ; and her birth-name ; and her heart- 
 and-soul name, also. I fancy it needs not to be 
 changed much into her heaven-name." 
 
 I suppose I have more than a score of times 
 been the respondent in some colloquy like the 
 above, in regard to my friend, Lucy Larcom ; 
 though I do not remember ever adding what I have added 
 now r , about heart and soul and heaven. Yet her name has 
 always seemed to me one of those born and baptismal appel 
 lations which hold a significance and a prophecy. Her name 
 is a reminder of herself, and herself of her name. I " s pect," 
 like Topsy, that they must needs have "growed" together. 
 "Lucy," the light; "Larcom," the song-bird haunt ; the 
 combe, or valley-field of larks. For it is no great stretch of 
 supposition, but a clear probability, that Lark-combe may 
 have been the origin of the patronymic. 
 
 26 415 
 
410 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 She sings ; and she sings of the morning and of the light. 
 She is Lucy Larcom. 
 
 She was born in the pleasant old town of Beverly, on the 
 northeastern coast of Massachusetts ; and a great part of 
 her life has been lived, and much of her work done, in that 
 corner of the old Bay State, to which, with the strongest 
 home love and instinct, she clings at this day. Taking the 
 century as a year, she was born at the end of its May. She 
 belongs to its bloom, and prime, and summer-tide ; she is 
 passing along through the glory of its harvest, and her life is 
 rich and ripe and bright in it, and the days are yet long, and 
 the leaf unfallen. If souls were grouped upon the planet as 
 they are in the celestial latitudes she would belong at its 
 equator. Growth and change may illustrate themselves in 
 such, but there shall never be with them a locked-up winter 
 or a polar night. 
 
 She was the next to the youngest of a family of eight sis 
 ters ; and the homes about her that built up the quaint streets 
 and laneways of the really Nv\v- English village, reminding 
 one, as it greatly does, or did then, of such villages of Old 
 England as Miss M it ford writes her pictures of, were full 
 of neighbor children. In the lanes and field-places, they all 
 played and grew merrily together ; she, as she expresses it, 
 having "run wild there under wholesome Puritanic restric 
 tions." 
 
 She played "Lady Queen Anne," "Mary of Matanzas," 
 " Open the Gates as High as the Sky," and all the pretty old 
 ring and romp and forfeit games of the primitive time. She 
 had the charmed surrounding which met and helped to shape 
 her nature ; dwelling between the hill, the river, and the sea. 
 Up the rocky height that rose from before her father s door, 
 and looked toAvard the ocean, she used to climb in such 
 dreams as accompany the child whose fancy and spirit-eyes 
 are opening; she found some " enchanted flower" ; she heard 
 some secret from a bird ; she caught glimpses of a glory-land 
 in some still, shining sunset ; and she shut up these things 
 and pondered them in her heart. To balance and leaven all 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 419 
 
 this, slio was systematically and conscientiously nourished 
 from the Bible and the shorter catechism ; and she is glad, 
 to-day, of both sides of her training. 
 
 She road, as children had to read in those days, and in her 
 simple circumstances, that which she could find. She lived, 
 alternately, and almost indifferently, in the "Pilgrim s Pro 
 gress " and the " Scottish Chiefs" ; she got hold of Milton, and 
 tasted the sweetness of his " Paradise," and exulted in the glory 
 of the " Heavenly Hierarchies " ; she dipped and drank already 
 at the springs of that old English literature which has always 
 been her study and delight, and fronf which she has dealt so 
 largely in her ministries of teaching to others. She always 
 had in her the elements of receptivity and assimilative power, 
 and of outgiving impulse and power of application, which 
 have made her the teacher and the worker in the world that 
 it is her life to be. She began, even at this early time, 
 to shape, in rude, simple, childish fashion, her receptions 
 and assimilations. She made verses, and now and then was 
 found out in making them. 
 
 At seven years old she secretly wrote, illustrated with 
 crude water-colors, and published, to herself, her first 
 work ; a manuscript volume of little stories and poems. 
 After enjoying it perhaps as long as the dear public often 
 enjoys what is done for it in this way, she one day solemnly 
 consigned it, through a deep, chasmy crack in the old garret, 
 to the piecemeal criticism of the rats and mice ; and thence, 
 in the natural order, to oblivion. 
 
 After her father s death the home at Beverly was broken 
 up. Mrs. Larcom turned her thoughts toward Lowell, then 
 opening its opportunities, in the wise and provident way in 
 which that field of life and labor was opened to the women of 
 the country who would come and work. Girls were wanted, 
 and were flocking there for employment in the mills. Homes 
 were wanted, also, in consequence. Good, motherly house 
 keepers, not common boarding-mistresses, were sought, 
 and accepted only with the best credentials, by the corpora 
 tion, to occupy its houses and take care of the operatives. 
 
420 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 Lucy s mother, mother of many girls, was just one such. 
 She chose the work and went. 
 
 Here, being then, at the beginning, ten years old, she 
 " helped her mother," in the intervals between her hours of 
 school, "in the household work." It began as it has kept on. 
 In her woman-childhood she is still, in the great, beautiful 
 world-sense a " helper in the household work." 
 
 It Avas after two or three years of school-going and the 
 helping at home that she began mill-work, among the very 
 youngest of those employed, a little "doffer "; taking off 
 empty bobbins and putting on full ones ; this was at once the 
 monotony and the significance of her first labors ; between 
 whiles she had her recreations witli her mates, her quiet 
 little hidings, also, in the dreamland that always followed and 
 encompassed her, and in whose light the objects and surround 
 ings of her actual daily life took an apparition and meaning 
 unguessed, perhaps, in the merely workaday world wherein 
 others half lived at her side, with whom no veil was lifted. 
 Here, as in her earlier childhood, she wove into words her 
 visions, made verses, told herself stories. She must have 
 drawn largely to herself from all that went on about her in 
 that community of young woman-life, which even to us who 
 only hear about and imagine it, carries such a charm of in 
 terest and wealth of suggestion to the thought. There is 
 something in the community-idea which takes a kind of heav 
 enly hold, and I think it was meant to do so, of all minds 
 not separated and debased into some poor, covetous self- 
 seeking. The very fact in our history of this Lowell life, 
 as it then was, tells its story of the changed and changing 
 age in which we find ourselves to-day, taken further and fur 
 ther off from such possibility. Where now do we find the 
 capitalist, planning his railroad which is to open up new 
 country, or his company corporation which is to develop a 
 new resource or applj r a new invention, sitting down, as 
 did Francis Lowell and Nathan Appleton, to weigh and con 
 sider first the question of what it will all be to the humanity 
 concerned and brought together, or any way affected by the 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 421 
 
 work ? But this is not the place to follow out that suggestion 
 into discussion of all the great problem of investment and 
 interest, financially, politically, and socially. It just crops 
 up by the way, as we are reminded that that life of the 
 Lowell mill-girl can hardly ever be lived over again, until in 
 some new moral as well as mechanical phase of our history 
 we come, out of our present rush and fever of miracle and 
 money-making, to far-off fresh and better beginnings. 
 
 Lucy Larcom, growing into girlhood, was now, however, 
 in this phase and opportunity. 
 
 Companionship. In one way or another, that is what fills 
 our human need. We filter it into friendships ; we sift it 
 down into inmost communions, as we live and make our nat 
 ural selections ; but nevertheless, the magnetism of the multi 
 tude remains, a power and a delight to human-loving spirits. 
 A great many together of like pursuits, condition, a king 
 dom under one rule, from children at school, up through 
 all social formations, all organizations, scientific, artistic, 
 benevolent, enterprising, religious, to the gathering into 
 
 the great kingdom at last of the multitude that no man can 
 
 c ~ 
 
 number, we find ourselves made, not for solitude but for 
 association. It is not good for anybody to be alone. 
 
 Doubtless, then, there was a charm in that living, in the 
 house in the " red-brick block, with a green door and green 
 window-blinds ; the third in a row of four brick blocks, 
 each the exact counterpart of the other." In the family 
 order, Avhere the daughters and the mill-girls who joined and 
 made up the household kept their hours and their pleasant 
 habits under home rules together ; the breakfasts by lamp 
 light, the morning labor in the mills, the noon-spell, the leis 
 ure evenings, when books and work were brought forth, and 
 there was the cheerful gathering round the long tables ; when 
 they "made and mended, wrote and studied"; when they 
 told each other bits of their earlier histories before their his 
 tories had thus run alongside ; when the mountains and the 
 forests and the sea brought their flavors and their harmonies 
 together in the talk of the different homes and up-bringings, 
 
422 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 and so a whole world was rounded out, to the shnping of 
 which each experience and nature lent material and touch. 
 
 Then the sweet helpfulnesses and charities among them 
 selves, the double work done by the well ones that a 
 feeble one might rest ; the mutual spur and lift of mental 
 endeavor; the Sunday repose and church-going, and Sun 
 day freshness of attire, in which each enjoyed, while she 
 contributed her own to the happy holy-day aspect of the 
 time : 
 
 " The churchward crowd 
 
 That filled brick-pavcn streets and sandy roads 
 With pleasant color. Maidens robed in white, 
 With gypsy hats blue-ribboned ; maidens gay 
 In silk attire; and maidens quaker-prim, 
 With gingham gowns, straw bonnets, and smooth hair, 
 Girl Baptists, Universalists, Methodists, 
 Girl Unitarians, and Orthodox, 
 Sought each their separate temple, while a few 
 Entered the green enclosure of Saint Ann s, 
 Still left an oasis of vine-wreathed stones 
 Amid the city s dust." 
 
 The way in which Miss Larcom herself tells us the story 
 of all this, proves how she lived into it, and found together 
 in it the things she does most joyfully find life in, both 
 poetry and work. 
 
 "While yet a child," she says, "I used to consider it 
 special good fortune that my home was at Lowell. There 
 was a frank friendliness and sincerity in the social atmosphere 
 that wrought upon me unconsciously, and made the place 
 pleasant to live in. People moved about their every-day 
 duties with purpose and zest, and were genuinely interested 
 in one another ; while in the towns on the seaboard it some 
 times was as if every man s house was his castle in almost a 
 feudal sense, where the family shut themselves in, on the 
 defensive against intruders." Still, she never lost her 
 love and allegiance for the sea beside which she was born. 
 Frequent visits kept up the charm, and held the links un- 
 
LUCF LARCOM. 423 
 
 broken ; and we have in her written utterances the wealth 
 of manifold gathering and experience; both the "Idyl of 
 Work" in the city of looms and spindles, and the "Wild 
 Hoses of Cape Ann," full of picture and perfume and legend 
 that could only have been seen and breathed and learned 
 where the forests lean down to listen to the ocean, and the 
 waters send up their song and strength and keen, sweet bap 
 tism to the hills and trees. 
 
 Out of this Lowell living came first the contributions that 
 helped to give charm and purpose to the pages of the " Offer 
 ing," of which, in its manuscript beginning, as the " Diving 
 Bell," a little periodical of original papers by a literary 
 club of girls, her sister was the editor; later, and in retro 
 spection, she gave us her "Idyl of Work," in the very title 
 of which she has set what I have hinted before, and which 
 cannot help being touched every now and then in considering 
 what she has been and lived, the very key-chord of her 
 nature, in-seeing and out-doing. 
 
 And what are these but the "faith and work" of religion? 
 To this two-part, primary chord fall in and harmonize all 
 beautiful relation and utterance. Manhood or womanhood 
 is completed within them. Loving and giving ; friendship 
 and service ; motherhood and ministry ; when we have those 
 watchwords we discern and tell the story of such character 
 and influence as this. One does not like to venture too much 
 into personality while sketching a living person ; but the out 
 line would be the merest outline if something of the real and 
 motive being were not presented. Here and there in her 
 own lines it indicates itself: one feels that notwithstanding 
 her youth when actually one of those Lowell girls, so that 
 the literal living-out of the character could scarcely have 
 been then and there, and notwithstanding the fact, indeed, 
 that she really meant to set forth the image she had in her 
 mind of her own elder sister, she unconsciously gives her 
 self forth also, and inevitably, perhaps, through family like 
 ness, in some touches of her portrayal of "Esther" in the 
 "Idyl." 
 
424 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 "If I had but a home 
 To give her mothering in ! " 
 
 says this Esther of a pining, sorrowful companion. And 
 the answer is, 
 
 "But, Esther, dear, 
 
 To us your heart is mother, shelter, home ; 
 
 Let her, too, find it so." 
 
 " Not always to be here among the looms, 
 . Scarcely a girl she knew expected that ; 
 Means to one end their labor was, to put 
 Gold nest-eggs in the bank, or to redeem 
 A mortgaged homestead, or to pay the way 
 Through classic years at some academy ; 
 More commonly to lay a dowry by 
 For future housekeeping. 
 
 But Esther s thought 
 
 "Was none of these; unshaped and vague it lay, 
 A hope to spend herself for worthy ends." 
 
 "A Ruth who never of a Boaz dreamed. 
 Whatever work came, whoso crossed her path, 
 Lonely as this pale stranger, wheresoe er 
 She saw herself a need, there should be home, 
 Business, and family." 
 
 There is a something, a muchness, rather, to those who 
 know her even a little, of motJierliness in the impression con 
 veyed by her whole presence. 
 
 " A single woman with a mother s heart 
 Such as too many a child cries after." 
 
 One feels taken kindly home ; soothed, sympathized with ; 
 there is repose and reliance, a sense of reality and abiding- 
 ness all through. It is the grandeur and sweetness of 
 woman-nature. 
 
 " Woman can climb no higher than womanhood, 
 Whatever be her title." 
 
 " I think thee is more restful than many people," said her 
 dear friend Elizabeth to her, one day, as she leaned beside 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 425 
 
 her. This motherliness finds expression in the direct way 
 toward little children ; witness her "Childhood Songs," the 
 tenderness, the entering in of them to children s little ways 
 and delights and imaginations. 
 
 " Through the gladness of little children 
 Are the frostiest lives kept warm," 
 
 She sings concerning " Prince Hal," her baby nephew. 
 What then of the summer souls that never knew a frost-touch ; 
 whom nothing can chill except to a sweet dew-point of feel 
 ing or pity? It came out in her real care and love for her 
 nieces and nephews, the children of her dearly-loved sister, 
 of her life with whom we shall hear presently ; it comes out 
 in her friendships ; it shows even in her way of speaking of 
 her own childhood ; for the deep mother-feeling, the very 
 spirit-yearning of the Lord, mothers the soul itself that 
 knows it ; and in some dim, small likeness learns the mean 
 ing, disputed over in dogma, and only revealed to the 
 nature that has in itself both parenthood and childhood, of 
 the mystery of the Father and the Son. 
 
 It comes out in her love and kinship for the flowers, of 
 which and for which she interprets so continually with a 
 heart- wisdom. They are identical to her with human sweet 
 nesses ; they come to her with messages from " over the 
 blank wall of death : " 
 
 " Sweet-brier, her soul in thy breath !" 
 
 The roses, the daisies, the water-lily, the golden-rod, ferns, 
 the very " Flower of Grass," 
 
 " That only stirs 
 
 To soothe the air, and nothing doth require 
 But to forget itself in doing good," 
 
 every one of them is a friend, an angel to her. And when 
 she brings the flowers and the children together, when she 
 makes fragrant, delicate rhymes that seem to have grown and 
 been gathered in the fields, about "Pussy Clover," "Red- 
 Top and Timothy," "Red Sandwort," "A Lily s Word," or 
 
420 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 gathers them all into loving, mngic numbers as they come, 
 "hastening up across the fields," the 
 
 " Wayside fairies clad in gowns of gossamer," 
 
 we feel as if we had been children again ourselves, and out 
 a-summering for weeks of pleasant weather ; and could come 
 back bringing handfuls of beauty with us, and heartfuls of 
 happy courage to remember that 
 
 " Just to live is joy enough 
 Though where roads are dull and rough." 
 
 But we have gone off, with her, indeed, into the fields, 
 leaving her, as to the chronicle, among the spindles in 
 Lowell. 
 
 It was at one of the meetings of the literary circle, estab 
 lished among the mill-girls, that Miss Larcom first met the 
 poet Whittier, who was then in Lowell editing a Free-Soil 
 journal. lie became her friend ; showing his real interest in 
 her at once by criticising her share in the written contri 
 butions of the evening. She was then very 3 r oung ; but it 
 was the beginning of an interest and gratitude that have con 
 tinued mutually in an established friendship from that time 
 to the present. Afterward, when she had come to know and 
 dearly love the poet s sister, the three were much together 
 in such intercourse as is rarely enjoyed. In happy sea- 
 sojourn at Salisbury Beach, near the respective homes at 
 Amesbury and Beverlj r , in visits at Amesbury, in counsel and 
 work together, out of which in recent time have grown the 
 beautiful compilations of "Child-life," and "Songs of Three 
 Centuries," these lives, strong, high, helpful and respon 
 sive, have run near together and contributed the one to the 
 other. It is the pride and thankfulness of Lucy Larcom s life 
 to have so known and been indebted to Whittier. 
 
 One after another, sisters married out of the home, until 
 only two remained ; and at about twenty years of age Lucy 
 accompanied one of these married sisters, Emeline, who had 
 been to her that dear friend, half-mother, half-mate, always 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 427 
 
 understanding, sympathizing, counselling, that only a sweet, 
 strong elder sifter can be, to the then wild prairies of Illinois. 
 Here she was to share in the efforts, the deprivations, the 
 braveries, the new pleasures and contentments also, of a 
 clergyman s household in the pioneer time and country. It 
 seemed as if her life were dividing itself into separate epochs 
 of experience, as departments of life-study ; teaching her 
 first this side and then that of the world and things, and of 
 human movement in them, that she might come, through all, 
 "compacted and built together," to the wise, full-rounded 
 womanhood that should have learned itself and apprehended 
 its vocation. 
 
 A truly pioneer life was theirs, almost a nomadic one, 
 as they changed many times from place to place, as ways and 
 calls opened and summoned onward. It was not much to go 
 from one rough, hastily-built, temporary sort of house to 
 another ; scarcely more than to strike tents and encamp again 
 among possibly more encouraging surroundings; and once on 
 the great prairies it was like being upon the sea ; the same 
 undifferenced vastness, the same easily sliding horizon, the 
 same instinct, doubtless, to push on until one could really 
 make land somewhere and go ashore. At any rate, this im 
 pulse or the impelling of circumstances, made a sort of Arab 
 of the early settler of those days ; and our little household 
 followed the usual fate and fortune. 
 
 Out here, somewhere, I cannot give latitude and longi 
 tude, Miss Larcoin taught school, in a vacated log building, 
 to a two-mile neighborhood. In, upon such length of radius- 
 lines, one of which she herself tracked daily, came her 
 scholars, big and little, from all the small colonies round 
 about. It was in the corner of a big township, taking in 
 pupils from, I think, three counties ; and she taught under 
 the auspices of a district committee, before whom, previous 
 to induction to office, the candidate was obliged to hold up 
 right hand and sivear to acquaintance, sufficient to instruct 
 from, with writing, spelling, arithmetic, and geography. 
 The emolument accruing to the situation was the noble sum 
 
428 LUCY LAHCOM. 
 
 of forty dollars for three months ; and once, when the time 
 for payment arrived, and her brother-in-law visited the com 
 mit tec-man, whose duty it was to make it, his reminder was 
 met with the rather startled remark, as if the subject had 
 never presented itself in so strong a light before: "Forty 
 dollars ! Well, that s a lot o money to pay a young woman 
 for three months teachin ! She oughter know consider ble !" 
 When the official was reassured by a statement of what Miss 
 Larcom s antecedents in study and achievement had been, he 
 could only still more surprised, apparently reiterate with 
 slight transposition: "Well, that s a good deal for her to 
 ha done ! " But I believe he did not complete the inversion 
 of ideas by adding "she ought to be paid consider ble !" 
 lie only, as under vague, half-protest still, counted slowly 
 over the money. 
 
 The two-mile pilgrimage to this temple of learning lay 
 across the unfenced waste, roamed over by great herds of 
 cattle ; wild creatures whom one would suppose it a daily 
 heroism to meet ; but neither teacher nor children seem to 
 have had much thought of fear, or ever to have met with any 
 accident or hairbreadth scape. The beasts had too free 
 range, and their life and habits were too uncrossed by human 
 interference and provocation, to be malignant. There was 
 something of the same untamed incomprehension of limit or 
 fetter in the pupils of the prairie themselves. One little fel 
 low, upon the opening of the school, on the first day of his 
 attendance, asked her with delightful freshness and confidence, 
 as he found himself placed on a bench in a row of silent 
 scholars: "Is school commenced, Miss Lucy?" On being 
 answered "yes," he remarked, with the same simplicity: 
 "Well, then, I hope it ll quit commencing pretty soon, before 
 it gets very long ! " 
 
 Another scholar, a girl, was once put in slight disgrace for 
 some disobedience. "You may go and stand in the chimney," 
 said Miss Larcom. 
 
 The chimney was a great, central structure of the log-house, 
 with a debouchure spacious enough for a common-sized fam- 
 
LUCY LAHCOM. 429 
 
 ily dinner-table to be laid therein. Whether the family could 
 also sit round it, I will not peril my veracity by venturing to 
 assert. The child obeyed ; but presently had disappeared ! 
 She was no longer in the room, and the great fireplace was 
 vacant. She had simply, and quite naturally, ascended 
 through the chimney, and was availing herself of the freedom 
 of all out-doors. 
 
 During some other of their sojournings, her school-work 
 was done in various lovely, secluded forest-nooks, where she 
 had restful anchorage from the ail-abroad, perpetual sea-same 
 ness of the prairie. It must have been like creeping in a 
 dream into a corner of New England asjain. 
 
 But oh ! the hills, and oh ! the sea ! How she missed her 
 one "home-corner of Massachusetts," which she loves so fer 
 vently as her very own world ! 
 
 It was in one of these places that she found herself in the 
 neighborhood of an excellent young ladies school. Ex 
 changing, as she says, the position of teacher for that of 
 scholar, she spent three years at Monticello Female Seminary, 
 following the full course of study, and the last two years 
 taking charge of the preparatory department of that institu 
 tion. In this, again, we see in circumstance, or indeed in 
 the wise acceptance and utilizing of circumstance, a parable 
 and touch of character. Alternately, and always on the two 
 sides as the right and left of her being, the teacher and the 
 taught; eager, grateful, modest to receive; purposeful, gen 
 erous, strict and faithful to give account in giving forth again 
 of all ; the attitudes and movements of large, true-balanced, 
 dedicated life. 
 
 But she " could not make up her mind to be a Western 
 woman." Her heart was among the hills and by the sea. 
 She longed for the rocks of New England, and for the friend 
 ships founded upon the rocks of strength and steadfastness 
 which she knew were there for her to go home to. So she 
 went back to Beverly,, where, for a year or two, she taught a 
 class of young ladies ; then accepted a position as teacher in 
 Wheaton Female Seminary, at Norton, Mass. ; remaining 
 
430 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 there for six years, conducting classes in rhetoric, English 
 literature, and composition ; sometimes adding history, men 
 tal and moral science, or her own dearly favorite pursuit 
 of botany. Always, one can see, learning and leading in 
 things that touched most directly human thought and expe 
 rience, or drew lesson and analogy from the word written in 
 lovely created things. Poetry, in its large sense, as the key 
 and relation in which all life and truth are set, was the ele 
 ment and sphere in which her nature ranged and wrought. 
 
 Miss Larcom s health began, after this length of time, to 
 suffer from such a constant strain of teaching-work. Nothing 
 is more exhausting than the earnest labor of imparting thought. 
 They who most truly and livingly teach most certainly use 
 up their own vitality. She found she must relinquish the 
 regular employment, and did so ; although from time to time, 
 incidentally, she has been prevailed upon to instruct in lec 
 tures upon literature, or to take classes in kindred studies in 
 young ladies schools in Boston. 
 
 The w r ar called forth all Miss Larcom s intense and gener 
 ous humanities, and, as a thing of course, inspired her writ 
 ings. How the Massachusetts woman, in her pride and 
 loyalty, and yet with the heartache of the time, sings of the 
 momentous springtide when, close upon the snows, and before 
 a green leaf opens on a tree, 
 
 " To her ancient colors true, 
 Blooms the old town of Boston in red and white and blue !" 
 
 And in " Re-enlisted," makes the mother who " smiled to 
 see him going," cry up through a sob that one can almost 
 hear swell in the verse : 
 
 " And I and Massachusetts share the honor of his birth ; 
 The grand old State, to me the best in nil the peopled earth ! 
 I cannot hold a musket, but I have a son who can ; 
 And I m proud for freedom s sake to be the mother of a man !" 
 
 "With what indignation she flings out her utterance in the 
 " Sinking of the Merrimack," the ship that had stained the 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 431 
 
 "fair Northern name," so peculiarly dear to her always, that the 
 sound of the word is as if her own name were called : 
 
 " Gone down in the flood, and gone out in the flame ! 
 Then sink them together, the ship and the name!" 
 
 And her " Loyal Woman s No"; it is like a scathe of 
 swift lightning rushing down from the "great peaks" of her 
 higher nature upon the creeping valley-creature ! 
 
 Her first poem in the " Atlantic " was " The Rose En 
 throned." Previously to this, as far back as during her 
 early residence in Illinois, some poems "were published with 
 the name, and some slight sketch of the writer, in Griswold s 
 " Female Poets of America " ; and at about the same time 
 verses of hers were printed in " Sartain s Magazine." During 
 1852-53, she wrote frequently for the "National Era," of 
 which Mr. Whittier was corresponding editor. Later, the 
 " Independent " and the " Boston Congregationalist," and the 
 various modern magazines, received and published her contri 
 butions. 
 
 " Hannah Binding Shoes" appeared first in the New York 
 "Crayon." Perhaps no single poem of hers has been better 
 known or more heartily admired. She herself has said, I 
 believe it was "between you and me," but there has always 
 been, immemorially, a third party admitted to that formula 
 of confidence, that she " never thought * Hannah* much of a 
 poem." Probably because it was one of those simple realities 
 that sing themselves, and so sing immortally. 
 
 But the " Rose Enthroned " is, it seems to me, her greatest 
 inspiration. It is a parable-epic of creation ; twenty-one 
 four-line stanzas, of which each group of seven is, doubt 
 less from some inherent necessity of the truth, and quite un 
 consciously to the writer, like a six-days feon and a Sab 
 bath ; the sum of them making the week and Sabbath of 
 ages, in whose progress the great chaos has seethed, formed, 
 and blossomed : the Planet has travailed and brought forth 
 the Rose ! 
 
432 LUCi" LAKCOM. 
 
 " And ever nobler lives, and deaths more grand, 
 For nourishment of that which is to come : 
 While, mid the ruins of the work she planned 
 Sits Nature, blind and dumb." 
 
 That was the first rest ! 
 
 " And every dawn a shade more clear, the skies 
 A flush as from the heart of heaven disclose 
 Through earth and sea and air a message flies 
 Prophetic of the Rose." 
 
 And that is the breath of the second pause. Until 
 
 " At last a morning comes, . . . 
 when 
 
 " In golden silence, breathless, all things stand ; 
 What answer waits this questioning repose? 
 A sudden gush of light and odors bland, 
 And lo, the Rose ! the Rose 1 " 
 
 " What fiery fields of chaos must be won, 
 
 What battling Titans rear themselves a tomb, 
 What births and resurrections greet the sun 
 Before the Rose can bloom ! 
 
 " And of some wonder-blossom yet we dream 
 
 Whereof the time that is enfolds the seed ; 
 Some flower of light, to which the Rose shall seem 
 A fair and fragile weed." 
 
 The verse leaves us in the waiting world-time of to-day. 
 
 To have written such a poem as this alone is to have been 
 a poet. No wonder, the "Atlantic" then being published 
 with a "no-name" table of contents, that it should have 
 been attributed to Emerson. 
 
 And this is the little mill-girl of Lowell who doffed the 
 bobbins ! Truly, the "Rose Enthroned" hath some touch of 
 a life- story. 
 
 When "Our Young Folks" magazine was started, Miss 
 Larcom became one of its assistant editors, and had for some 
 time the hard, preliminary, winnowing work to do. She 
 sifted the great mass of in-pouring MSS., selected such as were 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 433 
 
 worthy of second thought, and handed them up to the second 
 thinkers. Subsequently, she had nearly all the responsible 
 charge, and became, indeed, for some time the leading editor. 
 The year or two during which she occupied that charming 
 office-room overlooking the Common, and up-looking to Park- 
 street steeple, are memorable for pleasantness, not only to 
 herself, but to those who found her there, bright and repose 
 ful, ready and responsive, in the midst of her busy, and one 
 would think often confusing occupation. "But that," as she 
 says, " was almost fifteen years ago." 
 
 Seven years followed of quiet, independent living, at 
 housekeeping for herself at Beverly Farms ; when she, as 
 needs must, went on with her living and thinking, and these 
 " not to herself alone," though her housekeeping was. 
 
 Some one has said that " Miss Larcom may be called 
 the poet of friendship " ; and so she may ; but it ought 
 to be added that her friendship takes all the possible 
 forms. I have spoken of her " motherlmess " ; her single- 
 hood and yet full womanhood ; and I may dare to do so, 
 for she tells of it herself; she cannot help but write "My 
 Children": 
 
 " Too many for one house, you see, 
 
 And so I have to let them be 
 In care of other mothers. 
 
 " My darlings! by my mother heart 
 
 I have found, I shall find them. 
 Though some from me are worlds apart, 
 And thinking of them, tears will start 
 
 Into my eyes, and blind them." 
 
 Even her Christmas is " Woman s Christmas," her song 
 the rejoicing of the mother-heart. 
 
 " By the close bond of womanhood, 
 By the prophetic mother-heart, 
 Forever visioning unshaped good, 
 Mary, in Him we claim our part. 
 
 27 
 
434 LUCY LARCOM. 
 
 "What were our poor lives worth, if thence 
 
 Flowered forth no world-perfuming good, 
 No love-growth of Omnipotence ? 
 The childless share thy motherhood. 
 
 "Breathe, weary women everywhere. 
 
 The freshness of this heavenly morn; 
 The blessing that He is, we share, 
 For unto us this Child is born!" 
 
 And fitly follows her aspiration in her " Woman s Easter" : 
 
 " O Sun ! on our souls first arisen, 
 
 Give us light for the spirits that grope ! 
 Make us loving and steadfast and loyal 
 
 To bear up humanity s hope ! 
 O Friend ! who forsakest us never, 
 Breathe through us Thy errands forever ! " 
 
 The secret is, ministry. The very work of the Spirit. 
 The " taking of mine, and showing it unto them." Somehow, 
 she always found a way to do this, even from her earliest in 
 stincts. There was something touchingly comical in a fash 
 ion she had when a child of alternately helping her mother, 
 the wearied and worried mother of eight, and a widow, 
 In little household services, and then, when she could find 
 nothing else, sitting and reciting or singing in the mother s 
 hearing, quite as if it only happened so, scraps of hymns ; 
 especially and often the verses of "Come, ye disconsolate.* 
 She had large resources to draw upon, for she had learned 
 hymns by the hundred, as occupation in sermon-timo, in her 
 first attendances at church, when sermons were, pardonably, 
 wearisome. Maybe she had first learned to apply the 
 
 " Come, ye disconsolate, 
 Where er ye languish," 
 
 to her own inward sustaining during these sacrificial hours. 
 
 In this spirit of ministry she gathered together the lovely 
 compilation of "Breathings of a Better Life," which has vis 
 ited many a troubled and desolate heart with comfort, and 
 
LUCY LARCOM. 435 
 
 lifted up and strengthened many a seeker and striver with its 
 words from " up higher." 
 
 The mountains and the rivers are her ministers ; the brook 
 is "Friend Brook "to her. They are all friends for what 
 they can give her to bring away to other friends. 
 
 " River, O river ! that singcst all night, 
 
 The words of thy song let me know : 
 I come, and I go. 
 
 " River, O river ! thy message is clear. 
 
 Chant on, for I hear. 
 What the mountains give me 
 Bear I forth to the sea. 
 Life only is thine to bestow. 
 I come, and I go. 
 
 ** River, O river ! thy secret of power 
 
 I win from this hour; 
 Thy rhythm of delight 
 Is my song in the night : 
 I am glad with thy gladness ; for, lo! 
 I come, and I go." 
 
 "Roadside Poems," and "Hillside and Seaside," are com 
 pilations from readings of nature, such as a render for herself 
 could find and choose among works of her kindred. "Child- 
 life," " Child-life in Prose," " Songs of Three Centuries," are 
 the sheaves hound up from fields of ripe and beautiful litera 
 ture, for which she gleaned in company with Mr. Whittier, and 
 which he edited. These are the work of recent years ; her 
 latest, and original writing, has been the volume, "Wild 
 Roses of Cape Ann ; " in which 
 
 " The sea is wedded to the sky, " 
 
 the hills and the river-channels and the tides lean, and move 
 to, and meet each other with their benedictions, the fra 
 grances of rose and pine, and the salt strength of the sea- 
 breath mingle to one delicious atmosphere : 
 
43() LUCr LARCOM. 
 
 " The sounds and scents that float by us 
 
 They cannot tell whither they go; 
 Yet however it fails of its errand, 
 
 Love makes the world sweeter, I know. 
 
 "I know that love never is Avasted, 
 
 Nor truth, nor the breath of a prayer; 
 And the thought that goes forth as a blessing 
 Must live as a joy in the air." 
 
 Later than any book, come to us from here and there the 
 things she has wrought out singly, and been dropping, seed 
 into the furrows, seemingly where it might chance. One 
 of the very last is a joy-song of fellowship; in toil, she 
 is in love with toil, and sings it as a. lover sings his mistress, 
 in every busy industry that men and women make, and 
 hasten to day by day ; in 
 
 "All the sweetness and all the mirth 
 That stir in the bosom of kindly earth ;" 
 
 the births and growths and givings of the live world ; floAT- 
 ers, birds, children, friends ; in 
 
 "Love and loveliness everywhere." 
 
 "I am glad," she cries, at the close of every stanza, 
 " I am glad that I live in the world with you ! " 
 
 Yes, she calls even into the beyond, to the " spirits dear 
 who have vanished from sight," in the "many mansions whose 
 home is one," where " the doors are open, and light shines 
 through," 
 
 "I am glad that I live in the world with you ! " 
 
 I cannot close this sketch of her better than in her own 
 refrain : 
 
 " Thank God for the work he lets us do ! 
 I am glad that I live in the world with youl" 
 
ClIAPTEK XIX. 
 
 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 BY JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 Miss Mitchell s Nantucket Home Her Ancestors "Poor but Happy" 
 Her Early Life Her Father s Love for Astronomy How She Obtained 
 Her Education Unwearied Devotion to Her Studies A Great Event in 
 Her Life Discovers a Telescopic Comet Claiming the Prize Offered 
 by the King of Denmark Difficulty in Obtaining it Edward Everett s 
 Efforts in Her Behalf Final Recognition of Her Claim Receives 
 the Gold Medal from the Danish King Her Fame Abroad Visit 
 ing the Old World Entertained and Honored by Distinguished Scientists 
 Her Own Account of Some of Them Amusing Experiences Inter 
 esting Incidents Her Life and Daily Work. 
 
 .ARIA MITCHELL, the subject of the present 
 memoir, was born in Nantucket on the first 
 day of August, 1818, and was the third in a 
 family of ten children. The parents were 
 William Mitchell and Lydia Coleman Mitchell. 
 She was related, on the mother s side, to 
 Benjamin Franklin, whose grandmother was 
 also an ancestress of hers. Her paternal 
 grandfather was the } r oungest son of a man re 
 puted rich in his time, who, however, expended a 
 great part of his fortune in the education and establishment 
 of his elder children. From him this younger son inherited 
 some thirty thousand dollars. 
 
 In the next generation, this sum was subdivided among a 
 number of heirs, and was further diminished b} T the war of 
 1812, so that the inheritance of Maria s father was scarcely 
 more than one thousand dollars, which covered the cost of 
 the house in which he lived, and in which his family was 
 reared. 
 
 437 
 
438 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 From an autobiographical sketch, written by Mr. Mitchell 
 late in life, and never published, it appears that he was bred 
 in easy circumstances which allowed him to enjoy the best 
 educational opportunities afforded by the neighborhood in 
 that day. These were not great, lie relates that the incom- 
 petency and unkindness of his teachers were such as to give 
 him a distaste for hooks, while his father s description of 
 natural phenomena filled him with enthusiasm. He says in 
 this connection : 
 
 "I have never forgotten his calling me to the door in my 
 eighth year, and showing me the planet Saturn. My age at 
 Ihis period I calculated many years afterwards from the 
 position of the planet. But the claim, if I have any, to 
 learning, rests on my own exertion, late in my teens." 
 
 Here was surely a born astronomer, destined to pursue 
 his native science through endless difficulties and discoura^e- 
 
 - O 
 
 ments. At the age of fifteen he learned the trade of a 
 cooper, which soon proved too severe for his bodily strength, 
 lie presently became a teacher, and at the age of eighteen 
 principal of a school. In the exercise of this profession he was 
 happy and successful, but failing health obliged him to seek a 
 more active occupation, which he found in assisting his father 
 in the oil and soap business, in which his old trade of cooper 
 ing became useful. 
 
 The war of 1812 now intervened, and greatly reduced the 
 fortunes of the family. Mr. Mitchell married in 1813, and 
 commenced wedded life on a small farm, owned by his 
 father, "poor but happy." He "went fishing from the 
 village, and worked between tides, raising corn and potatoes 
 on land which, by the encroachment of the sea, no longer 
 exists." He taught school in the winter for a stipend of two 
 dollars per week. 
 
 In this penury his eldest child was born ; but a week later 
 arrived a ship laden with whale oil, which his father was 
 commissioned to convert into soap. This revival of business 
 changed the aspect of affairs, and for seven years thereafter 
 he lived in comfort, working in partnership with his father. 
 
: 
 
 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 441 
 
 The latter retiring from business in 1822, Mr. Mitchell again 
 became a teacher, commencing with a school of his own, and 
 presently becoming the teacher of the first public grammar- 
 school established at Nantucket. He established later a 
 school of his own, but afterwards became secretary of an 
 insurance company, and finally cashier of the Pacific Bank. 
 Of all these divers occupations that of pedagogy was the 
 most congenial to him. He was an adherent to "Friends 
 principles," and a birthright member of the society, to which 
 his ancestors for several generations had belonged. 
 
 Maria, at an early age, became a^. purjjl in the public school 
 taught by her father in Nantuckkt. At schools of this 
 character, throughout New England, girls and boys were 
 taught in classes together, following the same studies and 
 the same recitations. 
 
 Miss Mitchell remembers her mother as a very laborious 
 woman. The salary of a school-teacher in those days was 
 but a slender resource for the support of a large family, and 
 could only be made to suffice for it by the greatest care and 
 economy. The labors of the housewife were assisted by one 
 domestic only, and this was usually a girl in her teens, with 
 small knowledge and experience. In order to add to his 
 means, Mr. Mitchell built a small observatory upon a part of 
 his land, and was enabled to earn one hundred dollars per 
 annum by astronomical work done for the United States 
 Coast Survey. 
 
 In this thrifty household Maria s task was what she calls, 
 "an endless washing of dishes," which, Aveary as it may 
 sometimes have been, she preferred to needlework. The 
 drudgery necessarily entailed by narrow circumstances was 
 however relieved and rendered endurable by the atmosphere 
 of thought and intelligence which gave its tone to the house. 
 Concerning this, Miss Mitchell says : 
 
 "We always had books, and were bookish people. There 
 was a public library in Nantucket before I was born. It was 
 not a free library, but we always paid the subscription of one 
 dollar per annum, and always read and studied from it. I 
 
442 MAKIA MITCHELL. 
 
 remember among its books Hannah Move s works and 
 Rollins Ancient History. I remember, too, that Charles 
 Folger, the present Secretary of the Treasury, and 1 had both 
 read this latter work through before we were ten years old, 
 though neither of us spoke of it to the other until a later 
 period." 
 
 As Mr. Mitchell s family increased the discrepancy between 
 its needs and his resources made itself more sensibly felt, 
 and in the year 1837 he became cashier of the Pacific Bank, 
 at a salary of twelve hundred dollars per annum. His chil 
 dren naturally regarded this change as a rise in life, but he 
 himself thought otherwise. He still retained his employment 
 under the Coast Survey, and this connection brought to his 
 house such persons as the elder Agassiz, Benjamin Pierce, 
 Prof. Bache, and others, whose society was much appreciated 
 by the members of the household, and especially by Maria, 
 who, at the age of seventeen, began to assist her father in his 
 observatory work. 
 
 Mr. Mitchell, who bore at a later day the title of Honorable, 
 is spoken of in a letter of Edward Everett s as "a skilful 
 astronomer, a member of the Executive Council of Massa 
 chusetts, and a most respectable person." 
 
 In 1820 Mr. Mitchell was elected a member of the 
 Massachusetts convention for the revision of the Constitution 
 on the occasion of the separation of the State of Maine. 
 The first President Adams, Daniel Webster, Judge Story, 
 Josiah Quincy, and James Savage were all members of this 
 convention. Despite the eloquence shown by more than one 
 of them, Mr. Mitchell found their much speaking very 
 burdensome, and confesses that it gave him a strong distaste 
 for public life. Many years later he was elected and re-elected 
 as one of Governor Briggs Council, and was for a number 
 of years one of the overseers of Harvard College. He was 
 also elected for one term to the Massachusetts somite. 
 
 More congenial were to Mr. Mitchell the scientific pursuits 
 which he managed, with wonderful perseverance, to combine 
 with the labors of a life Avhich, he says "was always, pecun- 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 443 
 
 inrily, a struggle." He started in life with "an innate love 
 of astronomical inquiries," and, through a natural aptitude for 
 studies of this kind, was able so to acquire and apply knowl 
 edge as to gain for himself an honorable position among the 
 astronomers of his time. He contributed a number of papers 
 to " Silliman s Journal," and delivered a very acceptable course 
 of lectures on astronomy, at the invitation of the Boston 
 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, of which at 
 that time Daniel Webster was president, and Nathaniel Froth- 
 ingham secretary. lie received the degree of Master of Arts 
 from Harvard College and from Brown University, and was 
 early elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and 
 Sciences. 
 
 Maria Mitchell quitted the public school of Nantucket at 
 the age of sixteen. She enjoyed after this one year of 
 tuition at a private school, kept by Mr. Pierce, commonly 
 known as Father Pierce, in the same place. 
 
 The daughters of the family were at this time expected to 
 contribute what they could earn to the expenses of the house 
 hold. An elder sister of Maria s became a teacher, at :i 
 salary of three hundred dollars per annum. Maria herself 
 would have been glad to do as much as this for herself and 
 the others. She felt, however, the absolute need of some 
 years of further study, and, in order to command these, 
 accepted the post of librarian of the Nantucket Athenrcum. 
 Her salary here was sixty dollars for the first year, seventy- 
 five dollars for the second, and for each of the eighteen years 
 that followed, one hundred dollars. Out of this small stipend 
 she was able to lay by something for future emergencies. 
 
 It was during this period of twenty years that Maria 
 Mitchell, easily performing her duties as librarian, found 
 time to prosecute the solid scientific studies which have given 
 her a recognized and honored place among the scientists of 
 her time. 
 
 The writer of this biography lately asked Miss Mitchell 
 what especial circumstances had led her to the study of 
 astronomy. The reply Avas substantially the following : 
 
444 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 "It was, in the first place, a love of mathematics, seconded 
 by my sympathy with my father s love for astronomical 
 observation. But the spirit of the place had also much to do 
 with the early bent of my mind in this direction. In Nan- 
 tucket people quite generally are in the habit of observing 
 the heavens, and a sextant will be found in almost every 
 house. The landscape is flat and somewhat monotonous", and 
 the field of the heavens has greater attractions there than in 
 places which offer more variety of view. In the days in which 
 I lived there the men of the community were mostly engaged 
 in sea-traffic of some sort, and " when my ship conies in " 
 was a literal, not a symbolical expression." 
 
 A sister of Miss Mitchell remembers her as " an exceedingly 
 shy young girl, not fond of society, but very fond of books 
 nnd study, and quite apt at writing little occasional pieces, 
 generally in verse." We learn from the same source that 
 Mr. Mitchell never recognized any distinction of sex in the 
 education of his children. Maria had therefore the same 
 education with her brothers, and was especially taught navi 
 gation. Her sister bears testimony to her persistence in study, 
 und also to the faithfulness with which she performed her part 
 of the work of the household, not in the shape of cake and 
 custard-making, but of solid work. She often studied with 
 her knitting in her hands, and her father to the day of his 
 death wore stockings, one yard in length, of her knitting. 
 
 In the Nantucket Athenaeum we are glad to hear that : 
 
 She controlled in a large measure the reading of the 
 young people. She advised them what to read, and had a 
 way of losing improper books, if there were any. They 
 usually turned up at the time of the annual examination of 
 the library, but she never knowingly allowed a boy to have 
 a hurtful book." 
 
 As years passed on, Miss Mitchell began to be spoken of 
 as a woman of uncommon merit and attainment. The writer 
 of this sketch remembers to have heard of her as an astrono 
 mer of recognized position as early as the year 184(5. She 
 was living at Nantucket at this time, and had probably no 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 445 
 
 anticipation of tho publicity about to bo given to hor modest 
 and quiet labors. Fume came to her in the shape of a tele 
 scopic comet, which she discovered on the 1st of October, 
 1847, and described as in a position "nearly vertical, above 
 Polaris -ibout live degrees." Her father announced the fact 
 to William C. Bond, at that time director of the observatory 
 at Cambridge. 
 
 It happened that tho King of Denmark, sixteen years 
 before this time, had decreed the foundation of a gold medal 
 of the value of twenty ducats, to be awarded to the first 
 discoverer of a telescopic comet. The conditions of this 
 award, intended to prevent imposture, were such as to in 
 crease considerably the difficulty of obtaining it. The first 
 of these conditions was that the announcement of the dis 
 covery should be made by the first post which should leave 
 the locality thereafter. 
 
 Mr. Edward Everett, at this time President of Harvard 
 College, had had some correspondence on the subject of 
 telescopic comets with Prof. Schumacher, of the Royal 
 Observatory at Altona. In this way ho had learned the 
 fact of the medal-foundation. 
 
 Hearing of Miss Mitchell s discovery some weeks after Mr. 
 Mitchell s communication of it to Mr. Bond, of the Cam 
 bridge University, he learned also that no steps had been 
 taken by her or her friends to secure for her the medal to 
 which he was quite sure that she was entitled. The corre 
 spondence undertaken by Mr. Everett in behalf of his dis 
 tinguished countrywoman is preserved in a small pamphlet 
 which was printed, but not published, in the year 1857. In 
 an introductory statement, he says: 
 
 "Having learned, some weeks after Miss Mitchell s dis 
 covery, that no communication had been made on her behalf 
 to the trustees of the medal, and aware that the regulations 
 in this respect were enforced with strictness, I was appre 
 hensive that it might be too late to supply the omission. 
 Still, however, as the spirit of the regulations had been com 
 plied with by Mr. Mitchell s letter to Mr. Bond, it seemed 
 
446 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 worth while at least to make the attempt to procure the medal 
 for his daughter. Although the attempt might be unsuc 
 cessful, it would at any rate cause the priority of her dis 
 covery to bo more authentically established than it might 
 otherwise have been." 
 
 The printed correspondence opens with the letter in which 
 Mr. Mitchell announced his daughter s discovery to his 
 friend, William C. Bond. He asks whether any one else 
 has seen it, and remarks that : " Maria supposes it ma}- be 
 an old story." This letter bears the date of October 3, 1847, 
 and thus shows us the infrequency of mails from the Cape at 
 that time. Mr. Everett s first letter to Mr. Mitchell is dated 
 January 10, 1848, and is as follows : 
 
 Mr. Edward Everett to Mr. William Mitchell. 
 
 "DEAR SIR, I take the liberty to inquire of you whether 
 any steps have been taken by you, on behalf of your 
 daughter, by way of claiming the medal of the King of 
 Denmark, for the first discovery of a telescopic comet." 
 Here follows a statement of the regulations regarding the 
 announcement of the discovery, after which Mr. Everett 
 says : " In consequence of non-compliance with these regula 
 tions, Mr. George Bond has on one occasion lost the medal. 
 I trust this may not be the case with Miss Mitchell." 
 Mr. Mitchell, replying to Mr. Everett, says: 
 " No steps were taken by my daughter in claim of the 
 medal of the Danish King. I urged very strongly that it 
 (the discovery) should be published immediately, but she 
 resisted it as strongly. She remarked to me, If it is a new 
 comet, our friends, the B.,nds, have seen it. It may be an 
 old one so far as relates to the discovery, and one which we 
 have not followed. She consented, however, that I should 
 write to William C. Bond, which I did by the first mail that 
 left the island after the discovery. This letter did not reach 
 my friend till the fith or 7th, having been somewhat delayed 
 here, and also in the post-office at Cambridge. The stipula 
 tions of his Majesty have, therefore, not been complied with, 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 447 
 
 and the peculiar circumstances of the case, her sex, and 
 isolated position, may not be sufficient to justify a suspen 
 sion of the rules. Nevertheless, it would gratify me that, the 
 generous monarch should know that there is a love of science 
 
 O 
 
 even in this, to him, remote corner of the earth." 
 
 Mr. Everett now wrote to Prof. Schumacher, and to 
 parties in England, urging Miss Mitchell s claim to the 
 Danish medal. The discovery of the comet was soon es 
 tablished, and it was thenceforth known by the name of 
 "Miss Mitchell s comet." Her delay in applying for the 
 medal threw some difficulty in the way of her obtaining it. It 
 was finally decided, however, that the spirit of the regula 
 tions had been complied with by Mr. Mitchell s letter to Mr. 
 Bond. Thanks to Mr. Everett s perseverance, and to the 
 energetic efforts of the American Minister at the Court of 
 Denmark, the award was at last made, and the medal 
 obtained. 
 
 In the year 1857 Miss Mitchell had occasion to visit Eng 
 land, and also to make an extensive tour upon the Continent 
 of Europe. Through the kindness of a member of her 
 family, the writer has had access to a number of letters, in 
 which her various experiences are narrated for the benefit of 
 her family. After some stay in London, which she did not 
 reach until after "the season," she made various excursions, 
 one of which carried her to Stratford-upon-Avon, where she 
 became the guest of the well-known Flower family. She 
 here learned the sad condition of Miss Bacon, the originator 
 of the theory which ascribes to Lord Bacon the authorship of 
 Shakspcare s plays. Miss Mitchell visited her distressed 
 countrywoman, who was at this time suffering both from 
 pecuniary embarassment, and from a partial derangement of 
 her faculties. Miss Mitchell was able in some degree to 
 assist this unfortunate lady, who died soon after this time. 
 
 Miss Mitchell s scientific reputation had preceded her in 
 England, and easily opened the way for her to much pleasant 
 intercourse with persons of distinction. Several of her let 
 ters describe a visit to Cambridge, whither she went with 
 
448 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 Mrs. Airy, wife of the Astronomer-royal. Here, she re 
 ceived much attention from Dr. Whewell, at that time Master 
 of Trinity, and well known in the literary and scientific 
 world by his History of the Inductive Sciences. 
 
 Miss Mitchell had a room at the Bull Hotel, hut was really 
 the guest of Dr. Whewell, at whose house she took luncheon 
 and dinner on the three days of her stay in Cambridge. She 
 describes this gentleman as "a magnificent looking man, 
 courteous but condescending in his manner." "lie is about 
 fifty-five years old. His hair is perfectly white and curls a 
 little. He is large (of stature), has good blue eyes, and 
 would be handsome if his mouth were good. The expression 
 of the mouth is not good-tempered." 
 
 At a dinner-party of twenty persons, on the day of her 
 arrival, Miss Mitchell Avas the honored guest. Of Dr. 
 Whewcll s conversation at dinner, she says : 
 
 "Like all Englishmen (twenty-six years ago) he was very 
 severe upon American writers. He said that Emerson did 
 not write English and copied Carlyle. I thought his severity 
 reached really to discourtesy, as I was an American, and I 
 think he perceived it when he asked me if I knew Emerson, 
 and I replied that I did, and that I valued my acquaintance 
 with him. I got a little chance to retort by telling him that 
 we had outgrown Mrs. Hemans in America, and now read 
 Mrs. Browning more. He laughed at this, and said Mrs. 
 Browning was so coarse that he couldn t tolerate it, and that 
 he was amused to hear that any people had got above Mrs. 
 Hemans. Washington Irving is the only (American) writer 
 whom Englishmen tolerate, and a lady on the other side of 
 Dr. Whewell said to me : " Do you call Irving an Ameri 
 can?" I said, "I suppose he must be so called, as he was 
 born in America." " Yes, but his father was born in 
 Scotland." 
 
 Whewell said to Miss Mitchell that he knew how to pro 
 nounce the word " Niagara " from the rh} r me : 
 
 "You must see Niagara 
 For that is a staggerer." 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 449 
 
 His first remark to her, she says, was : " We will, as you 
 Americans say, go the whole hog." At parting, she asked 
 whether he would, some day, visit America. lie replied, 
 "Yes, if you behave yourselves and keep quiet." 
 
 Among other distinguished persons seen during this visit 
 to ("Minbridgc, Miss Mitchell mentions Profs. Sodgwick, 
 Challis, and Adams. She requested the gentleman last 
 named to show her the spot on which he made his computa 
 tions for Neptune, and he was evidently well pleased to do so. 
 
 A visit to Sir John and Lady Ilcrschel at Collingwood 
 was much enjoyed by Miss Mitchell. She reached this place 
 at dusk, and thus describes the reception given her : 
 
 "There was just the light of the coal fire, and as I stood 
 before it Sir John bustled in an old man. much bent, with 
 perfectly white hair standing out in every direction. He 
 reached both hands to me, and said : We had no letter, and 
 did not expect you, but you are always welcome at this house. " 
 
 Miss Mitchell had omitted to acquaint her friends by letter 
 with the precise time at which she might be expected to 
 arrive. Her stay with them was full of interest. She had 
 great pleasure in looking over Sir William Herst-hel s manu 
 scripts and those of his sister Caroline. She found Sir 
 John not only a ready and able talker, . but also a good 
 listener, the best she had met with in England. As a part 
 ing gift, he bestowed upon her a specimen of his aunt s 
 writing, having already given her one of his own calculations. 
 Such presents do the learned exchange ! 
 
 One of Miss Mitchell s letters from London describes an 
 evening party, called in those days a rout, at the house of 
 Prof, and Mrs. Baden Powell. Here she met Roget of the 
 Thesaurus, and Arnott, the well-known author of " Arnott s 
 Elements of Physics." She describes him as not much over 
 sixty years in age, short, stout, and vigorous, with white 
 hair. She says : 
 
 "lie asked me if I wore as many stockings when I was 
 observing as the Ilerschels did. Sir William, he said, put 
 on twelve pair, and Caroline fourteen." 
 
150 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 She had hoped to meet Mr. Babbnge at this party, and had 
 asked several times whether he was in the room, to which 
 question the reply was: "Not yet." She took leave of her 
 hosts at eleven o clock, and tells us that just as she " stepped 
 upon the threshold of the drawing-room to go out a broad 
 old man stepped upon it to come in. The servant announced, 
 Mr. Babbage. Of course, that glimpse was all I shall ever 
 have." 
 
 After these days, Miss Mitchell made a sojourn of some 
 weeks in Paris, where she desired to attend scientific lectures, 
 and to become acquainted with French savants. In order to 
 extend her familiarity with the French language, she resided 
 for a time as parlor-boarder in a boarding-school. Sir George 
 Airy had written to the astronomer Lcverrier, to announce 
 her coming, and Lady Lyell had also given her an intro 
 duction to a valued friend, Mrs. Power, a sister of Sir 
 Francis Horner. Of Leverrier Miss Mitchell says : " His 
 English was worse than my French." She also made ac 
 quaintance in Paris with the sister of the celebrated Arago, 
 and with other members of that family; "whose connecting 
 links," she says, " are astronomers thrust out of employ 
 ment." The ladies of the Weston family (sisters of Mrs. 
 Maria Weston Chapman) were at this time residing in Paris. 
 From them Miss Mitchell received many friendly attentions, 
 and among other useful bits of information, this one, that 
 the Emperor Napoleon III. was not "good society." The 
 lower classes of French people, as seen in Paris, appeared to 
 her very superior to those of the same order in England. 
 
 In the course of this winter Miss Mitchell found her way 
 to Rome, in company with the Hawthorne family. Her 
 impressions of the Eternal City are preserved in numerous 
 letters to members of her own family. The interest of the 
 ruins and historical monuments was to her very great, and 
 she seems to have studied carefully the treasures of the 
 Vatican. It is interesting to think of her in that holy of 
 holies which contains four of the greatest pictures in the 
 world. Among these she was especially impressed with the 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 451 
 
 beauty of Rafiaelle s "Transfiguration." Miss Mitchell did 
 not escape the fascination of studio visiting. The sculptor 
 Mozicr was an especial friend of hers, and her letters have 
 much to say concerning his works. She knew also Akers 
 and Bartholomew, and the painter Rothermel. She saw the 
 Ilawthornes frequently, and promises her father many anec 
 dotes of Hawthorne himself, who at this period must have 
 been gathering many of the facts and fancies which took 
 shape in his "Marble Faun." 
 
 Miss Bremer was in Home at this time, and Miss Mitchell 
 describes her as, fr a little woman in black, but not so plain. 
 Her face is a little red, but her complexion is fair, and her 
 expression very pleasing. She chatted away a good deal, 
 asked me about astronomy, and how I came to study it. I 
 told her that father put me to it, and she said that she was 
 just writing a story on the affection of father and daughter. 
 She told me that I had good eyes." 
 
 From Rome Miss Mitchell travelled to Florence, and 
 thence to Venice. In the former city she had several inter 
 views with Mrs. Somerville, whose personal appearance is 
 described by her in a letter to her father : 
 
 "She is small, very has a small but broad head looks 
 about sixty, but is really seventy-seven years of age. She 
 has blue eyes does not look much unlike Miss Bremer, but 
 has well-cut features." 
 
 Miss Mitchell s first visit to this distinguished woman was 
 rendered unsatisfactory by the volubility of an acquaintance 
 who volunteered to accompany her. A second visit was more 
 successful. This time Miss Mitchell took the precaution to 
 go alone, and thus enjoyed a long talk, of which she speaks 
 as follows in the letter already cited : 
 
 " Mrs. Somerville talks with all the readiness and clearness 
 of a man, but with no other masculine characteristic. She is 
 very gentle and womanly. She spoke of Maury, Bond, and 
 Pierce. She says that a new edition of " The Physical 
 Sciences " will be out soon, and that she will give me a copy. 
 She spoke almost severely of Dr. Whewell s book : and in 
 28 
 
452 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 the highest terms of Herschel. She is chatty and sociable, 
 without the least pretence, or the least coldness." 
 
 From the same correspondence we will quote an account 
 of a third and last conversation between these two eminent 
 votaries of science : 
 
 "I paid a last visit to Mrs. Somerville before I left Flor 
 ence. She gave me two books, and the promise of two 
 more, and some six autographs. On the occasion of the first 
 visit I told her of thy having sent her thy article on comet s 
 tails, and in the course of the last she voluntarily asked me, 
 if it was possible, to send her a copy of it. She also desired 
 me, if I could, to send her a photographed star. She had 
 never heard of its being done, and saw at once the importance 
 of such a step. She talks with a strong Scotch accent, and 
 said to me : " Ye have done yeself great credit," and so on. 
 
 From Venice Miss Mitchell journeyed northward to 
 Vienna, and thence to Berlin. Here she saw the celebrated 
 astronomer, Encke, whom she describes as, " Sixty-seven 
 years old the ugliest man that I ever saw shorter than I 
 am, and careless of dress." Encke waited upon Miss 
 Mitchell, and, among other attentions, took her to see the 
 presents made by the cities of Germany to the Princess 
 Royal, on her marriage : 
 
 "The presents were in two rooms, ticketed and numbered, 
 and a catalogue of them sold. All the manufacturing com 
 panies availed themselves of the opportunity to advertise 
 their commodities, I suppose, as she had presents of all 
 kinds. What she will do with sixty albums I can t see, but 
 I can understand the use of two clothes-lines, because she 
 can lend one to her mother, who must have a large Monday s 
 wash." 
 
 Miss Mitchell had brought with her an introduction to 
 Alexander von Humboldt. He responded to this at once by 
 an invitation to call at an appointed hour on the following 
 day. Miss Mitchell wrote a most interesting account of this 
 interview to her father. We are allowed to give the follow 
 ing extracts from the letter : 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 453 
 
 "The servant showed me into ft handsome study, and I had 
 just time enough to notice that it had a great many worsted- 
 worked cushions and a handsome sofa when Humboldt came 
 in. He was a smaller, trigger-looking man than I had 
 expected. He made a low bow, and thanked me for calling 
 then shook hands then asked me to sit On the sofa. He 
 took a chair near me and began to talk. I remained just 
 half-an-hour, as long as I thought I had any right to remain. 
 He talked every minute as fast as he could speak on all 
 manner of subjects and all varieties of people. He spoke of 
 Kansas, India, China, Observatories of Bache, Maury, 
 Gould, Ticknor, Buchanan, Jefferson, Hamilton, Brunow, 
 Peters, Encke, Airy, Leverrier, Mrs. Somerville, and a host 
 of others. He talked incessantly, but with no incoherence. 
 He said that we had retrograded morally since he was in 
 America that we had strong men in the time of Jeflcrson. 
 In speaking of astronomers he said : " Gould quarrelled with 
 Herschel, but Gould was wrong. Maury has been very 
 Useful, but, for the director of an astronomical observatory, 
 he has published some astonishing things in his " Geography 
 of the Sea." 
 
 In reference to this interview, Miss Mitchell has recently 
 said : 
 
 "Humboldt knew more of America than I did. It was 
 just at the time of the Albany Observatory quarrel, and he 
 told me where the prominent officers had gone when they 
 scattered." 
 
 It is pleasant for us that we can have a glimpse of Hum- 
 boldt s personal appearance through Miss Mitchell s eyes : 
 
 " He is handsome his hair is thin and very white his 
 dyes very blue. He has no teeth, and so his articulation is 
 indistinct, but his English was perfect. He w r ore black 
 clothes, a dark blue silk waistcoat, a white neck-cloth. He 
 is a little deaf, and so is Mrs. Somerville. He asked me 
 what instruments I had, and what I was doing, and when I 
 told him that I was interested in the variable stars, he said 
 I must go to Bonn, and see Agelander. I told him that I 
 
454 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 wanted to go home, he said that Bonn was on my way 
 to London. When I came out he followed me, and insisted 
 that I should go to see Agelandcr." 
 
 From this interesting tour, involving so varied a view of 
 the European world, and so gratifying a recognition on the 
 part of its most eminent scientists, Miss Mitchell returned in 
 the month of June, 1858, to resume her simple and retired 
 life on the island of Nantucket. Here her studies and 
 services were continued on their old footing. In the spring 
 of 1860, her mother, Lydia Colcman Mitchell, died, alter 
 some three years of failing strength, which followed a life of 
 uncommon activity and exemption from physical suffering. 
 
 In the brief autobiography written by Mr. Mitchell, and 
 already quoted from, we find the following description of the 
 beloved wife and mother : 
 
 "As she was only known to thce as early as middle life, I 
 may be permitted to speak of her person in youth. Her 
 form was perfect in its proportions, rather tall and slender, 
 and early, as in later life, she was very upright. Her step 
 was always short, and her motions quick. Her face was not 
 what would be called handsome. Her features were well- 
 formed, but her skin was slightly freckled. Her eyes were 
 her commanding feature. It was in these that the great 
 qualities of her mind and heart could be read. Her dress 
 was always according to the manner of Friends, she having 
 been for some time an overseer in the societ} r , and clerk of 
 its meetings. White dresses were evidently her prevailing 
 taste Avhile young, and in these she often appeared as elegant 
 in person as beautiful in form. She was an intense reader in 
 her youth. For the use of the books in tw6 circulating 
 libraries she served each as librarian until she had read every 
 volume. The substance of her reading through the day 
 was related to her associates in the evening, myself (in the 
 years of courtship) being frequently of the number. The 
 cares of her family took the place of her books in later 
 years, but after her children reached maturity her reading 
 was resumed." 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 455 
 
 Clearly on the island of Nantucket, in those days, it did 
 not appear that the cultivation of intellectual gifts resulted in 
 incapacitating a woman for the bearing and rearing of a large 
 family. 
 
 In 1801 Mr. Mitchell retired from business, and left the 
 island, as he says : " without an unpaid debt outside of my 
 family." This removal was to Lynn, which he chose as a 
 residence partly because his daughter Maria wished to bo 
 near Boston, and partly because the community had in it a 
 Quaker element, which promised him congenial worship and 
 sympathy. 
 
 From the small salary already mentioned by us Miss 
 Mitchell had been able to lay up money enough to make at 
 this time the purchase of a small house in Lynn, valued at 
 sixteen hundred and fifty dollars. In this house she now 
 resided for some years with her father, to whom had been 
 granted a pension of three hundred dollars per annum. 
 Maria w r as now able to earn five hundred dollars yearly by 
 computations. The pair lived comfortably on their own 
 resources, "only" says Miss Mitchell, "we w r ere obliged to 
 keep a girl, for I, having to support myself by computing, 
 could not do housework." 
 
 After a residence of five years in Lynn, Miss Mitchell was 
 appointed professor of astronomy in Vassar College, Pough- 
 keepsie. She was at first reluctant, on her father s account, 
 to accept this position. The care of his declining years 
 rested upon her, as the only daughter who. remained un 
 married. Her father was now seventy years of age. She 
 could not leave him, and feared to take him with her lest the 
 change should prove prejudicial to him. Mr. Mitchell was, 
 on the contrary, very anxious that his daughter should 
 assume the duties of the office which w r as now pressed upon 
 her acceptance. She did so, and had every reason to be 
 satisfied with the result. 
 
 Mr. Mitchell survived this change of residence about four 
 years. In his autobiography he bears testimony both to the 
 intelligence of the Vassar pupils and to the uniform respect 
 
45G MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 with which they treated him. He says: "Among the 
 teachers and pupils I have made acquaintances that a prince 
 might covet." 
 
 Miss Mitchell found at Vassar an observatory already 
 built. This quaint establishment faces the southern point of 
 the college building, and forms, with its dome, a pretty 
 feature in the view of Vassar. It has three stories, the first 
 even with the ground, and the second attainable by a high 
 flight of stone steps. The ground floor is occupied by a 
 class-room, in which lessons are given, and a bedroom, 
 occupied by one or two of Miss Mitchell s pupils. On the 
 second floor is Miss Mitchell s sitting-room, a neat and 
 tasteful apartment, well furnished with books and pictures, 
 and containing a large astronomical clock, and a much- 
 valued bust of Mrs. Somerville, the gift of Frances Power 
 Cobbe. Above this is the observatory proper, with its large 
 telescope. 
 
 In the summer of 18G9 Miss Mitchell joined the throng of 
 astronomical and other observers who were drawn to Bur 
 lington, Iowa, by its position as a central point of the total 
 eclipse of the sun predicted to take place on the morning of 
 August 7. Several pupils from Vassar accompanied her. In 
 an article contributed by her to rf Hours at Home," she gives 
 a graphic description both of the journey and the event. 
 
 The party from Vassar had brought their own instruments 
 with them. To adjust these for the occasion required both 
 labor and ingenuity. The scientific observation of an eclipse 
 is no holiday task, as we may gather from a few passages 
 quoted here and there from Miss Mitchell s paper : 
 
 " In preparing for an observation of time the astronomer 
 ascertains to a tenth of a second the condition of his chro 
 nometer, not onty how fast or how slow it is, but how much 
 that fastness or slowness varies from hour to hour. He notes 
 exactly the second and part of a second when the expected 
 event should arrive, and a short time before that he places 
 himself at the telescope. The assistant counts aloud the 
 half-second beats of the chronometer ; and the observer, with 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 457 
 
 the eye upon the point to be watched, and the ear intent on 
 the assistant s voice, awaits the event. 
 
 " At length all was ready. The observers were at the tele 
 scopes ; the regular count of the half-seconds began there 
 were some seconds of breathless suspense, and then the inky 
 blackness appeared on the burning limb of the sun. All 
 honor to my assistant, whose uniform count on and on, with 
 unwavering voice, steadied my nerves. We watched the 
 movement of the moon s black disk across the less black 
 spots on the sun s disk. As the moon moved on the crescent 
 BOOH became a narrower and narrower golden curve of light, 
 and as it seemed to break up into brilliant lines and points, 
 we knew that the total phase was only a few seconds off. 
 
 "The Mississippi assumed a leaden hue. A sickly green 
 spread over the landscape. Venus shone brightly on one 
 side of the sun, Mercury on the other, Arcturus was gleam 
 ing overhead, Saturn was rising in the east. The neigh 
 boring cattle began to low, the birds uttered a painful cry ; 
 fireflies twinkled in the foliage, and when the last ray of 
 light was extinguished a wave of sound came up from 
 the village below, the mingling of the subdued voices of the 
 multitude. 
 
 "Instantly the corona burst forth, a glory indeed! it en 
 circled the sun with a soft light, and sent off streamers for mil 
 lions of miles into space. And now it was quick work ! To 
 see what could be seen, to make notes, and to mark time, all 
 in less than three minutes, knowing all the time that narrow 
 limitation." 
 
 In 1873 Miss Mitchell again visited Europe, this time, she 
 says, for relaxation, which she seems to have found in visit 
 ing various educational institutions, and especially in in 
 specting the Imperial Observatory at Pultowa. Here she 
 was the guest of the Astronomer Struve. Her impressions 
 of Russia afterwards took shape in a lecture on St. Petersburg, 
 to which the writer has not had access. She is permitted, 
 however, to quote from some manuscript notes which Miss 
 Mitchell has preserved : 
 
458 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 "The observatory was founded by (Emperor) Nicholas in 
 1838. It takes a despotic government to encourage science, 
 and Nicholas granted three hundred thousand pounds." The 
 income of the establishment at the time of her visit was only 
 twenty-live thousand dollars, which seemed to her niggardly 
 "after so magnificent a beginning." It is interesting to learn 
 from these notes that the large telescope used at this obser 
 vatory is of the same manufacture and size as that used at the 
 observatory in Cambridge, Mass. This telescope was, she 
 found, devoted to the observation of double stars and period 
 ical comets. A special drill was at this time in progress 
 with a view to the intended observation of the transit of 
 Venus in December, 1874, when a number of instruments, 
 and even the small buildings containing them, were to be 
 transported to the coast of Asia, where the observation could 
 most perfectly be made. 
 
 Miss Mitchell was glad to find in Mme. Struve a strenuous 
 advocate of the higher education of women. Despite the 
 claims and clamors of a baby, the intelligent mother found 
 much time to converse with her guest upon this theme, so 
 interesting to both ladies. " Mme. Struve says that a great 
 many women (in Russia) are studying medicine, but very 
 few study any other science. The reason is that other 
 science does not pay. Neither did medicine pay to women 
 until it was studied by them as a science. Ways open up 
 when they are steadily sought." 
 
 In the autumn of the year 1874 Miss Mitchell was elected 
 president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, 
 succeeding in this office Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, the first 
 president of the association, then entering upon the third 
 year of its existence. In this capacity Miss Mitchell pre 
 sided over two of the annual congresses of the association, 
 of which the first was held in Syracuse, N. Y., and the second 
 in Philadelphia, in October of the Centenary of American 
 Independence. 
 
 Miss Mitchell s presidency proved a very fortunate one. 
 Contrary to her own anticipations she showed much execu- 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 459 
 
 tive efficiency in dealing with the perplexed business of the 
 congress, which was at this time overburdened by the num 
 ber of papers presented, and the insufficiency of the time 
 allotted for their consideration. She had felt at the outset 
 much distrust of her own capacity as a presiding officer. 
 Her natural shyness and lifelong habits of retirement and 
 study seemed to her an unfit preparation for a service of so 
 public a character, requiring such readiness and variety of 
 resource. The result was quite otherwise, and in accordance 
 with the Scripture saying that " Wisdom is justified of all her 
 children." 
 
 Miss Mitchell s figure and face were in themselves im 
 pressive, the one tall and erect, the other characterized 
 by thought and observation. Her fine hair, already touched 
 with silver, seemed a crown of dignity, while her penetrating, 
 yet kindly eyes, expressed at once determination and benevo 
 lence. Her ruling Avas always careful, her influence pacific 
 and harmonizing. Her adherence to principles made her 
 always direct and uncompromising, while no personal ambi 
 tion or prejudice darkened or distorted her relations with her 
 fellows. Her name had lent pursuasion to the invitation by 
 which the association had originally been called together. 
 Her presence and influence greatly aided and furthered all 
 that was solid and good in the undertaking. Her retirement 
 from the office at the end of her second term of service was 
 greatly regretted by the whole body. 
 
 One feature introduced by Miss Mitchell into the opening 
 meeting of the congress was the substitution of a silent 
 prayer, after the manner of Friends, for the vocal prayer which 
 had introduced the proceedings on former occasions. This 
 change was much approved, and the silent prayer has been 
 retained in subsequent years. 
 
 Miss Mitchell has never been willing to take upon herself 
 again the duties of president. As chairman of the committee 
 on science, she continues to give very efficient aid to the 
 association, and no congress of the Association for the Ad 
 vancement of Women passes without receiving a substantial 
 
460 MARIA MITCHELL. 
 
 proof of this interest in a paper from her pen, or from that 
 of one of her pupils. 
 
 Besides the article on the eclipse of 1809, already cited, 
 Miss Mitchell has contributed, at intervals, to " Silliman s 
 Journal," and to the "American Journal of Arts and 
 Sciences." From the latter have been reprinted " Notes on 
 the Satellites of Saturn, "and from the former, a series of 
 observations of the satellites of Jupiter, extending from the 
 winter of 1870-71 to June 19, 1877. 
 
 Miss Mitchell has now occupied the chair of professor of 
 astronomy at Vassar College for seventeen years. During 
 this period the Vassar Observatory has acquired for itself a 
 recognized place in the annals of scientific study. Many able 
 teachers of mathematics have been trained within its walls. 
 
 In response to a question lately asked her about the results 
 of her professional labors, Miss Mitchell said: "The pupils 
 of Vassar are of great promise. They have been a won 
 derful cheer to me." She had not previously known much 
 of young girls as students, and was surprised to find in them 
 so much of latent power. 
 
 To the same questioner Miss Mitchell has kindly given the 
 following outline of a working-day at Vassar : 
 
 " Morning. I receive two classes. 
 
 "Afternoon. I prepare for the next day, and copy observa 
 tions. 
 
 " Evening. I observe for two hours if the weather is fine. 
 My assistant watches the sun-spots daily. 
 
 " Night ? Formerly, I worked a good deal at night, but of 
 late, I plan my observing for the evenings, making observa 
 tions on Saturn at present (February, 1883) and on some 
 other planet when that is in a good position in the evening." 
 
 Miss Mitchell is now in the sixty-fifth year of her age. In 
 her mature life she has only once suffered from severe illness, 
 and in this case her indisposition was attributed to malaria. 
 Her devotion to scientific pursuits has therefore been sec 
 onded by vigorous bodily health, which as yet shows no 
 symptom of decline. Her carriage is still erect and stately, 
 
MARIA MITCHELL. 461 
 
 and her dark eyes retain their penetrating but kindly glance. 
 She does not adhere to the denomination of Friends, either in 
 her form of dress or of worship. Nevertheless, a certain 
 simplicity of taste and directness of speech are marks (valu 
 able ones, we think) of her early training in a Quaker church 
 and household. 
 
 In her college life Miss Mitchell has been a valued friend 
 to pupils, teachers, and president. Although averse to 
 frivolity, she sympathizes in all the reasonable pleasures of 
 the young people, and has herself a freshness of feeling and 
 enjoyment of life which can only accompany a wise use both 
 of time and of power. That she may long continue in her 
 honored position must be the earnest wish of all who, know 
 ing her worth, have at heart the interests of science and the 
 higher education of women. 
 
 o 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 BY MARY CLEMMER. 
 
 A Rare Example of Womanhood Ancestry of Lucretia Mott The Women 
 of Nantucket Celebrating the Fourth of July A Nantucket Tea- 
 party Lucretia Mott s Marriage A Marvellously Mated Pair A 
 Perfect Wedded Life of Fifty-seven Years Power as a Preacher 
 Abhorrence of Slavery How the Colored People Revered Her Name 
 Surrounded by a Mob Claiming and Receiving Protection from a Ruffian 
 
 Dauntless Bravery Reception in England Mrs. Mott s Domestic 
 Life Devotion to Her Children Her Thrift, Industry, and Economy 
 
 Her Home a Refuge for Runaway Slaves The Meeting-place of Re 
 formers Lnst Years of Her Life A Great Philanthropist, Great 
 Preacher, and Perfect Woman. 
 
 NY attendant upon the Woman s Suffrage meetings 
 
 j i on 
 
 of the United States to the year 1880, among 
 the many remarkable women on the platform, 
 might have seen one who, in her combined 
 attributes of person, mind, and spirit, was the 
 l^x most remarkable of all ; and this woman Avas 
 Lucretia Mott. In this place the most remark 
 able thing about her Avas the atmosphere created 
 around her by her unique and exalted personality. 
 Born of the spirit, it was felt by the indifferent and 
 the antagonistic, even when it could not be analyzed. If one 
 was armed with opposing views, mailed in the mind that was 
 in St. Paul concerning women, it was easy enough to antago 
 nize the brilliant esprit of Mrs. Stanton, the aggressive Avit 
 of Susan I>. Anthony, the free thought of Ernestine L. Rose ; 
 but Morgan Dix or St. Paul himself would instinctively 
 have been mollified, if not persuaded, by that winning, 
 womanly figure, so essentially feminine in its aspect, with 
 462 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 463 
 
 its Quaker garb and meekly-folded kerchief; by the dark, 
 appealing eyes and gentle mouth, whose benignant sweet 
 ness robbed dominant chin and lofty brow of all aggressive 
 harshness. 
 
 Wherever she was she brought with her an atmosphere of 
 good-will which won everybod}-. Since her death, a gentle 
 man who was never a lover of Woman s Suffrage Conven 
 tions, said : " I never felt the slightest antagonism to any 
 thing she said, no matter how much I differed from her." 
 Who could feel any antagonism to such a lovely mother as 
 that, " whatever she might see fit to believe?" 
 
 She was an illustrious example of the potency of per 
 sonality in its finest and rarest .development. Not her 
 opinions but she herself was the force that swayed mankind. 
 Through the alembic of such a nature beliefs and deeds alike 
 rose to the highest altitude of character, and through it, and 
 from it, fell in perpetual benediction upon her day and gener 
 ation. 
 
 I present her to her compatriots, not merely as a philan 
 thropist or a reformer, but in every attribute of character and 
 of action as one of the rarest examples of womanhood 
 America has yet produced. A woman so exalted herself 
 that all other women may adore and follcnv her, not for one 
 time, but for all time. Nothing could have been more fitting 
 to her character and her future than that Lucre! ia Mott 
 should have been born on the island of Nantucket, where 
 she first saw this world s light January 3, 1793. She came 
 from the oldest stock that peopled this memorable island ; 
 on her father s side from James Coffin and Thomas Macy, 
 who from Martha s Vineyard and Salisbury, Massachusetts, 
 came to Nautican in 1659, when it claimed as its inhabitants 
 three thousand Indians. Thomas Macy fled from the govern 
 ment of Massachusetts Bay, that wished to punish him for 
 being a Quaker, by branding him with iron, scourging him 
 at the pillory, and cropping his ears. He preferred the 
 Indians and Nantucket. 
 
 The Quaker poet of the island sings of him : 
 
464 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 "Far ronnd the bleak and stormy Cape 
 
 The vent roiis Macy passed, 
 And on Nantucket s naked isle, 
 Drew up his boat at last." 
 
 The Coffin family also claimed among its numbers Sir Isaac 
 Coffin, who was an admiral in the British Navy. He was the 
 son of a Boston Tory, and, with the Nantucket Coffins, was 
 descended from an ancient North Devonshire English family. 
 Sir Isaac left Boston for England in 1773, where after various 
 vicissitudes he was made a baronet in 1804, and full admiral 
 in 1814. As late as 1826 he visited the island of Nantucket, 
 and endowed with a fund of twenty-five hundred pounds 
 sterling the Coffin School which flourishes there to-day. The 
 father of Lucretia Coffin Thomas Coffin came from a 
 sturdy race of sea-captains, and, like hundreds of others of 
 these island captains, pursued the whale in distant seas, while 
 his wife and little daughters kept the house, kept the shop, 
 and made periodical commercial voyages to Boston, engaged 
 in the traffic of oil and candles for provisions and goods of 
 merchandise. We need not wonder that the woman who as 
 a child began life in this wise was as careful and thrifty at 
 eighty years of age as she was at thirteen. 
 
 From her mother Lucretia Mott was descended from Peter 
 Folger, who was another of the original proprietors of Nan 
 tucket. He was a remarkable man, the father of the mother 
 of Benjamin Franklin. His name is still found on deeds 
 transmitting land from the natives, it flourishes in family 
 relics and in family titles, and is honorably borne by the 
 present Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Hon. 
 Charles J. Folger. Inheriting the positive mental and phys 
 ical characteristics of a positive race, trained under the dis 
 tinctive conditions of development which are sure to stamp 
 individuality upon any character which receives their force 
 ful impressions, Lucretia Coffin grew to her tAvelfth year 
 on this island of the sea. A tiny span were these years 
 in her long and illustrious life, yet it was long enough to 
 allow the young girl s growth in all the sturdy elements, 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 467 
 
 nnd all the great principles of broad thinking and high 
 living which distinguished her afterwards. In these few 
 brief years she came to a perfect consciousness of her love 
 of knowledge, her love of truth, her love of justice, her 
 love of the oppressed, of the toiling, for all who had need 
 .of her, and to a perfect acquaintance with all the practical 
 duties of life. Mrs. Mott writes of these early years in her 
 diary : " I always loved the good in Childhood and desired to 
 do right. In those early years I was actively useful to my 
 mother, who, in the absence of my father on his long voyages, 
 was engaged in the mercantile business, often going to Boston 
 to purchase goods in exchange for oil and candles, the staple 
 of the island. 
 
 * The exercise of women s talents in this line, as well as 
 the general care which devolved on them in the absence of 
 their husbands, tended to develop and strengthen them meiv- 
 tally and physically." 
 
 This continent could scarcely present another spot whose 
 conditions of atmosphere, of intelligence, of self-reliance, of 
 thrift, would all tend to so unique a training, to so distinctive 
 a life for its women as does Nantucket. It is a foregone fact 
 that it produces men and women of great intelligence, but 
 outside of that it is equally true that every Nantucketer is 
 marked by a quality of mind and habit of thought essentially 
 his or her own. In contact with the world this may merge 
 into a larger cosmopolitan life till it seems to be lost till 
 some fortunate touch of time or place recalls the old memo 
 ries, and for the moment the Nantucketer is as perfectly him 
 self again as if he had never left his native island. 
 
 But a few years since the writer of these lines chanced to 
 be at Nantucket on the Fourth of July. The historic day 
 was celebrated in the Fair Grounds about a mile from the 
 town, and it was celebrated solely by the women of Nan 
 tucket. Not only did they move thither in their open carts, 
 laden with hampers of deliciously-cooked food, with viands 
 enough to supply a small regiment ; but beside those consola 
 tions for the stomach, which they dispensed later with a liberal 
 
468 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 hand, they bore the Constitution of the United States and 
 various orations studiously thought and written out, Avhich, 
 in addition to extemporaneous addresses, they delivered to 
 the crowd on the sward with fervent unction and no halting: 
 
 O 
 
 eloquence. They mounted the platform of their large, shaded 
 pavilion, and with the ruddy moors stretching away to the 
 south shore, and the monotone of the waves breaking on San 
 Coty Head, their voices rose and spread far away into the 
 purple spflce, in words of enthusiasm for truth, for temper 
 ance, for freedom, for country. Do you wonder that Lucretia 
 Mott, born of such a race, nurtured in such an atmosphere, 
 even at eighteen years of age was an incipient preacher, an 
 inspired seer? 
 
 A few days later your friend was invited to a tea-party, in 
 vited out of human good-Avill, for she sat a stranger to every 
 person at the table, and every person but herself was a 
 native of the island of Nantucket. After delicious strawber 
 ries, biscuit, cake, and tea had been dispensed, the hostess, 
 not stirring from her seat at the head of the table, said to 
 her guests still gathered around it, " Now the literary ex 
 ercises of the Tea will begin." Indeed she began them 
 herself by repeating tAvo quotations of poetry, adding. 
 "Friend Anne, can thee tell me where I found that?" 
 Strange to say friend Anne could not tell, from so remote 
 and difficult a source had it been extracted. But friend 
 Hannah knew all about it, and its antique author also. 
 This was the beginning of a pastime covering a wide range 
 of research and of cultivation. It was a tilt of memory, a 
 race of Avits, an aesthetic garnishing of the mind and the hour 
 that left no room for gossip about neighbors or servants. 
 
 I recall the incident as I read in a brief record of Lucretia 
 Mott, made at the time of her death, that Avhcn she Aveighed 
 less than eighty pounds and had lived more than eighty 
 years, her daily pastime was to sit reciting to herself the 
 poetry which she had learned generations before In old Nan- 
 tucket. In the cool of the evening, she Avould sit repeat 
 ing in tones of liquid sweetness \vhole pages of " CoAvper s 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 469 
 
 Task," "Young s Night Thoughts," and of Milton when his 
 lofty strains did not jar upon her wider and clearer sense of 
 justice. Through her long life her sermons and addresses 
 were garnished with the fine and eloquent citations from 
 standard authors which she began to commit to memory, ac 
 cording to universal habit, in her girlish days at Nan tucket. 
 Susan B. Anthony tells us that when she had passed her 
 eighty-seventh year she spent an entire evening until after 
 eleven o clock reading aloud to her household Arnold s ex 
 quisite poem "The Light of Asia." 
 
 Those who recall that deep and tender voice may thrill in 
 memory at its moving sweetness, while to the strong, great 
 souls gathered about her this woman of more than eighty- 
 seven years read the parting words of the Lord Siddartha to 
 his wife and love, Yasodhara, as he left her to go forth to 
 save the world : 
 
 " Comfort thee, dear ! he said, if comfort lives 
 In changeless love ; for though thy dreams may be 
 Shadows of things to come, and though the gods 
 Are shaken in their seats, and though the world 
 Stands nigh to know some way of help, 
 Yet whatsoever fall to thee and me, 
 Be sure I loved and love Yasodhara." 
 
 " I will depart," he spake, " the hour is come ! 
 ... I lay aside these realms 
 Which wait the gleaming of my naked sword ; 
 My chariot shall not roll with bloody wheels 
 From victory to victory, till earth 
 Wears the red record of my name. I choose 
 To tread its paths with patient, stainless feet, 
 Making its dust my bed, its loneliest wastes 
 My dwelling, and its meanest things my mates : 
 Clad in no prouder garb than outcasts wear, 
 Fed with no meats save what the charitable 
 Give of their will, sheltered by no more pomp 
 Than the dim cave lends or the jungle bosh. 
 This will I do because the woful cry 
 Of life and all flesh living cometh up 
 29 
 
470. LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 Into my ears, and all my soul is full 
 Of pity for the sickness of this world ; 
 Which I will heal if healing may be found 
 By uttermost renouncing and strong strife." 
 
 "This will I do who have a realm to lose 
 Because I love my realm, because my heart 
 Beats with each throb of all the hearts that ache, 
 Known and unknown, these that are mine and those, 
 Which shall be mine, a thousand million more 
 Saved by this sacrifice I offer now." 
 
 It is like seeing Lucretia Mott anew to recall her reading 
 these lines, so completely do they repeat in essence the spirit 
 that was in her and that moved her through her whole exist 
 ence in her relations to the human race. 
 
 In 1708 a woman, Mary Starbuck, called "the Great 
 Merchant," a woman of deep spiritual convictions as well as 
 executive thrift, proved not only her executive ability to 
 engage in the commerce of the world, but was in her own 
 personality potent enough to win over the entire population 
 of Nantucket to the faith of the Friends or, in other words, 
 converted the entire colony to Quakerism. 
 
 The momentum of this woman penetrates to-day the mind, 
 the manners, the very atmosphere of Nantucket. In no other 
 place in America is its womanhood so distinct, original and 
 independent, both in thought and action, as on the island of 
 Nantucket. 
 
 Thus Lucretia Mott in the singular sweetness of her nature, 
 in the equally singular force of her character, the freedom of 
 her thought, was but the natural sequence of the conditions 
 in which she was born and nurtured. Her heredity, her 
 training, the very atmosphere of her island home made her 
 what she was. Neither sex nor opposition, contumely nor 
 persecution, ever lessened one iota the distinctive quality of 
 her convictions, the breadth of her comprehension, nor the 
 beneficence of her work as a human being. 
 
 When thirteen years of age Lucretia Coffin and an elder 
 sister were sent to " The Nine Partners," a Friends boarding- 
 
LUCRETJA MOTT. 471 
 
 school, in Duchess County, New York. There she remained 
 two years without a vacation. At fifteen, she became an 
 assistant teacher in the school, and at the end of the second 
 year became teacher with the opportunity to offer to a young 
 sister the means of education. Another teacher at " The 
 Nine Partners " was young James Mott, the son of an old 
 Quaker family from Long Island. The two, the young 
 man and the maid, true counterparts in temperament and in 
 spirit, in obedience to Nature s primal law, in the beauty of 
 their youth, loved and wedded. 
 
 Lucretia Coffin was in her eighteenth year, and James 
 Mott had just passed his twentieth, when they entered into 
 the closest compact of life-long lovers, which with them lasted 
 more than fifty-seven years. 
 
 In speaking of this marvellously mated pair, Robert Coll- 
 yer says : " If James and Lucretia had gone around the 
 world in search of a mate, I think they would have made the 
 choice that heaven made for them. They had lived together 
 more than forty years when I first knew them. I thought 
 then, as I think now, that it was the most perfect wedded 
 life to bo found on earth. They were both of a most beau 
 tiful presence. He, large, fair, with kindly blue eyes and 
 regular features. She, slight, with dark eyes and hair. Both 
 of the sunniest spirit ; both free to take their own way, as 
 such fine souls always are, yet their lives were so perfectly 
 one that neither of them led or followed the other, so far as 
 one could observe, by the breadth of a line. He could speak 
 well in a slow, wise way, when the spirit moved him, and the 
 words were all the choicer because they were so few. But 
 his greatness for he was a great man lay still in that fine, 
 silent manhood, which would break into fluent speech while 
 you sat with him by the bright wood fire in winter, while the 
 good wife went on with her knitting, putting it swiftly down 
 a score of times in an hour to pound a vagrant spark which 
 had snapped on the carpet, or as we sat under the trees in the 
 summer twilight. Then James Mott would open his heart to 
 those he loved, and touch you with wonder at the beauty of 
 
472 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 his thoughts ; or toll you stories of the city where, when a 
 young man, he lived; or of the choice humor of ancient 
 Quakers, who went through the world esteeming laughter 
 vain, and yet set the whole world laughing at their own quaint 
 ways and curious fancies." 
 
 But the wonderful unison of spirit and action which made 
 the married life of James and Lucretia Mott one lono- har- 
 
 O 
 
 mony, complete in every part, was not the mere accident of 
 congenial temperaments coming together in one house, or of 
 two happy tempers acting together under one name, hut be 
 yond everything it was the result of their oneness of moral 
 purpose, their oneness in devotion to what they believed to 
 be right, their oneness of sympathy with the oppressed and 
 wronged everywhere. 
 
 Later in life, when attending the marriage of friends, it was 
 the custom of Lucretia Mott after the ceremony to speak a 
 few words of counsel to the bridal pair. On one such occa 
 sion she told the young couple that she owed the happiness 
 of her own married life to the fact that her husband and her 
 self were one in the deep interest they felt in the sacred 
 cause of wronged humanity. 
 
 She said to a friend : " James and I have loved each other 
 more than ever since we worked together for a great cause." 
 
 Benignantly beautiful in age, her beauty in youth was an 
 inspiration and delight to all who beheld it. Her figure was 
 slight and petite. Her features delicate and regular. Her 
 e t yes, widely set and full, were of that limpid-gray that deep 
 ens and darkens into black when moved by the excitement of 
 sympathy, or the animation of conversation. Beside her 
 husband, who was tall and muscular, she looked a sprite in 
 her simple dove-colored dress, with the white muslin ker 
 chief crossed upon her breast, and the quaint little Quaker 
 cap framing the noble and beautiful face. 
 
 John G. Whittier, who met her first when she was forty 
 years of age, says of her : " I first met her in the convention 
 of 1833, which formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. 
 A woman then comparatively young, singularly beautiful in 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 473 
 
 feature and expression, dressed in the plain but not inelegant 
 garb of a Friend, she sat among us, quietly listening, occa 
 sionally giving in a few well-chosen words, her thought on 
 soino point under discussion." 
 
 On their marriage James and Lucretia Mott joined her 
 family in Philadelphia, James entering business with his 
 father-in-law, Thomas Coffin. The partnership was of short 
 duration, for Thomas Coffin died suddenly, leaving his widow 
 in straitened circumstances with five children to support. 
 Of this season of trial Lucretia writes : The fluctuations 
 of the commercial world, owing to the Embargo, and the 
 war of 1812, the death of my father and the support of five 
 children devolving on my mother, surrounded us with diffi 
 culties. AVe resorted to various modes of obtaining a com 
 fortable living at one time engaged in the dry-goods busi 
 ness, and then resumed the charge of a school, and for 
 another year I was engaged in teaching." She adds : " These 
 trials in early life were not without their good effect in dis 
 ciplining the mind and leading it to set a just estimate on 
 worldly pleasures." 
 
 Later, James Mott entered the cotton trade, but in the 
 heyday of financial success relinquished it from conscientious 
 motives. As his wife had resolved in her devotion to the en 
 slaved " to abstain from all slave-grown products," so James 
 Mott relinquished a remunerative business because its profits 
 were possible only by slave labor. He finally engaged in the 
 wool business, and through that won the competency that 
 gave leisure, travel, books and cultivation to the later years 
 of this intellectual and devoted pair. 
 
 After living a life of concentrated devotion to father and 
 
 O 
 
 mother, brothers and sisters, husband and children, till she 
 had lived twenty-five years, she touched unaware the key 
 note of her special power, of her everlasting fame. Of that 
 crisis in her life she says : 
 
 " At twenty-five years of age, surrounded with a family 
 and many cares, I felt called to a more public life of devotion 
 to duty, and engaged in the ministry in the Society of Friends, 
 
474 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 receiving every encouragement from those in authority until 
 the separation amongst us in 1827, when rny convictions led 
 me to adhere to those who believed in the sufficiency of light 
 within, resting on truth for authority rather than authority 
 for truth. 
 
 " I searched the Scriptures daily, often finding a construc 
 tion of the text wholly different from that which had been 
 pressed on our acceptance. The highest evidence of a sound 
 faith being the practical life of the Christian, I have felt a 
 far greater interest in the moral movements of the age than 
 in any theological discussion. . . . My sympathy was early 
 enlisted for the poor slaves. The ministry of Ellas Hicks 
 and others on the subject of the unrequited labor of slaves, 
 and their example in refusing the products of slave labor, all 
 had their effect in awakening a strong feeling in their behalf. 
 
 " The unequal condition of women in society also early 
 impressed my mind. Learning while at school that the 
 charge for the education of girls was the same as for boys, 
 and that when they became teachers women received but half 
 us much as men for their services, the injustice of this was 
 so apparent that I early resolved to claim for my sex all that 
 an impartial Creator had bestowed. . . . The temperance 
 reform early engaged my attention, and for more than twenty- 
 five years I have practised total abstinence from all intoxicat 
 ing drinks. . . . The cause of peace has had a share of my 
 efforts. . . . The oppression of the working-classes by ex 
 isting monopolies and the lowness of wages often engaged 
 my attention. I have held many meetings with them, and 
 heard their appeals with compassion and a great desire for a 
 radical change in the system which makes the rich richer and 
 the poor poorer. . . . But the millions of downtrodden 
 classes, being the greatest sufferers, the most oppressed class, 
 I felt bound to plead their cause in season and out of season. 
 . . . This duty was impressed upon me at the time I con 
 secrated myself to that gospel which anoints to preach deliv 
 erance to the captive, to set at liberty them that are 
 bruised. " 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 475 
 
 Thus we read in her own simple words the confession of 
 her faith and the statement of her " call " as a preacher of the 
 gospel. For perfectly as she performed the humblest duty 
 of a woman s life, exalted as she was as a fragile woman, 
 her claim upon the remembrance of posterity is that of a 
 great-brained, great-hearted philanthropist, a consecrated, 
 self-forgetting preacher of the truth. 
 
 She belonged to that rarest, highest order of human be 
 ing whose real potency lies in sheer personality in a per 
 sonality, penetrating, pervading, all-inspired, and consecrated. 
 Lucretia Mott was in herself a perfect illustration of what 
 pure spiritual force may be and do in a single personality. 
 ,As an embodiment of spiritual force she was the supreme 
 American woman of her century. 
 
 The key to her power and to her place as a public preacher 
 in the ministry of the Friends is found in her primal declara 
 tion : " My convictions led me to adhere to the sufficiency of 
 the light within us, resting on truth as authority, not on 
 authority as truth." This declaration of her faith set her at 
 once beyond the pale of man s authority or theology, as ex 
 pressed in the canons of the Universal Church. It left her 
 unrcached by the dictum of St. Paul, as interpreted by his 
 brethren. Not that she ignored St. Paul, or believed that 
 she disobeyed him ; but reading his eloquent declarations by 
 the illumination of her own God-seeking spirit, she stopped 
 to inquire of no man what she should or should not do. If 
 she did not desire the praise of men, neither did she fear 
 their censure, nor heed with spiritual awe their dogmas. Not 
 that she was puffed up in her own conceit, but because she 
 sought but two things, mental freedom, spiritual sight, that 
 through these she might consecrate all that Avas hers to the 
 service of humanity and of God. " How," she cried, " can 
 I follow the light of God without a free, fearless, single- 
 minded use of the powers lie gives me ? " How she should 
 use these powers she inquired of no man. The history of all 
 past ages forbade her to do so. Again she declared : " Prov 
 ing all things, trying all things, and holding fast only to 
 
476 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 that which is good, is the great religious duty of this age. 
 ... I desire to escape the narrow walls of a particular 
 church, and to live under the open sky, in the broad light, 
 looking far and wide, seeing with my own eyes, hearing with 
 my own ears, and following truth meekly but resolutely, how 
 ever arduous or solitary may be the path in which she leads. 
 . . . I thank God that 1 live at a time and under cir 
 cumstances which make it my duty to lay open my whole 
 mind with freedom and sincerity." At a later day we may 
 thank God that searching the Scriptures daily, daily seek 
 ing only to know the truth and to do her duty, she sought 
 concerning them the command of the inward witness in 
 stead of the mandates of men, martinets of theolog} 7 , who, 
 in the name of St. Paul, would have stilled at birth the spon 
 taneous eloquence and consecrated utterances of this gentle 
 prophetess of the Friends. When she was " called " to speak, 
 at eighteen years of age, at the funeral of a, friend, she 
 obeyed the command without pausing to argue her right to 
 that obedience. But more than thirty years afterwards, in a 
 National Convention held in Philadelphia, she defended the 
 position which so quietly yet so firmly she took in her early 
 youth. After a clergyman had arisen in the open convention 
 quoting numerous passages from the Scriptures to prove that 
 no lesson is more plainly and frequently taught in the Bible 
 than woman s subjection," and Mrs. Tracy Cutter had replied 
 in these Avords : " It is a pity that those who would recom 
 mend the Bible as the revealed will of the all-wise benevolent 
 Creator, should uniformly quote it on the side of tyranny and 
 oppression, "Mrs. Mott arose and said : " It is not Christianity 
 but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her. . . . 
 "Instead of taking the truths of the Bible in corroboration 
 of the right, the practice has been to turn over its pages to 
 find example and authority for the wrong for the existing 
 
 abuses of society Even admitting that Paul did 
 
 mean preach when he used that term, he did not say that the 
 recommendation of that time was to be applicable to the 
 churches of all after-time. . . . We should find, comparing 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 477 
 
 text, with text, that, a very dido rent construction might bo put 
 upon tlicm. ... In tlio sumo epistle to the same church, 
 Piiul gave express directions how women shall prophesy, 
 which he defines to be preaching, speaking to men for ex 
 hortation and comfort. He recognized them in prophesying 
 and praying. The word translated servant is applied to a 
 man in one part of the Scriptures, and in another it is trans 
 lated minister. Now that same word you will find might be 
 applied to Phoebe, ;i deaconess. ... In this same epistle the 
 word prophesy ing should be preaching preaching godliness." 
 . . . " Cn the occasion of the first miracle which it is said 
 Christ wrought, a woman went before him and said, What 
 soever he biddeth you do, that do. The woman of Samaria 
 said, Come and see the man who told me all the things that 
 ever I did. . . . The language of the Bible is beautiful in 
 its repetition Upon my servants and my handmaidens 1 
 will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy. " 
 
 As early as 1848, in the convention held at Rochester, Lucretia 
 Mott arose and said, " Many of the opposers of Woman s Rights 
 who bid us obey the bachelor St. Paul themselves reject his 
 counsel. He advises them not to marry, but even a clergy 
 man will marry twice or thrice. In general answer I will 
 quote, One is your Master, even Christ. " 
 
 These words of Lucretia Mott are given at length, not as 
 
 ~ O 
 
 argument to prove her right to preach, but to prove the spirit 
 in which she preached. 
 
 True in spirit and in fact as these utterances defining her atti 
 tude as a public teacher are, they do not and cannot annul the 
 great fact of nature which makes the duties of priesthood in 
 compatible with the functions of ordinary womanhood. But 
 equally true and equally potent is the fact that from the be 
 ginning of time exceptional women have at intervals appeared 
 in the human race, as if to prove the primal unity of its cre 
 ation in the likeness of God, women who by governing con 
 ditions and special individual gifts have been called forth from 
 the common lot to fill an uncommon place and to do an un 
 common work. All the way down the centuries ecclesiastical 
 
478 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 men have protested and tyrannized and told women that they 
 were nothing if they were not inferior and subordinate. St. 
 Paul s words have been wrested from their corollaries by ar 
 bitrary men to command the subjection and silence of women. 
 Yet the uplifted woman-seer has never ceased to see the 
 heavenly vision ; the woman-oracle has never been dumb. 
 The prophetess has always existed as well as the prophet ; 
 her sublime strain penetrates all the ages. More than six 
 hundred years before Homer was born, Miriam joined her 
 lofty chorus to the glad song of Moses. "And Miriam the 
 prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; 
 and all the women went out with her with timbrels and 
 dances." The women of Israel were gathered together not in 
 the house, for they "went out," and Miriam the prophetess 
 went before, not a trembling woman, but a rapturous leader 
 of the exultant women who followed her. " Sinjj } r e to the 
 Lord for he hath triumphed gloriously!" she cried; and/ 
 strange to tell, there was no Knox Little, nor Morgan Dix 
 standing in the road to command silence and order all these 
 inferior beings back into the house, lest the very happiness 
 of their voices bring reproach on Israel. 
 
 The second woman elevated by the Almighty to public 
 dignity and supreme authority was Deborah. "And Deborah, 
 a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that 
 time." How lofty the femininity, how profound the tender 
 ness of her declaration: "The inhabitants of the villages 
 ceased, they ceased in Israel until that I, Deborah, arose, 
 that I arose a mother in Israel ! " 
 
 She was prophetess, she Avas judge, she w r as the leader 
 of the tribes, but of no one of these functions of authority 
 did she boast. "I, Deborah, arose a MOTHER in ISRAEL," 
 she declared. In her soul the primal womanly function 
 compassed and covered all other authority. Great in the 
 motherhood of wisdom, she judged Israel for forty years. 
 What significance we find in the last words recorded of her : 
 "And the land had REST for forty years." It requires no 
 tension of the imagination to think of Lucretia Mott as a 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 479 
 
 ruler und mother in Israel for forty years. We go back to 
 these women whose greatness reaches us from the morning 
 twilight of time. We pause over the meagre records of in 
 spired and consecrated women who stand august and holy in 
 every age, how often sanctified by suffering, exalted by mar 
 tyrdom, and while we gaze wo marvel that even to-day so 
 many consecrated men delight to give ecclesiastically the 
 narrowest instead of the broadest, the most humiliating in 
 stead of the most ennobling interpretation of woman s place 
 and woman s work in the Christian Church. 
 
 Clergymen delight to declare often and eloquently the 
 immeasurable debt owed by women to the Christian Church. 
 Woman owes everything to the life and words of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, who, in all his earthly life and ministry, never 
 uttered a word that could wound the sensitive heart of a 
 woman ; who never did a deed to depress or humiliate her in 
 the scale of being ; who never lectured her from the basis of 
 sex ; who never told her she was inferior because she was a 
 woman, but who always addressed her as a human being. 
 Yes, woman owes everything to Jesus Christ, but how little 
 she owes to his masculine interpreters ! Christianity as in 
 terpreted by men owes to women a debt it can never 
 pay. How much more has she done for Christianity than 
 Christianity, as promulgated by men, has ever done for 
 her I 
 
 Suppose a part of the breath and the words now expended 
 by clergymen in reiterating St. Paul s injunction of silence, 
 and in preaching woman s inferiority, biblical subjection, and 
 man s everlasting supremacy, were sometimes used as well 
 in recalling the name of Miriam, the exalted place of Deborah, 
 the self-abnegation of Priscilla, who, Paul says, "For 
 my life laid down her own neck;" of Persis who labored 
 much in the Lord ; of " the elect lady " of St. John ; of the 
 four prophetesses of Cesanea? If the minds of men who are 
 church-members and ministers turned with half the celerity 
 to these honored names and lives that they do to the per 
 petual assertion of their own supremacy and authority, they 
 
480 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 would gain unawares a co-operation of women in the service 
 of the church of which now the} do not even dream. 
 
 Sucli now is the mental activity, the intellectual and spirit 
 ual aspiration of universal womanhood, that no cause, not 
 even that of religion, no organization, not even that of the 
 church, is, or can be, helped by men constantly reminding 
 woman of her degradation through Eve and her consequent 
 subjection and inferiority to man. The sooner ministers 
 accept this fact, and act from it, the better it will be for the 
 Christian Church and the entire human race. Live and let 
 live most of all in the Gospel, wherein all are declared to 
 be one in Christ should be the primal and ever-present 
 desire of every Christian heart and mind. 
 
 Thus lived and preached Lucretia Mott. She was one in 
 that small but illustrious line of heaven-ordained women 
 ministers which holds in exalted memory the names of 
 Susanna Wesley, of Mary Fletcher, Dinah Evans, Rachel 
 Southcotc, Elizabeth Fry, Margaret Von Cott, and Sarah 
 Smiley. 
 
 Robert Collyer, who knew her well, said of her, "It was 
 not possible that a woman like Lucretia Mott should keep 
 silent in the churches, because that great brain was created 
 to think, and the noble heart to beat through, making and 
 moulding speech, and those line dark eyes to see what the 
 prophets see. 
 
 " And had she not been reared among those who have 
 always held the woman to be a minister of God as truly as 
 the man? . . . An old friend in Lancaster County told 
 me once of his first hearing her in the early days when she 
 was almost unknown. . . . He had had a dreary time 
 with the Friends that day, but at last a woman stood up he 
 had not seen before, whose presence touched him with strange, 
 new expectations. She looked, he said, as if she had no 
 great hold on life, and began to speak in low tones, with just 
 a touch of hesitation as of one who is feeling after her 
 thought, and there was a tremor as if she felt the burden of 
 the Spirit. But she found her w r ay out of all this, and then 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 481 
 
 he began to hold his breath. He had not heard such epenk- 
 ino- in all his life. It was so born of all conviction, so surely 
 
 O ** 
 
 out of the inner heart of the truth, and so radiant with the 
 inward light for which he had been waiting, that he went 
 home feeling as he supposed they must have felt in the old 
 time who thought that they had heard an angel." 
 
 Robert Collyer goes on to say, " I once heard such an out 
 pouring. It was at a wood-meeting up among the hills. She 
 was well on in years then, but the old fire still burned clear, 
 and God s breath touched her out of heaven and she pro 
 phesied. . . . For two hours she held the multitude 
 spell-bound, waiting on her words. ... I have said she 
 prophesied. No other term would answer to her speech. 
 Her eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord and 
 she testified of that she had seen ; and this was all the more 
 wonderful to me, because it was the habit of her mind in her 
 later years to reason from premise to conclusion. 
 But she had seen a vision sitting there in the August splendor, 
 with the voice whispering of God s presence in the trees, and 
 the vision had sent the heart high above the brain. 
 
 ff I think I should not quite have known my friend but for 
 that wood-meeting, as we should not quite have known Christ 
 but for the Sermon on the Mount." 
 
 An illustration of her power as a preacher despite all pre 
 judice is given in an incident which occurred after the World s 
 Convention. Returning from lOurope in a merchant-vessel, 
 on the voyage Mrs. Mott was moved to hold a religious 
 meeting among the great number of Irish emigrants in the 
 steerage. But they objected. They w r ould not hear a woman 
 preach, for women priests were not allowed in the church. 
 But the spirit that was pressing on "the woman preacher" 
 was not to be prevented from delivering its message. She 
 asked that the emigrants might be asked to come together 
 to consider with her whether they would have a meeting. 
 That seemed fair and just, so they came. She explained 
 to them how different her idea of a meeting was from a church 
 service to which they were accustomed ; that she had no 
 
482. LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 thought of saying anything derogatory to that service, nor 
 of the priests who ministered to them; that her heart had 
 been drawn to them in sympathy as they were leaving their 
 old home for the new one in America ; and that she had 
 wanted to address them as to their habits and aims in their 
 everyday life in such a way as to help them in the land of 
 strangers to which they were going. And then askino- them 
 
 *^j . <_? o <^ 
 
 if they would listen (and they were already listening, because 
 her gracious words and voice had so entranced them that they 
 could not help it) she said she would give an outline of what 
 she wanted to say at the meeting. So she was drawn on by 
 the silent sympathy she had secured until the whole of the 
 Spirit s message was delivered and only the keenest-witted 
 of her Catholic hearers waked up to the fact as they were 
 going out that they had listened to the preaching of the 
 woman priest after all. 
 
 "William Adams, a Friend, of Philadelphia, at his death, in 
 1858, left a diary in which are recorded many of his impres 
 sions of Lucretia Mott s ministry as he had sat under it at the 
 Cheny and Race Street Meeting back to 1841. 
 
 Under date of third month, 1841, he writes : " At meeting 
 this morning there were several speakers, Lucretia Molt as 
 usual in her plain, close, searching style." 
 
 " Eleventh month. Evening meeting was much croAvded. 
 I should say more than two thousand persons assembled to 
 hear Lucretia Mott deliver one of her most thrillinsr dis- 
 
 O 
 
 courses previous to her leaving the city on a religious visit. 
 
 "First month, 1842. Lucretia Mott arose, and in her 
 usual felicitous manner, explained many texts of Scripture 
 relative to the atonement in a spiritual sense, too often con 
 sidered outwardly. 
 
 " Second month. Lucretia Mott arose with the text : 
 To do good and to communicate, forget not, for with such 
 sacrifices God is well pleased. " 
 
 "Sixth month. Lucretia Mott was favored to preach the 
 Gospel to the heathen in an edifying manner. I am willing 
 to bear witness to the savor of her testimony on my spirit, 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 483 
 
 believing that she is commissioned to preach the Gospel as it 
 is in Jesus. 
 
 "Second month, 1845. That precious handmaid of the 
 Lord, Lucretia Mott. Great has been her exercise and devo 
 tion in the cause of the slave ; may her reward be sure. 
 Thou precious lamb, tliou hast known what it is to be in perils 
 through false brethren, and to be persecuted for righteous 
 ness sake, and thine is the kingdom, of heaven. Let me bear 
 
 v^_-f 
 
 testimony to thy edifying discourses, "and be permitted to say 
 that I believe thou art not far from the kingdom. Let this 
 record stand to enduring generations. Amen. 
 
 One year later he wrote : "Third month, 1846. Lucretia 
 Mott occupied most of the meeting with an edifying discourse 
 before eleven hundred people. Lucretia, thou beloved hand 
 maid of the Lord ! Great is thy faith, and great are thy 
 persecutions." 
 
 The first of the persecutions mentioned by her devout 
 friend in his diarv were those that came from her following 
 
 " O 
 
 Elias Hicks in the division of the Society of Friends. This 
 father of reform before the } r ear 1825 preached against slavery 
 in its chosen strongholds, Maryland and Virginia. At that 
 early day he stood unflinchingly for women s rights, declaring 
 that under the law there were prophetesses as Avell as proph 
 ets, and the effusion of the spirit in the latter days as prophe 
 sied by Joel, was to be equally on sons and daughters, 
 servants and handmaids. To believe otherwise is irrational 
 and inconsistent with the divine attributes, and would charge 
 the Almighty with partiality and injustice to one-half of his 
 rational creation." 
 
 This one declaration is a sufficient explanation for Lucretia 
 Mott s turning from the elder society to follow the fortunes 
 and the faith of the later and larger teacher. The Orthodox 
 Friends mourned the loss of two young preachers, the greater 
 in promise and power being Lucretia Mott. Young as she 
 was, she was already brave enough to go forth from the 
 camp with reproach. Many years after, when he stood in a 
 like strait, she told her friend Robert Collyer all that she suf- 
 
484 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 fercd at that time. Referring to that confidence he says : " I 
 have to remember with what a tender pathos she opened her 
 heart to me when it seemed almost like death to leave my 
 old mother-church, of the trouble it was to her, when she 
 had to do this in the days of Elias Hicks, when she had to 
 part with old friends for the truth, and have the meeting 
 house closed to her in which she had loved to meet them, 
 when she suffered reproach that she might be true to her own 
 soul. And she told me how then James Mott stepped to the 
 front, fighting her battles, shielding her as it were behind his 
 heart. There were times before and after, she said, when he 
 would question what she said or did, but not in those sad 
 days. Then his whole anxiety w r as to help bear her burden 
 and fight her battle." 
 
 According to her own testimony, in early youth Lucretia 
 Mott s soul was moved by the cruel injustice of negro slavery 
 as w r ell as by the depressing inequality she saw meted out to 
 women in education, remuneration, and social condition. 
 But the utterly unrequited labor of slaves made the first and 
 deepest demand on her conscience, on her speech, on her un 
 tiring efforts for their uplifting. With all their enforced 
 ignorance, shut out as they were from books, from the read 
 ing of public journals, and from all intelligent knowledge of 
 public affairs, the negro race as if by instinct learned the names 
 of their real friends, and at an early day many negro chil 
 dren were named by their parents for Lucretia Mott. Nor 
 did the calling of the name end low down in the human scale, 
 for after visiting her in America, Lord and Lady Amberley 
 named their first child, born on their return to England, 
 Lucretia Mott Amberley. 
 
 The second persecution that fell upon her was because of 
 her consistent and entire devotion to the cause of the slave. 
 Not only did she plead in their behalf with learning, eloquence, 
 and the deepest spiritual unction, but every act of her life 
 consistent with her speech made her moral force felt through 
 out the land wherever she went or was known. For many 
 years she would not ride in a public conveyance that would 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 485 
 
 not admit colored people, nor would she eat or use any 
 thing that was the product of slave labor. Everywhere, amid 
 howling, stone-throwing mobs, she stood unmoved, as gentle 
 and unflinching amid pelting eggs and brickbats as when she 
 sat knitting by her own pleasant fireside. Those who know 
 her in those early years tell what she never told herself, 
 what a force she was in those old battles. How quiet she was 
 in the uproar, " how with her woman s wit she would 
 , always say the wisest word and hit on the nicest thing to 
 do." One evening they were being driven out of a public 
 hall by a mob. It was a time of the utmost peril. 
 
 "Take this friend s arm," she said to another woman, "he 
 will protect thee from the mob." 
 
 "But who will protect thee, Lucretia?" anxiously inquired 
 her friend. 
 
 " This gentleman," she answered, gently touching the arm 
 of one of the mob. "He will see me safe through." 
 
 A rough, red-shirtcd ruffian he was to outward sight, as he 
 was no doubt in all his outer fibre, yet somewhere deep down 
 in the core of his being was the kernel of true knighthood 
 which makes every man by unspoiled nature every woman s 
 defender. At any rate the " ruffian " gave Lucretia Mott 
 his arm, and led her forth from his frenzied comrades to 
 safety and home. 
 
 The leading abolitionists for more than one generation 
 were deemed raving fanatics, and it is true doubtless that 
 many of them possessed more zeal than knowledge. Yet 
 the remarkable fact remains that the two bravest leaders of 
 all, the two oftenest exposed to indignity and danger, 
 William Lloyd Garrison and Lucretia Mott, were never, 
 amid the wildest tumult, with violent death just before 
 them, moved from their serenity or their gentleness. 
 
 In such hours as these she wrote to her friend Garrison : 
 " My mind has been especially turned toward those who are 
 standing in the forefront of the battle ; and my prayer has 
 gone up for their preservation, not the preservation of their 
 lives, but the preservation of their minds in humility and. 
 30 
 
486 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 patience, faith, hope, and charity. ... If persecution is the 
 means which God has ordained for the accomplishment of this 
 great end, emancipation, then in dependence upon HIM for 
 strength to bear it, I feel as if I could say, Let it come ; 
 for it is my deepest conviction that this is a cause worth 
 dying for." 
 
 The greatest natures are always greater than their creeds. 
 Lucre tia Mott proved herself to be greater than hers, greater 
 than her sect, when, in open disobedience to its command not 
 to co-operate with "the world s people, "she joined them so far 
 as to form with them in 1833 the original Anti-Slavery Soci 
 ety of the United States, and to suggest and amend their 
 second declaration concerning the eternal rights of all men. 
 At that time the era of prejudice and of mobs was at high 
 tide. But a few months before William Lloyd Garrison had 
 been dragged through the streets of Boston at the peril of his 
 life. Three days later Lucretia Mott addressed a meeting of 
 anti-slavery women while brickbats were crashing through 
 the windows ; and the next day, while the building was again 
 surrounded by rioters, she exhorted the members of the con 
 vention to be steadfast and solemn in the prosecution of the 
 business for which they were assembled. 
 
 Of the formation of this society Mrs. Mott writes in her 
 personal notes: "In 1833 the Philadelphia Female Anti- 
 slavery Society was formed, and being actively associated in 
 the efforts for the slaves redemption, I have travelled thousands 
 of miles in this country, holding meetings in some of the 
 slave States, have been in the midst of mobs and violence, 
 and have shared abundantly in the odium attached to the name 
 of an uncompromising modern abolitionist, as well as par 
 taken richly of the sweet tokens of peace attendant on those 
 who would undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go 
 free. " 
 
 In 1838, July 11, his seventieth birthday, John Quincy 
 Adams wrote in his diary of the evening before, spent at the 
 house of James and Lucretia Mott : " I had a free conversa 
 tion with them till between ten and eleven o clock upon 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 487 
 
 slavery, the abolition of slavery, and other topics 
 
 Lucretia Mott, the mistress of the house, wife of James Mott, 
 is sensible and lively, and an abolitionist of the most intrepid 
 school." The day following this interview the first midnight 
 assault was made on Bailey s anti-slavery press in Cincinnati. 
 
 In 1837 Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, and in 1838 
 Pennsylvania Hall, dedicated to free discussion, was burned 
 the fourth day after its opening with the co-operation of 
 the city authorities of Philadelphia. It was on the day 
 before that Lucretia Mott addressed an audience of women, 
 with stones and brickbats pouring through the windows. 
 Men were excluded from these meetings on the ground of 
 delicacy and the fitness of things. And it did not take 
 Lucretia Mott long to express the "hope that such false 
 notions of delicacy and propriety would not long obtain in 
 this enlightened country." 
 
 In 1840 the question of women speaking before promis 
 cuous assemblies became "the sensitive bone " of contention 
 in the organization of abolitionists. Their unity on the sub 
 ject of slavery did not evolve a like unity on the dictum of 
 St. Paul, and the fact of women "speaking in meeting." The 
 irreconcilable question divided the society in two bodies. 
 And the old organization, as the first abolitionists called 
 themselves, appointed " our beloved friends, William L. 
 Garrison, N. P. Rogers, C. L. Kennard, and Lucretia Mott 
 delegates to the World s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in 
 London in June, 1840, with Thomas Clarksori as president." 
 
 It never occurred to the single mind of the gentle Friend 
 who then had been preaching the gospel of justice and love 
 for more than thirty years, who was always thinking of the 
 truth, never of herself, that she would be denied the privilege 
 of sitting with her fellow delegates, not from any unfitness of 
 character or lack of mental power, but solely because she 
 was a woman. She was denied for this cause alone. In the 
 history of human progression there could scarcely be more 
 interesting reading than her own account of the reception of 
 the women delegates at this convention. In her notes she 
 
488 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 writes : " In 1840 a World s Anti-Slavery Convention was 
 called in London. Women from Boston, New York, and 
 Philadelphia were delegates to that convention. I was one 
 of the number, but on our arrival in England our credentials 
 
 were not accepted because we were women This 
 
 brought the woman question more into view, and an increase 
 of interest on the subject has been the result. In this work, 
 too, I have been engaged, heart and hand, as my labors, 
 travels, and public discourses evince. The misrepresentation, 
 ridicule, and abuse heaped upon this as well as other reforms 
 do not in the least deter me from my duty. To those whose 
 name is cast out as evil for the truth s sake, it is a small thing 
 to be judged of man s judgment." 
 
 We must look far to find a human declaration more disin 
 terested, larger, or nobler than this. 
 
 Born a Friend, educated from babyhood in a Friends meet 
 ing, where woman s equality was unquestioned, freedom of 
 speech was as natural to her as the air she breathed. Where 
 women differently trained would have assumed to speak in 
 public places, Lucretia Mott spake as the bird sings, and thus 
 carrying her freedom of being, thinking, and speaking every 
 where, with no consciousness of it as something she had taken 
 up, whose possession might be questioned, she never as 
 sumed anything or aroused any personal antagonism even 
 in those who differed from her. Her very gentleness and 
 freedom from self-consciousness half-veiled and softened her 
 great ethical force and unconquerable courage. That which 
 would have been audacity in others was delightful uncon 
 sciousness in herself; thus all her life without knowing it 
 she was the incarnation in herself of woman s cause at its 
 best. 
 
 Though denied her place as a delegate in the World s Con 
 vention, she had a pleasant seat given her as a lady in the 
 gallery which at that date was much for English enlighten 
 ment to give, and more than it gives to-day to women in 
 the gallery of the House of Parliament. While sitting in 
 this seat " after half the world had been voted out," Elizabeth 
 
LUCRETIA. MOTT. 489 
 
 Cady Stanton, then a vivacious and beautiful bride, writes : 
 " Said I, Suppose in spite of the vote of excommunication the 
 spirit should move you to speak, what would the chairman 
 do, and which would you obey, the spirit or the convention? 
 She promptly replied : Where the spirit of God is, there is 
 liberty. " 
 
 Though the English reformers of 1840 could tolerate no 
 innovation so aggressive as a woman delegate, nevertheless 
 they were sufficiently gentlemen to treat her politely, and she 
 was invited to breakfast with people of high rank. Uncon 
 ventionally enough, as every English man and woman knew, 
 nt the breakfast-table she found the opportunity denied her at 
 the convention, and without parley, she arose and addressed 
 the brilliant assembly. Sitting at that table were those who 
 voted against her admission as a delegate. 
 
 Amazement filled every feature at her daring but by a 
 very natural process to the British mind when they saw 
 dukes and duchesses listening with profound attention, and 
 sometimes bowing their heads in assent even the British 
 reformer found it easy to listen also. Through genuine esprit 
 de corps, perhaps the peer knew her best, so proving the 
 assertion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
 " I don t wonder Lady Byron liked her," said Emerson. 
 " She belongs to the aristocracy." 
 
 Notwithstanding the brethren prevented her speaking in 
 meeting, two very tangible and important results followed 
 Lucretia Mott s presence in the World s Anti-Slavery Con 
 vention. The first was the introduction it afforded to a 
 younger woman, to whom Lucretia Mott at once became an 
 inspiration and an oracle. Elizabeth Cady Stanton has done 
 more than any other one woman, with her clear reasoning 
 nnd fine eloquence, to move the minds of thoughtful law 
 givers, and to change unjust laws to just ones in behalf of 
 women in legislatures. At the time of this World s Conven 
 tion, which she visited with her young husband, she stood 
 eagerly questioning on the border-land of her unknown, un 
 dreamed-of future. Instinctively she sat down at the feet of 
 
490 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 a priestess who. had so long inhaled hallowed air that she 
 gave it back in every breath in exalted prophecy and promise 
 for womanhood. Mrs. Stanton says : " I had always regarded 
 a Quaker-woman as one does a Sister of Charity a being 
 above ordinary mortals, ready to be translated at any mo 
 ment. I had never spoken to one before nor been near 
 enough to touch the hem of a garment. Mrs. Mott was to 
 me an entire new revelation of womanhood. I sought every 
 opportunity to be at her side, and continually plied her with 
 questions, and I shall never cease to be grateful for the pa 
 tience and seeming pleasure with which she fed mv hunger- 
 
 O M. , ^ 
 
 ing soul. ... I found in this new friend a woman emanci 
 pated from all faith in man-creeds, from all fear of his 
 denunciations. Nothing was too sacred for her to question, 
 as to its rightfulness in principle and practice. It seemed to 
 me like meeting some being from a larger planet, to find a 
 woman who dared to question the opinion of popes, kings, 
 synods, parliaments, with the same freedom that she would 
 criticise an editorial in the London Times. . . . When I 
 first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same 
 right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox 
 had, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom ; 
 it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noonday 
 sun after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the 
 earth. . . . 
 
 " There are often periods in the lives of earnest, imagina 
 tive beings when some new book or acquaintance comes to 
 them like an added sun in the heavens, chasing every 
 shadow away. Thus came Lucretia Mott to me at a period 
 in my young days when all life s problems seemed inextri 
 cably tangled. When, like Noah s dove on the waters, my 
 soul found no solid resting-place in the whole world of thought. 
 . . . Before meeting Mrs. Mott I had heard a few men of 
 liberal opinions discuss various political, social, and religious 
 theories, but with my first doubt of my father s absolute wis 
 dom came a distrust of all men s opinions on the character 
 and sphere of women. . . . Hence I often longed to meet 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 491 
 
 some woman who had sufficient confidence in herself to frame 
 and hold an opinion in the face of opposition a woman who 
 understood the deep significance of life, to whom I could talk 
 freely ; my longings were answered at last." 
 
 The second result of the meeting in London of Lucretia 
 Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the call for the first 
 Woman s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, 
 July 19 and 20, 1848. After Lucretia Mott, Sarah Pugh, 
 Abby Kimble, Elizabeth Neal,Mary Grew, all Friends from 
 Philadelphia and Abby Southwick and Emily Winslow of 
 Boston, had travelled three thousand miles to take their 
 seats as delegates in the World s Anti-Slavery Convention, only 
 to be refused them. Lucretia Mott and her newly-found lover, 
 Elizabeth Stanton, walked arm-in-arm down Great Queen 
 street, discussing with their musical voices the great indig 
 nity that to their minds that day had been cast on woman 
 hood. They then and there resolved on their return to 
 America to hold a Woman s Rights Convention. They kept 
 their word. And from that gathering of earnest, brave, but 
 inexperienced women, who made written additions to the Dec 
 laration of Independence to meet their own special demands, 
 wrongs, and needs, more than forty years ago, have 
 evolved by a natural law the great, splendidly-organized, 
 wisely-regulated yearly conventions of women of to-day, 
 projected and directed by a force of women whose zeal and 
 devotion in their work can only be measured and equalled by 
 the experience which directs and the wisdom that compre 
 hends human life in all its bearings, human nature in all its 
 needs, and, beyond all, the unity of humanity in its essence 
 and in its aspirations. 
 
 So much space has been given to the public life and work 
 of Lucretia Mott one might naturally suppose that there 
 could be but little inclination, time, or strength left to her for 
 purely personal domestic life. Yet the potent fact remains, 
 that the sweetness and fulness of her life as a woman cannot 
 be measured or told in words, though the placid narrative of 
 its gentle deeds would of itself fill a large volume. While her 
 
492 LtTCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 children were young and needed her, her life was devoted to 
 them. How she served them so faithfully, and yet had some 
 time left for mental improvement, she has told in her own 
 words. She says, " My life in the domestic sphere has 
 passed much as that of other wives and mothers in this 
 country. I have had six children. Not accustomed to re 
 signing them to the care of a nurse, I was much confined dur 
 ing their infancy and childhood. Being fond of reading I 
 omitted much unnecessary stitching and ornamental work in 
 the sewing for my family, so that I might have more time for 
 this indulgence and the improvement of my mind. . . . 
 The Ladies Department in the periodicals of the day had 
 no attraction for me." 
 
 The thrift and economy she learned so early in the frugal 
 home in Nantucket never left her. In youth cramping cir 
 cumstances compelled her to economize for her own, but 
 when she lived on to all the opportunities of affluence she 
 economized no less that she might give of her abundance to 
 others. Like another great American woman, her friend, 
 Lydia Maria Child, she pinched herself even in letter-paper 
 that she might have a little more for charity. A friend tolls 
 of a letter received from her two and a half inches wide by 
 two and a quarter inches long, written on both sides, contain 
 ing one hundred and forty-one words treating of seven dis 
 tinct subjects. She apologized for her paper, and enclosed 
 five dollars for a benevolent object. She was never weary of 
 sewing tiny rags together to be woven into carpets, never 
 weary of knitting never, even in extreme age, of walking 
 from house to house, dealing out with her own hands food 
 and clothing to the poor. One of her own family tells of the 
 great cloak and heavy saddle-bags stuffed with good things 
 which encircled her small person as she sallied forth on these 
 daily errands of mercy. Shortly before her death, when she 
 could no longer leave her bed, hearing the voice of her son- 
 in-law in the hall below, she called his name and he went up 
 to her room. He found her sitting up in bed environed by a 
 wooden frame set with shelves and full of pies and delicacies. 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 493 
 
 " Surely thou hast enough to eat ! " ho exclaimed. 
 
 "Yes," she replied, with the quiet humor so characteristic 
 of her ; " but it will not last till to-morrow ; " the under 
 truth being that all these good things had been made at her 
 order and placed on the shelves surrounding her, that she 
 might deal them out with her own hands to the poor as her 
 Christmas offering to their comfort. 
 
 While she believed that she had a duty to religion, to her 
 country, and to humanity, she lived and died a perfect house 
 keeper, attending personally to every detail from garret to 
 cellar, as if attending to them was the whole duty of her ex 
 istence, yet attending them always with that clear vision and 
 calm Avisdom, that grasp of detail, yet command of the whole 
 which left no chance for fretfulness or fussiness. Mrs. 
 Stanton says of her : " When seated around her board, no 
 two and two side-talk in monotone was ever permissible ; 
 she insisted that the good things said should be enjoyed by 
 all. At the close of the meal, while the conversation went 
 briskly on, with a neat little tray and snowy towel, she washed 
 up the silver and china as she uttered some of her happiest 
 thoughts. James Mott at the head of the table maintained 
 
 o 
 
 the dignity of his position, ever ready to throw in a qualify 
 ing word when these fiery reformers became too intense." 
 
 This home, that for many years was the ark of refuge to 
 runaway slaves, was also a rallying court to many of the 
 distinguished of the earth. It was long the chosen meeting- 
 place of such reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell 
 Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Gerrit Smith, Ann 
 Preston, Mary Grew, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Susan B. 
 Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton ; and in it 
 its gentle mistress entertained Frederica Bremcr, Harriet 
 Martineau, Lord Morpeth, Lord and Lady Amberley, Fanny 
 Kemble, John Quincy Adams, and others equally prominent 
 in the world of society, thought, and letters. 
 
 No characteristic in her was more marked than her free 
 dom from all personal littleness. Her superiority to mere sect, 
 and her keen recognition of, and dauntless love of truth 
 
494 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 wherever she found it was nowhere more apparent than in 
 her devotion to the writings of men claimed as leaders of 
 thought by opposite sects of Christians. Her whole life a 
 profound daily student of the Scriptures, her two favorite 
 writers among divines were William Ellery Channing and 
 Dean Stanley. She loved Channing in her youth, but in ex 
 treme age she had room in her heart and mind for Dean 
 Stanley, who appealed no less forcibly to the " inward wit 
 ness " in her spiritual life. One little book of his, entitled 
 " Hopes of Theology," taking its name from three sermons 
 delivered by the Dean of Westminster before the University 
 of St. Andrew, she kept beside her till her dying day, 
 offering it for a glance to the visitors that came to her bed 
 side. In every sect are always found a few rare souls, dis 
 cerning spirits who, beyond the letter, perceive and read by 
 pure spiritual sight. They are the men and women who in 
 themselves are more potent than any dogma, larger than any 
 creed, and two such were both Arthur Penrhyn Stanley and 
 Lucretia Mott. 
 
 But ever looking toward that which is heavenly, when 
 she had lived more than eighty years upon the earth, she held 
 unabated all her old keen interest in art, in literature, as well 
 as in religion and the progress of the human race and the 
 State. Mrs. Belva Lockwood of Washington says that just 
 before her death she heard her discuss the merits of a paint 
 ing then on exhibition in Philadelphia, with all the interest and 
 more than the intelligence of youth, and, as has been already 
 said, her pastime in those twilight hours of waning life was not 
 only to repeat the poetry of buried generations, but to read 
 with thrilling effect the poems of later days, like Arnold s 
 "Light of Asia." 
 
 With the abolition of slavery and the passage of the Fif 
 teenth Amendment, the first great public life-work of Lucretia 
 Mott ended, yet her interest in the colored race, in the wel 
 fare and uplifting of women, in the furtherance of every 
 good cause for humanity, only ceased for this world with her 
 last breath. One of the last subjects she discussed was the 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 495 
 
 policy and personality of President Hayes, speaking of both 
 with approval, and deprecating every effort made by others 
 to keep alive old sectional animosity. 
 
 Twelve years after the death of her beloved husband, 
 Lucretia Mott died, not of disease, but because her work 
 was done, her human life lived out. She passed away 
 without pain, in peace amid her children, November 11, 
 1880. As she left the earth the land was flooded with her 
 praise, public journals of every shade of opinion vying 
 with each other to pay tributes of honor to the good Ameri 
 can woman, great in womanhood. 
 
 A nature so many-sided, a humanity so deeply veined, an 
 intelligence so universal and varied cannot be sounded or 
 measured by mere words. Her life, though vanished from 
 human sight, still shines on, a planet whose unfailing light 
 streams down the centuries, while it reaches upward to other 
 distant worlds. 
 
 Many women have equalled and even surpassed Lucretia 
 Mott in the development of special faculties, but rarely indeed 
 has a woman lived who has embodied in herself, in perfect 
 harmony to an equal degree, so many high intellectual and 
 moral qualities perfectly balanced. Her charity was as great 
 as her courage, and neither could be surpassed. Her gentle 
 ness equalled her will, and neither ever failed. Her humor 
 was as real as her seriousness, and neither in their place were 
 wanting. Her passion for truth never outran her forgiveness 
 of error. Her dauntless bravery, which never quailed before 
 danger, was matched only by her modesty, which never as 
 sumed anything. Standing amid polemical men in public 
 places, where another woman might have looked bold and out 
 of place, she seemed always their better angel, in whom they 
 recognized and adored the incarnation of that ideal woman 
 of whom all men dream. Diminutive in figure, she yet had 
 the look of command. She had the brow and the eyes 
 which rule through sheer force of intellect and potency of 
 soul ; but no less she had the playfulness, the tenderness, 
 the childlikeness which no one fears, but all men love. 
 
496 LUCRETIA MOTT. 
 
 Those who had long heard of her as an agitator when they 
 beheld her were always astonished alike at the gentleness 
 of her nature and of her manners. 
 
 Always listening for the Divine Voice, she never shrank 
 from uttering its commands without fear and without a thought 
 
 *-> O 
 
 of herself. Believing in the unity of the human race, in its 
 equality of essence, she asked no favors as a woman for her 
 self or others. Planting herself upon her human rights, she 
 simply demanded the removal of all hinderances to the eleva 
 tion of woman in the scale of being. From more than fifty 
 years of perfect marriage without bitterness but full of 
 happiness and the calm sense of absolute justice, she 
 claimed equal rights before the law for husband and wife, 
 father and mother and child. 
 
 Her discourses and sermons were frequently printed. She 
 published a sermon to medical students and a discourse on 
 "Women," delivered in Philadelphia in 1849 ; but her claim 
 upon the remembrance of her countrymen is not that of a 
 great writer, but that of a great philanthropist, of a great 
 preacher, of a perfect woman. In her personality and in 
 her work she is a complete illustration of the profound fact, 
 that a woman as well as a man may do an exceptional work, 
 fulfil an exceptional mission, without abating one jot the 
 symmetry of her nature and life in its special functions or 
 proportions. There is no more remarkable phase of the 
 many-phased anomaly of man and woman s mingled marriage 
 and warfare than the world-wide distrust manifested by man 
 in every age, of the stability of the laws of nature as inher 
 ent in woman, which he believes without a doubt to be im 
 mutable in himself. 
 
 Who ever hears the slightest hint of the danger of a man 
 getting out of his " sphere ? " No matter what he does him 
 self, he is sure of his sex. But he has filled the ages with a 
 watch-dog gaze and an eternal shout, lest by some inscrutable 
 quicksand of mental endeavor woman suddenly finds herself 
 "unsexed." The laws which govern the human creature, 
 created in the image of God, he seems to believe to be im- 
 
LUCRETIA MOTT. 497 
 
 mutable in their .application to but one-half of the human 
 race, that himself. Lucretia Mott is one of the perfect re 
 futations of this fatal error which God at intervals sends upon 
 the earth. She did everything which, as a woman, accord 
 ing to the code of mere conventionality, he ought not to have 
 done, yet hers was, and ever remained, the greatest woman 
 hood of all. 
 
 We go back to deeds of valor, of prowess, of high em 
 prise, to executive force, to conquering ability, to find that 
 the deeds which live and glow in the dust of the centuries 
 are those great in love of human nature, great in consecration 
 to humanity. 
 
 In summing up the excellences of Lucretia Mott, men do 
 not forget to name her thrift, her industry, her economy. 
 Yet she is not exalted in memory now because she sewed bits 
 of carpet together with an endless patience, nor because she 
 wrote letters on tag ends of waste-paper, or made with her 
 own hands her own pies and puddings she might have done 
 all these things well without one great thought beyond their 
 mechanical perfection nor was it because she dared to 
 question the opinions of popes and potentates, of synods and 
 parliaments ; nor because she declared the equality in nature 
 of man and woman. She is revered of all men to-day be 
 cause with a perfect love she loved all human nature. 
 
 Her carved image is worthy to stand with the greatest of 
 our great who have died. Yet she has carved no statues. 
 She has painted no great picture of history. She has not 
 sung songs of immortality like Milton, nor written books of 
 raving eloquence, like Carlyle. But in her own exquisite, 
 exalted personality, she is greater than Carlyle, abiding on 
 heights of self-conquest, on heights of unselfish devotion, 
 that he never dreamed of, much less attained. In her power 
 to transmute high principles into the sweetest and highest liv 
 ing of daily life, she was greater than Milton ; for in her own 
 individual self she was the perfect incarnation of the highest 
 principles she ever expounded, of the finest aspirations she 
 ever breathed, of the tenderest emotions she ever felt. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 LOUISE CHANDLEK MOULTOK 
 
 BY HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 A Charming Woman Mrs. Moulton s Parentage Influences that Sur 
 rounded Her Childhood Rigid New England Training Girlhood and 
 School Days First Literary Efforts Publication of Her First Book 
 Letters to the New York "Tribune" First Visit to Europe Impres 
 sions of the Old World Paris Rome Pictures of Italian Life 
 Venice Cordial Reception in London Honors Shown by Distin 
 guished People Flattering Attention Delightful Experiences How 
 Her Book of Poems was Received jn London High Praise from Eminent 
 Critics A Famous Traveller Personal Appearance Her Grace and 
 Charm of Manner A Gifted and Popular Woman. 
 
 "The lingering charm of a dream that has fled, 
 The rose s breath when the rose is dead, 
 The echo that lives when the tune is done, 
 The sunset glories that follow the sun, 
 Everything tender and everything fair, 
 That was, and is not, and yet is there," 
 
 NE thinks of them all, to quote her own words, 
 in remembering Louise Chandler Moulton after 
 the spell of her presence is gone. Sherwood 
 Bonner, in speaking of her once, declared that 
 she belongs to that class of women who seem 
 born to charm ; for charm, she sa}^s, is a sweet 
 arid comprehensive word, meaning to bewitch, 
 not to madden ; to delight, not to intoxicate ; 
 to satisfy, not to tantalize ; to please the soul 
 like the smell of a rose, the song of a brook, 
 the sight of waving fields. "In her writing, in 
 her person, in her manner, in her voice, in her 
 dress, there is the gracious and indefinable charm that would 
 lend attraction to a mediocre talent and a plain face ; and 
 which, when joined to a clear, fine intellect, a lovely mobile 
 408 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 499 
 
 face, and the exquisite manner of one who has breathed 
 always the atmosphere of the gently nurtured, results in a 
 woman worthy to be numbered among the fair ones of a 
 poet s dream." 
 
 Louise Moulton is, perhaps, the most personally popular 
 among the literary women of our country ; she pleases so 
 entirely that I doubt if there is a person in the world who 
 has any but a warm and admiring feeling towards her. She 
 began this career of conquest early ; for she was not nine 
 teen when Mr. Phillips, of the old Boston firm of Phillips 
 and Sampson, maintained that she was fitter to be President 
 of these United States than any man he knew. I have often 
 wondered since how, already, he could so well have known 
 and understood her, for Louise Moulton, aside from her 
 literary powers, is an extraordinarily clever woman, capable 
 of organizing and of carrying out, and one to whom the man 
 agement of anything requiring, with energetic action, thought, 
 tact, and delicacy to a fine degree, might well be intrusted. 
 
 Louise was born on the 10th of April, 1835, in the town 
 of Pomfrct, Connecticut. Her mother was Louise Clark, her 
 father, Lucius L. Chandler. On both sides she came of good 
 old English stock. One of her ancestors owned all of Pom- 
 fret in the early days when it was a much larger place in 
 extent than at present. In her father s family there was 
 always a good deal of ability ; his grandmother Cleveland 
 is said to have been a remarkable woman, and one of Louise s 
 earliest remembrances is hearing her read passages from the 
 Greek philosophers, long before the little listener could un 
 derstand them. Through this lady Louise is connected with 
 the Rev. Aaron Cleveland, of literary reputation, and dis 
 tantly with the poet and critic, Edmund C. Stedman, who 
 himself regards this Cleveland descent as an inheritance of 
 intellectual power. Of her father she has spoken to me as 
 the most tender, uncomplaining, great-hearted man she has 
 ever known ; and of her mother, as a gentle, gracious woman, 
 a noted beauty in her youth, but singularly free from the 
 vanity and selfishness of most noted beauties. Her feeling 
 
500 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 for her mother is, however, better expressed by these lately 
 published lines than by any words that I could add : 
 
 " How shall I, here, her placid picture paint 
 With touch that shall be delicate, yet sure? 
 Soft hair above a brow so high and pure, 
 Years have not soiled it with an earthly taint, 
 Needing no aureole to prove her saint 
 Firm mind that no temptation could allure, 
 Soul strong to do, heart stronger to endure, 
 And sweet, cairn lips that utter no complaint. 
 So have I seen her in my darkest days, 
 And when her own most sacred ties were riven, 
 Walk tranquilly in self-denying ways, 
 Asking for strength, and sure it would be given, 
 Filling her life with lowly prayer, high praise 
 So shall I see her if we meet in heaven." 
 
 Her mother, however, is still living in the quiet country 
 town where her long life has been passed, and her daughter s 
 successes have been a joy to her declining years. Both of 
 her parents were rigid Calvinists, with the imaginative side 
 of their natures somewhat undeveloped, and this child of 
 theirs, living in her ideal world, may have been puzzling in 
 many respects to them. But they idolized her, and indulged 
 her in every way that did not go counter to their ideas of the 
 immutable right and wrong. They held it ruinous to read 
 romances, to dance, or to play any game of chance, such as 
 draughts or backgammon. But although there is something 
 pathetic in the thought of a childhood so strictly reared, I 
 doubt not the little maid found her own pleasures in her own 
 way, a way that did not impair the sunniness of her nature. 
 The religious sentiments of her parents, nevertheless, ex 
 ercised a great power over her, with at times an awful fore 
 boding of doom and despair. She would wake when a little 
 thing, in the depth of the night, cold with horror, saying to 
 herself, " Why, if I m not among the elect I can t be saved, 
 no matter how hard I try, "and would steal along on her little 
 bare feet to be taken into her mother s bed, with a vague 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 503 
 
 sense that if in the far future she must be lost she would, at 
 any rate, have love and comfort now, and caressing arms to 
 shelter her from the shapeless terrors that mocked her soli 
 tude. But she felt differently in the sunlight ; then she was 
 full of a strong vitality, and exulted in running in the teeth 
 of a high wind and thinking that she was so much alive surely 
 nothing ever could kill her ; and then she would try and per 
 suade herself that no one really did die, but that certain 
 people, whose lot it was, took themselves thus out of sight 
 from time to time, and allowed it to be given out in order to 
 frighten children into being good. Yet, in spite of the novel 
 reasoning, and perhaps largely in consequence of those early 
 impressions, she has all her life held in keener dread than 
 ordinary what has seemed to her the unutterable mystery and 
 speechless solitariness of death. 
 
 Of course, being an only child, and brought up on such prin 
 ciples, she was thrown a good deal upon her own resources for 
 amusement. She could not have been more than eight years 
 old when a good part of her play all summer long consisted 
 in carrying in her head something she called a Spanish drama, 
 although she then knew little of Spain beyond some high- 
 sounding Spanish names that took her ear with their music, as 
 they did Browning s lover in the garden, and which she gave 
 to her characters. Every day, as soon as she was through 
 with lessons and tasks, and could get by herself, these char 
 acters thronged round her, and she watched their perform 
 ance ; it did not seem to her that she created them, but rather 
 that she summoned them and they came ; sometimes, indeed, 
 their behavior astonished her, and for one of them, a young 
 girl who persisted in dying, she really grieved. All her 
 lonely plays were tinctured with the colors imagination 
 gave, and she lived far more in the world of fancy than of 
 fact ; she used to listen for hours at a great keyhole in an 
 outside door, a keyhole through which the wind blew with 
 wailing, fantastic sounds which sometimes represented to her 
 thought far-off bugle-notes, and sometimes the long cries of 
 despairing souls. 
 31 
 
504 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 Louise was early sent to school, one teacher following an 
 other, till at length good fortune threw her in charge of the 
 Rev. Iloswell Park, at that time rector of the Episcopal 
 church in Pomfret, and also the head of a school called 
 Christ Church Hall. It was a school for boys as well as 
 girls ; and one of her schoolmates here, for a season, was 
 the brilliant, erratic, and audacious artist, James MacNeil 
 Whistler. She has pictures now that he drew for her in 
 those days when she was so industrious and happy under Dr. 
 Park s tuition, when they studied their Latin and German 
 together. 
 
 She was but fifteen when she began to publish the trifles 
 which for eight years she had delighted to write. It would 
 be difficult to say what it was that inclined her to a literary 
 life ; she had no literary friends, and no suggestion of the 
 sort in any quarter. It was like that springing of a plant in 
 a soil that never knew it before, from a seed brought b} r some 
 bird of heaven, as seeds of waving palms are carried to bare 
 coral reefs, and if it was the union .of anything in the two 
 lives of her ancestry that produced it, as many colors go to 
 the making of white, it was all so unaware and unconscious 
 that the child felt her movements must be secret as if she wero 
 committing a crime when she sent off her first verses to a daily 
 paper published in Norwich, Connecticut. It was on her way 
 from school one day that she happened to take the paper from 
 the office ; and, when she opened it, there were the lines, 
 What ecstasy ! Only her fellow-writers, remembering their 
 first publication, can fully sympathize with her, and they only 
 will understand how it seemed to her, as she walked homo 
 on air, a more wonderful and glorious event than any event 
 has ever seemed since. Three years later, Messrs. Phillips, 
 Sampson and Company, of Boston, published for her "This, 
 That, and the Other," a collection of stories and poems 
 which had appeared in various magazines and newspapers, 
 and which took the public fancy at once to the extent of 
 fifteen thousand copies. She was a little shocked to see the 
 huge posters headed, "Read this book and see what a girl of 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 505 
 
 eighteen can do," but the graciousness of all the newspaper 
 notices made such happiness for the young girl in her still 
 life as she would never know again, such happiness as a rose 
 growing in a dull, dim room might have if suddenly trans 
 planted into June sunshine and a whole heavenful of dews 
 and gentle airs. Among these reviews was one of length in 
 a Winsted paper, edited by Edmund C. Stedman, then just 
 graduated from Yale, and it began a friendship that has only 
 grown with years, and is counted by her among the memor 
 able prizes and pleasures of her life. Among other literary 
 friends that she then made was Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman ; 
 and her appreciative letters, kept now in a little yellowing, 
 precious parcel, helped and cheered in the most needful 
 period. 
 
 Directly after the publication of this first book, its young 
 author went for a final school-year to Mrs. Willard s semi 
 nary at Troy ; and she seems there to have combined studying 
 and writing, and love-making to a rather remarkable degree, as 
 in the August of 1854, six weeks .after leaving the school, she 
 became the wife of Mr. William Moulton, a gentleman who 
 edited and published a weekly paper in Boston, to which she 
 had for some time been a contributor. 
 
 In the autumn of the same } r ear the Messrs. Appleton and 
 Company, of New York, published for her a novel entitled 
 "Juno Clifford," which she took a fancy to print anony 
 mously as a test of her power. It had quite a success, but 
 would doubtless have done much more with the use of her 
 name. The next year she began writing for " Harper s 
 Magazine ; " and three years later, in 1859, the Messrs. 
 Harper issued a collection of the stories in a volume under 
 the title of "My Third Book." 
 
 She was now in her twenty-fifth year, fully launched upon 
 the literary high-seas, contributing to " Harper s," to the 
 "Atlantic," the "Galaxy," and " Scribner s," as they came 
 into existence, and to the "Young Folks," the "Youth s 
 Companion," and other periodicals for children. Her life 
 seemed a very fortunate one. She had a charming home in 
 
506 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 Boston, where she met and entertained the most pleasant 
 people ; her housekeeping duties were fulfilled to a nicety, 
 and no domestic detail neglected for all her industrious 
 literary undertakings. A daughter had been born to her, 
 Florence, the golden-haired little beauty to whom " Bedtime 
 Stories " were dedicated in some most tender and touching 
 verses, and, somewhat later, a son whose little life was only 
 numbered by days. 
 
 In 1870 she began writing letters from Boston to the New 
 York "Tribune," signed by her initials, continuing them for six 
 years, at the expiration of which time she first went abroad. 
 She sometimes sent four letters a week, giving items of inter 
 est to bookish people, reviewing books in advance of their 
 publication, and telling to the curious the affairs of the Radi 
 cal Club, then in its palmy days, when Emerson frequented 
 it, and John Weiss, David Wasson, Colonel Higginson, Dr. 
 Hedge, and a host of other brilliant and inspiring people. 
 These letters showed the hand of the accomplished letter- 
 writer ; without degenerating into gossip, they now and then 
 broke into enthusiasms controlled by a perfect taste that 
 took the reader along with them ; their fine judgment and 
 keen discrimination made them eagerly sought for ; where 
 she might need to condemn she was simply silent. A 
 satirical, stinging, or malicious sentence was never written 
 by Louise Moulton, although her sense of justice would 
 make it difficult for her to praise where praise was unde 
 served. "And now let me tell you of beautiful Louise 
 Moulton," wrote some one who had never seen her, in a 
 letter given in the notice from which I have already quoted : 
 " Years since when she first wrote her literary letters to the 
 Tribune, when I was shut into myself in a great sorrow, I 
 came to know her through those columns, then to admire 
 her, and finally to feel for her that reverence which we cher 
 ish towards loftier minds that lead us to higher mental culture. 
 I feel that those letters have done more towards shaping and 
 refining my taste for the literature of our age than anything 
 else of the kind that I have ever seen. She is so chaste, so 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 507 
 
 refined, so choice ! " Certainly no three epithets in the lan 
 guage would better define Louise than those. 
 
 She only gave up what she had found such pleasant work in 
 order to gratify her life-long yearning to visit the lands of song 
 and story beyond the seas ; and on the 22d of January, 
 1876, she set forth on a stormy winter sea, Rome being 
 her goal and Sherwood Bonner her companion. She had pub 
 lished, meanwhile, a collection of children s tales, called " Bed 
 time Stories," followed in the next year by another, " More 
 Bedtime Stories," and eventually supplemented in 1880 and 
 1883 by " New Bedtime Stories " and " Firelight Stories." A 
 sweet and wholesome atmosphere is that of these little books, 
 and they seem to me to constitute a sort of permanent memo 
 rial to the quiet instructions the writer received from her own 
 mother. They proclaim the gift of pure story-telling from the 
 first page; the young girls in them are maidenly, the young 
 lads are noble, the thread of the narrative is alluring. Older 
 children will lingeringly turn the pages of the story of the 
 " Little Mother "; and not that alone, for every story catches 
 the interest at the outset and holds it, and a fine naturalness and 
 power of pathos wrings the unwilling tears from every reader. 
 The same power is used on a larger scale in her collection of 
 tales for the older generation, called " Some Women s Hearts," 
 also published in 1874. These stories are so simply and 
 sweetly told that the reader does not at first recognize them 
 as the works of art which they are, beguiled along until he 
 finds himself in the midst of careful study on pages where 
 there are few strokes not meant to tell, and with a complete 
 characterization and a clear and vivid style which neither hur 
 ries nor excites the reader, but lets him feel something of the 
 calm personality of the writer. Without any extravagance, 
 they are full of close observation and analysis, of the 
 love of nature, and of picturesque fact and effect. There 
 is a sustained strength about the longest story of the book, 
 " Fleeing From Fate," a courage and a repressed energy, that 
 promise well for a novel of the three-volume length should 
 she ever undertake it. A novel in verse, such as Mr. Sted- 
 
508 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 man has often urged her to write, would be, better than other 
 work, suited to her powers, which would have a scope there 
 that they have not in any mere genre work. There are 
 others of her stories more than sufficient for a fresh volume, 
 but she 1ms not yet made the collection ; and she has cer 
 tainly printed poems enough for another book to mate with 
 " Swallow-Flights." 
 
 Her first voyage to England was a long delight, although 
 it was winter, and they only escaped a huge, black, following 
 sea. Then tarrying in London only long enough to read the 
 immemorial names on the street-corners, to realize with a 
 thrill that she was in Pall Mall, in Westminster Abbey, on 
 London Bridge, to see the queen open parliament, she made 
 straightway for her shopping in Paris, where the streets were 
 an unending pleasure. "As for jewels, if anywhere in the 
 world there are jewels to surpass those 3 r ou see in certain 
 shop-windows in Paris," she says, "it must be that they are 
 in kings houses. Fancy exquisite tea-roses, the size of life, 
 composed altogether of diamonds, so brilliant that they mock 
 your adjectives with their shining satire. Fancy blue forget- 
 me-nots made of sapphires ; and violets which look as if they 
 would smell of Parma, but are fashioned from amethysts ! 
 Such exquisite devices, such fascinating combinations of 
 precious stones I had never dreamed of until I came to Paris. 
 The effect they produce on you is curious. You begin by 
 wanting every glittering gewgaw that you see. You feel as 
 if your happiness depended upon this brooch or that medal 
 lion. But after a few days you see another brooch, another 
 medallion so much more beautiful that you are sure you 
 would not have been contented with your first choice. You 
 transfer your affections again and again, until you finally be 
 come accustomed and contented to regard the display of orna 
 ments like that of furniture and pictures, as beautiful things 
 to be looked at and enjoyed, but with which you have no 
 personal concern. When you have thus ceased to wish 
 for things, you begin thoroughly to delight in the streets of 
 Paris." 
 
LOUISE CHANDLEK MOULTON". 509 
 
 But Paris over, came Rome, and twelve weeks of raptures 
 and ruins, of churches and galleries, old palaces and almond- 
 trees in flower, the light upon the Alban hills, the kindly 
 gracious Roman society, all like a dream from which might 
 come awaking. Certainly no one was ever made to feel the 
 ancient spell, or to enjoy its beauty more than this sensitive, 
 sympathetic, and impressible spirit. Stiff Protestant as she 
 is, she was touched to tears by the benignant old pope s 
 blessing ; and she abandoned herself to the carnival, as much 
 a child for the time as the noblest Roman of them all. 
 " Hitherto the pretty Princess Margarita, since that time 
 become Queen of Italy, has kept to her balcony, from 
 which, be sure, she has sent forth no missiles less pleasing 
 than flowers and bon-bons, and an occasional white dove," 
 she writes ; " but on the last afternoon she drives up and 
 down the Corso with the rest. Her carriage and horses are 
 superb, her stalwart footmen are glorious in red and gold ; 
 but no one heeds the splendor of her equipage, for the soft 
 radiance of her own pallid beauty draws all eyes. She is 
 exquisitely attired, but you scarcely remember what she 
 wears, you are so much more impressed by what she is, a 
 fair and gentle lady, smiling sweetly as she bows in response 
 to the shouts of welcome that greet her approach, the rain of 
 fragrant posies that fills her carriage full. She bows and 
 smiles, bows and smiles, with an unvarying graciousness, to 
 the lofty and the lowly ; but is there not or is it only my 
 fancy ? a lurking sadness in the soft dark eyes, even while 
 the bright young lips are smiling? Perhaps it is but the 
 natural expression of her poetical temperament, for the 
 princess loves passionately verse and art and music ; but one 
 who has seen her husband, Prince Umberto, a man fierce- 
 looking, and somewhat sensual, and altogether of the earth 
 earthy, like his father, King Victor, must needs wonder 
 whether there can be anything of spiritual kinship between 
 this man and his rare, pale princess. Behind comes an equip 
 age which the Queen of the Fairies must have lent for the 
 occasion the tiniest of pony phaetons, drawn by four little 
 
510 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 black ponies. On these ponies ride little postilions, gorgeous 
 in red and gold, like the stalwart servitors of the princess, 
 and two small footmen sit behind in the rumble. In the 
 phaeton itself are the prettiest pair in the Corso. This boy, 
 with his handsome haughty face, is the little Prince of 
 Naples, the son of Prince Umberto and the Princess Mar 
 garita, lie has inherited his mother s beauty, and the 
 haughty self-possession which belongs to the bold, brave 
 house of Savoy. lie will be every inch a king some day. 
 His costume of green and gold satin, with frills of costly lace, 
 was magnificent enough for a young emperor. Beside him 
 was the daughter of a noble house, a little marchesina, who 
 was like the vision of a dream. She had the dazzling pale 
 ness of a blonde Italian. Her eyes were intensely blue, and 
 bright as stars, and her soft yellow hair floated about her 
 like a cloud of spun gold. Her costume was of white satin, 
 heavy with gold embroidery. The princess herself had 
 scarcely attracted so much attention as this dainty little pair. 
 They were almost buried in flowers, and they kissed their 
 hands in return, and bowed with a real childish joyousness 
 which was a pretty sight to see." 
 
 And after Rome came Venice, and the old palaces, where, 
 in one of them, " everything was of the past except the 
 flowers, which everywhere ran riot. Marble vases, rifled 
 from tombs, were full of glowing crimson t roses. Bright- 
 hued blossoms filled the windows, vines trailed over the 
 walls, fragrance as of a thousand gardens flooded the rooms." 
 Then the Tyrol, where, at Innspruck, the unutterable loveli 
 ness struck her dumb : " I was comforted afresh by the 
 wonderful glory of this long-enduring world wherein we 
 brief human creatures flutter like butterflies for a transient 
 day, and are gone." And after this, for contrast, the London 
 season ! 
 
 It was a gny season for the young American. She was in 
 the same house with Kate Field, who knew her London well, 
 and was ready to be guide and philosopher, as she long had 
 been friend, and she had letters of introduction to many 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 511 
 
 choice people, among them Lord Houghton, who is the same 
 kind of literary centre that the poet Rogers used to be, and 
 who gave her at once a breakfast, where she met Browning, 
 Swinburne, Gustave Dore*, and a company of the brightest 
 and best in London society. 
 
 Mrs. Moulton is one of the women whom Americans, with 
 any wish of impressing the foreigner, may well be proud to 
 send abroad. She is always and before everything a lady, 
 an artist even in good manners, with the most winning inno 
 cence and grace united to sufficient knowledge of the world, 
 a perfect dress, destitute of affectation, an attractive face, and 
 a voice, 
 
 " Oh, call it the well s bubbling, the bird s warble ! " 
 
 I have never heard such melodious tones from any other 
 woman s throat. " If I could only photograph your voice ! " 
 a photographer once boldly said to her. If he could he would 
 have photographed flute-notes, water-drops tinkling among 
 cool leaves, the ring of sterling silver, the reedy note of the 
 Virginia nightingale^ It was her voice of which an English 
 poet wrote, 
 
 " As soft as sleep, and pure as lonely springs, 
 Her voice wherein all sweetnesses abide." 
 
 It is easy to see how she made immediately a multitude of 
 friends. In August she was in Scotland, and later on the 
 lovely French sea-coast ; then followed a winter in Paris, 
 and then again London, in the midst of whose renewed 
 gayeties she was prostrated by an illness from whose effects 
 she has never fully recovered, its legacy being a slight 
 trouble of the heart. When she left her sick-room she 
 was not strong enough for another sea-voyage in the win 
 try weather, and she remained in London ; and there, in 
 the February of 1878, the Macmillans brought out her 
 poems, which, published in America simply under the title 
 of " Poems," in the English edition were aptly named " Swal 
 low-Flights." 
 
512 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 It was, as one may imagine, a trying moment to Louise, 
 when she saw her book ready to be sent out to the reviewers. 
 She was almost an utter stranger to the London press, and 
 had been told that they seldom hospitably entreated the Am 
 erican, how frigid or how cutting might not her reception 
 be I A friend said he had asked permission to review the 
 book for the " Examiner," but had been refused, as the editor 
 was to review it himself. Modest to painfulness, she could 
 not believe so brilliant a critic as William Minto would 
 trouble himself to make an example of her ; she dared not 
 believe that he would praise her. But at last the paper came 
 the first London review she had received. It occupied a 
 page of the " Examiner," and praised her more cordially than 
 her best friend would have dared to do. After notino- the 
 
 o 
 
 power and individuality of the verses, the freshness, direct 
 ness, and spontaneity, the originality and independence of 
 models, and the rich and pure music, it declared that it might 
 be doubted if George Eliot had " ever succeeded in express 
 ing the same intensity of feeling in verse of equal fulness and 
 equally free from that taint of over-excitement which is so 
 fatal to high art." It quoted the sonnet "One Dread "as 
 something that might have been written by Sir Philip Sidney ; 
 and furthermore said : "It is, perhaps, a good augury for the 
 future of American poetry that the spirit with which these 
 poems have most in common is the spirit of the forerunners of 
 the great Elizabethan period. They are not at all archaic in 
 form ; but they deal with the simple, primitive emotions, and 
 again and again, as we read them, we are reminded of Wyatt 
 and Sidney, and the casual lyrics gathered in such collections 
 as England s Helicon. " The "Athenaeum" followed in an 
 equally generous spirit. "Mrs. Moulton," it said, "has a 
 real claim to attention. It is not too much to say of these 
 poems that they exhibit delicate and rare beauty, marked 
 originality, and perfection of style. What is still better, 
 they impress us with a sense of vivid and subtle imagination, 
 and that spontaneous feeling which is the essence of lyrical 
 poetry ; " and, at another time, the " Athenaeum," in making 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 513 
 
 a classification of sonnet-writers, used her name as that of 
 the only American worthy of such rank. Then came Peter 
 Bayne, telling of "beauty and power" in two pages of the 
 " Literary World " ; a page of the " Academy " in such per 
 fect appreciation as might make any singer s blood tingle in 
 the veins, speaking again of lyrical spontaneity, of felicity 
 of epithet, brilliant word-painting, healthy tone and vigorous 
 execution, subtlety and suggestiveness of ideas, imaginative 
 force pervaded by the depth and sweetness of perfect woman 
 hood, and the simple, unstrained beauty of it all. The " Tat 
 tler " also, while declaring that here was to be found a true poet 
 who sings because she must and not because she will, added 
 that Mrs. Moulton was a mistress of form, resembling the 
 great artists who could afford to take liberties with rules, be 
 cause they have mastered them all, that the poems teemed 
 with artistic perfection, and satisfied the most exacting de 
 mands of criticism, even going so far as to say that England 
 never had a poet in such full, unquestioning sympathy with 
 woods and hills and winds and waves. "They belong to no 
 school. One cannot help feeling that they are as absolutely 
 native to the heart, and therefore as fresh to the sense as the 
 songs of Burns or of Bdranger. ... It implies genius," 
 said this review. rf We have read Mrs. Moulton s poems 
 with the inevitable result of finding in her well-nigh the one 
 absolutely natural singer in an age of aesthetic imitation. 
 She gives the effect of the sudden note of the thrush, heard 
 through a chorus of mocking-birds and piping bullfinches. 
 And it follows that poema which give this effect must needs 
 contain something of their own not to be found elsewhere. . 
 . . Mrs. Moulton owes nothing unless, indeed, to her own 
 heart and to nature at first hand. One sees her, and her only, 
 in her work, and yet finds no taint of the self-consciousness 
 which blights the best work that is characteristic of these 
 days. She is as spontaneous a s Walter Von der Vogelweide." 
 There was a column of equally warm praise in both the 
 " Times " and the " Morning Post " ; the " Pall Mall Gazette " 
 found itself reminded of the "exquisitely lyrical feeling which 
 
514 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 gives a unique charm to the songs of Heine," and the "Spec 
 tator," the "London," the "May Fair," the "Scotsman," and 
 others followed in welcoming praise. Those beautiful verses, 
 the "House of Death" was the poem that struck most forci 
 bly the hearts of the readers then : 
 
 " Not a hand has lifted the latchet 
 
 Since she went out of the door 
 No footstep shall cross the threshold 
 Since she can come in no more. 
 
 " There is rust upon locks and hinges, 
 And mold and blight on the walls, 
 And silence faints in the chambers, 
 And darkness waits in the halls 
 
 " Waits as all things have waited 
 
 Since she went, that day of spring, 
 Borne in her pallid splendor 
 To dwell in the court of the King: 
 
 " With lilies on brow and bosom, 
 
 With robes of silken sheen, 
 And her wonderful frozen beauty 
 The lilies and silk between. 
 
 " Red roses she left behind her, 
 
 But they died long, long ago 
 Twas the odorous ghost of a blossom 
 That seemed through the dusk to glow. 
 
 The garments she left mock the shadows 
 
 With hints of womanly grace, 
 And her image swims in the mirror 
 That was so used to her face. 
 
 " The birds make insolent music 
 
 Where the sunshine riots outside, 
 And the winds are merry and wanton 
 With the summer s pomp and pride. 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 515 
 
 " But into this desolate mansion, 
 
 Where love has closed the door, 
 
 Nor sunshine nor summer shall enter, 
 
 Since she can come in no more." 
 
 Another of the poems that divided favor with the critics, 
 who had very pleasant things to say of it, was How 
 Long?" 
 
 " If on my grave the summer grass were growing, 
 Or heedless winter winds across it blowing, 
 Through joyous June, or desolate December, 
 
 How long, sweetheart, how long would you remember 
 How long, dear love, how long ? 
 
 " For brightest eyes would open to the summer, 
 And sweetest smiles would greet the sweet new-comer, 
 And on young lips grow kisses for the taking, 
 When all the summer buds to bloom are breaking, 
 How long, dear love, how long ? 
 
 " To the dim land where sad-eyed ghosts walk only, 
 Where lips are cold, and waiting hearts are lonely, 
 I would not call you from your youth s warm blisses, 
 Fill up your glass and crown it with new kisses 
 How long, dear love, how long ? 
 
 "Too gay in June you might be to regret me, 
 And living lips might woo you to forget me ; 
 But ah, sweetheart, I think you would remember 
 When winds were weary in your life s December 
 So long, dear love, so long ! " 
 
 Innumerable letters came to her also from the long-estab 
 lished poets. Philip Bourke Marston wrote her of "the 
 most exquisite and natural blending of strong emotion with 
 the sense of external nature," in her work. He declared 
 "How Long" almost matchless, concluding with, "The 
 divine simplicity, strength, subtlety, the intense, fragrant, gen- 
 
516 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 uine individuality of your poems, will make them imperish 
 able." Other letters of congratulation were received from 
 other prominent poets, from Matthew Arnold, Austin Dob- 
 son, Frederick Wedmore, Gosse, O Shaughnessy, Frederick 
 Locker, and William Bell Scott, poet and painter, the friend 
 of Rossetti, whose picture, the " Gate of Memory," illustrated 
 one of his poems, and a volume of whose verses is illustrated 
 by Alma Tadema. Another letter ran, "I close the book 
 only when needs I must, at page the last, with music in my 
 ears and flowers before my eyes, not without thoughts 
 across the brain. Pray continue your flights, and be assured 
 of the sympathetic observance of yours truly, Robert Brown 
 ing." At this time her songs were set to music by Francesco 
 Berger and Lady Charlemont ; Lord Houghton gave her 
 again a round-table lunch at which George Eliot, Kinglake, 
 
 * 7 O O 
 
 Sir Charles Dilke, Browning, and several others turned the 
 gloomy February day into summer. She was invited every 
 where in short, and had rare opportunities of seeing the in 
 side of English houses, visiting, among other places, at the 
 home of Doctor Westland Marston, the father of the poet, 
 and himself a poet, whose daughter, Cicely, was her most 
 devoted friend, and died suddenly one day while making 
 her a morning visit. It was to her that three touching 
 sonnets, entitled " Her Ghost," published subsequently in 
 the "Atlantic," referred. Struck one day of this period 
 by the beauty of a painting by Burne Jones, a red-gowned 
 Venus, she published some verses to the purpose in the 
 " Athenaeum " 
 
 " Pallid with too much longing, 
 
 White with passion and prayer ; 
 Goddess of love and beauty, 
 She sits in the picture there 
 
 " Sits, with her dark eyes seeking 
 
 Something more subtle still 
 
 Than the old delights of loving 
 
 Her measureless days to fill. 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 517 
 
 " She has loved and been loved so often, 
 
 In her long immortal years, 
 That she tires of the worn-out rapture, 
 Sickens of hopes and fears. 
 
 " No joys or sorrows move her, 
 
 Done with her ancient pride; 
 
 For her head she found too heavy 
 
 The crown she has cast aside. 
 
 "Clothed in her scarlet splendor, 
 
 Bright with her glory of hair ; 
 Sad that she is not mortal, 
 Eternally sad and fair, 
 
 " Longing for joys she knows not, 
 
 Athirst with a vain desire, 
 There she sits, in the picture, 
 Daughter of foam and fire ! " 
 
 w I think," Burne Jones wrote her in reply, " you must 
 know how glad all workers are of such sympathy as you have 
 shown me, and I don t know of any other reward that one 
 ever sets before one s self that can be compared for a moment 
 with the gratified sense of being understood, it s like 
 hearing one s tongue in a foreign land. I do assure you I 
 worked all the more confidently the day your letter came. 
 Confidence and courage do often fail, and when all the 
 senses are thoroughly tired with work, and the heart 
 discouraged, a tribute like the one you sent me is a real 
 refreshment." 
 
 As high praise, in the meantime, as her lyrics received 
 was awarded to her sonnets. She was frequently pronounced 
 to be one of the few who had mastered all the difficult 
 art of the sonnet. In Hall Caine s " Sonnets of Three 
 Centuries," one of hers, called "Inter Manes," was in 
 cluded, and more recently in a collection, entitled " One 
 Hundred Sonnets," the following formed one of the one 
 hundred : 
 
518 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 " LEFT BEHIND." 
 
 " Wilt thou forgot me in that other sphere 
 
 Thou who hast shared my life so long in this 
 And straight grown dizzy with that greater bliss, 
 
 Fronting heaven s splendor strong and full and clear, 
 
 No longer hold the old embraces dear 
 
 When some sweet seraph crowns thee with her kiss? 
 Nay, surely from that rapture thou would st miss 
 
 Some slight small thing that thou hast cared for here. 
 
 I do not dream that from those ultimate heights 
 Thou wilt come back to seek me where I bide ; 
 
 But if I follow, patient of thy slights, 
 
 And if I stand there, waiting by thy side, 
 
 Surely thy heart with some old thrill will stir, 
 
 And turn thy face toward me, even from her." 
 
 In relation to these, and other of her sonnets, Mr. George 
 H. Boker, the poet, wrote her : " I especially am charmed 
 with your sonnets, with their harmony, dignity, and the pro 
 priety of their themes. You have the true insight as to the 
 province and capabilities of that stanza ; and it seems to me 
 that in your ability to make a sonnet all that it should be, 
 you easily surpass all your living tuneful sisterhood." Some 
 of these sonnets are impassioned in their beauty, some of 
 them are distinguished for lines that strike clear and strong 
 as bell tones, 
 
 " Through the large stormy splendors of the night," 
 one begins, taking the ear at the start ; 
 
 " Oh, let me drift, and dream, and fall on sleep," 
 
 another one ends, a distinction, however, not confined to 
 the sonnets, as witness the opening line of her book, 
 
 " Forth from the wind-swept country of my heart." 
 
 They are replete too, with such happiness of expression as 
 this is, 
 
 " The sense of that divine tumultuous stir 
 When spring awakes." 
 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 519 
 
 Still others are heavy with sadness, none more so than that 
 great one, " In Pace." 
 
 " When I am dead, with mockery of praise 
 
 Thou shalt not vex the stillness of my sleep ; 
 Leave me to long tranquillity and deep, 
 
 Who, through such weary nights and lonesome days, 
 
 Such hopeless stretch of uncompanioned ways, 
 Have come at length my quiet rest to keep 
 Where nettles thrive, and careless brambles creep, 
 
 And things that love the dark their dull brood raise. 
 
 After my restless years I would have rest, 
 Long rest after so many restless years, 
 
 Peace after strife, a dreamless sleep and blest, 
 
 Unmocked by hope, set free from haunting fears; 
 
 Since the old pain might waken at thy tread, 
 
 Come Thou not nigh when I am lying dead." 
 
 In the next summer she came home. But it is no wonder 
 that every year when spring winds blow she has a yearning 
 to renew the pleasures of that period, and set her foot upon 
 her ship and sail away to the English strand again. She does 
 it all the more easily for the fact that she enjoys the sea, 
 never bavins: suffered a moment s sea-sickness. In the sum- 
 
 O 
 
 mer of 1882 her stay abroad was briefer than usual, as she 
 delayed at home for the marriage of her daughter Flor 
 ence to Mr. William Shaefer, now of Charleston, S. C., in 
 whom she found a son after her own heart. Her charming 
 little "Random Rambles "was published in 1881, after several 
 of these foreign trips ; and that in connection with her letters 
 to the "Tribune," and her hundreds of stories both for children 
 and grown people, have possibly made her more widely known 
 as a prose writer than as a poet. But it is poetry that is her 
 passion, which most assails her with its claim to be written, 
 which best expresses her, and in which she has had the highest 
 recognition. Books are a sort of people to her ; Emerson 
 and Hawthorne, Thackeray and George Eliot are like friends ; 
 and although above all other poets she exalts Browning, yet 
 she sometimes says that she is thankful to have lived in the 
 32 
 
520 LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. 
 
 same time with Tennyson, Rossetti, Morris, Matthew Ar 
 nold, Swinburne, and the rest, and is sorry for the eighteenth 
 century. She is an extremely sympathetic reader, sensitive, 
 receptive, taking the color of a mood, the sparkle of a 
 thought ; she is not herself a steady worker, having times 
 and seasons of working as they come to her, accomplishing 
 much then with swift hand and swifter brain. For the last 
 year or so she has done a good deal of work on social matters 
 for "The Continent," and it has brought her in communica 
 tion with a large class of readers and correspondents who, 
 impressed by her gentleness and wisdom, give her their con 
 fidences, ask her direction of important affairs in their lives, 
 and send her by-and-by the fortunate results of their obed 
 ience to her advice. All her friends find in her this same 
 gentleness and wisdom, a charm now just tinged Avith 
 melancholy, and now varying into natural gladness. They 
 find her, also, a delightful talker, full of wit and brilliancy and 
 ready repartee and grace, full of generosity and never-failing 
 kindness. For the rest, her face with its delicate features, 
 the long dark lashes of its shining eyes, the fairness of its 
 waving bright brown hair, the winsomeness of its smile, is 
 itself an expression of her sweet and sunny temperament. 
 
CHAPTEE XXII. 
 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 BY ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 Mrs. Spofford s Parentage Anecdotes of Her Childhood A Novel Expedi 
 tion Girlhood Days Writing Dramas for School Exhibition First 
 Literary Efforts Her Brilliant Debut The Story that First Made Her 
 Famous How it was Received The Commotion it Created Her Won 
 derful Command of Language Newburyport and its Surroundings A 
 City by the Sea Some of its Odd People A Locality Justly Famed for 
 its Noted Persons Old Traditions and Associations Amusing Anec 
 dote Why the Colored Woman Named her Baby Genevieve instead of 
 Harriet Mrs. Spofford s Present Home on Deer Island A Romantic 
 Spot Genuine Hospitality A Charming New England Home. 
 
 N the history of nations we find their character as 
 nations strongly affected by their geographic 
 surroundings ; not in smiling, fertile, inland 
 plains has ever been the home of tribes noted 
 for their maritime powers, or of marauders, 
 who need the fortress of rock and mountain in 
 which to shelter themselves from retaliation and 
 hide their spoils. 
 
 It was from the stormy North, where man s 
 perpetual warfare with nature, necessary to perpet 
 uate life, made him strong, hardy, courageous, and 
 active, that the mighty horde of Goth and Visigoth swept 
 down upon languid and luxurious Italy, and woke her people 
 from their Indolence to fight the fresh strength that was to 
 renovate their land in spite of their efforts to repel its youth 
 ful vigor and subversive overflow. 
 
 And it is equally true of the individual, that to appreciate 
 character justly we must study and understand not only hered 
 itary influences, but those which are external ; for never has 
 man or woman born and nurtured in the artificial atmosphere 
 
 621 
 
522 HARRIET PRESCOTT SrOFFORD. 
 
 of a city been the true lover and recorder of nature that lie 
 is whose childhood has been spent by hill and shore, by dash 
 ing waters, or under deep forest boughs ; whom the wild 
 flowers have companioned, the birds sung to careless slum 
 bers, or the low song of ocean soothed in childish grief or 
 pain. 
 
 Harriet Prescott Spofford was born in Calais, Maine, April 
 3, 1835. Her father, Mr. Joseph N. Prescott, was then a 
 lumber merchant in that place ; afterward he studied and 
 practised law. He is said by those who knew him best to 
 have been a brilliant, tender-hearted, and prodigally generous 
 man, courteous and genial, of the best old New-England 
 blood ; and all these reminiscences of his character interpret 
 the nature of his daughter. After some years spent in 
 Calais, Mr. Spofford, in 1849, became attracted by the fasci 
 nations of the Pacific coast, and, leaving his family in their 
 Maine home, went out among the host of pioneers in that 
 famous year to seek fortune in the farthest West. He was 
 one of the founders of the city of Oregon, an;l three times 
 elected its mayor ; but he was seized in the midst of arduous 
 work with the subtlest foe humanity contends with, lingering 
 paralysis, and for twenty years lived on in that dim prison 
 of the bodly senses, till merciful death unbarred the door 
 forever. 
 
 Mrs. Spofford s mother was Sarah Bridges, a beautiful, 
 proud, dnd intellectual girl, worthy of the grand old name 
 " Sarah," for she was "a lady" indeed; and though worn in 
 later years with sorrow and loss, in the high-bred, delicate 
 outline of her face, and the instinctive courteousness of her 
 gracious welcome, even from the depths of physical suffering, 
 there still remained the royal insignia of nature s true nobility. 
 She died April 1, 1883, at Deer Island, Newburyport, in 
 her daughter s house. 
 
 Born of such parents, Harriet Prescott began her life 
 among the rocks, woods, and waters of Maine. Much light 
 is thrown on her nature by the anecdotes still told of her 
 early childhood. Her aunt, who recorded most of these 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SFOFFORD. 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 525 
 
 things, was accustomed to road the Bible to her at night after 
 
 the child was in bed. One night she said : 
 
 " Choose for yourself, Hal, what I shall read you to-night." 
 " Oh, aunty," said the baby of four, " I want you to read 
 
 in the first part of the Bible where God said, Let there be 
 
 light ! and there was light, and then " her tones growin^ 
 
 O O O O 
 
 eager, and her blue eyes ablaze with thoughts beyond her 
 speech " then over in the middle, where it says, f The heavens 
 declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His 
 handiwork, " adding in a tone of rapture, with her hands 
 clasped, " It is so beautiful." 
 
 Another night she said : " Aunty, I wish you would read 
 to me about Abraham offering up Isaac""; " and when the story 
 was finished, said, with her pathetic Voice, "Aunty, why did 
 God want Abraham to offer Isaac up ? " 
 
 " To show his faith and obedience, dear." 
 
 She stopped to think the troublesome story out, and then 
 
 " Did Abraham want to do it?" she asked, earnestly. 
 
 " No ; he loved his son, but he wanted to obey God." 
 
 " But was it right? Wouldn t Abraham have been hung?" 
 said the child, in tones of deep awe. 
 
 "No, Hal. God commanded him to do it." 
 
 After a pause she lifted herself from the pillow, and clench 
 ing her little fingers tightly together, exclaimed, with a per 
 fect passion of tears : 
 
 " Oh ! I hope God won t ask me to offer up my little sister, 
 for I m afraid I shouldn t want to do it ! " 
 
 The same passionate devotion to those she loved was shown 
 a year or two later, when her baby brother died, and on 
 entering the room she fainted dead away ; and being the next 
 day missed for a long time, and sought everywhere but in 
 the drawing-room where the tiny crib stood that held the 
 child s body, she was at last found there, covering the couch 
 with pale primroses from the garden, and bitter leaves of 
 wormwood ; even then instinctively recognizing the symbol 
 ism that makes 
 
 " Your voiceless lips, oh, flowers," be " living preachers." 
 
526 HARRIET FRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 So wild was her grief, so deep her dejection, that she was 
 threatened with congestion of the brain for a time. 
 
 At another time, being then but four, filled with childish 
 curiosity, and having in her mind a distinct picture of the end 
 of the world not its final end of destruction and judg 
 ment, but what another child called the "jumping-off place" 
 she coaxed a playmate to set off with her on an expe 
 dition to find it. Had they been grown women or men 
 and begun a quest of as little use or promise, such as 
 finding the North Pole, they would have gone openly 
 escorted by sympathy and loaded with supplies ; watched, 
 waited for ; and if seas and icebergs, grizzly bears and Esqui 
 maux, let them escape alive, received with public acclamation 
 and private rapture ; but they were only babies ! Children 
 of a larger growth monopolize all the immunities; and their 
 exploration ended ignominiously, for a passing farmer picked 
 them up, and in spite of every sobbing or indignant remon 
 strance, carried them home in his wagon, after they had 
 tramped a mile and a half on that hot summer morning, 
 * dirty and footsore, but persevering." 
 
 How much better would the world have been had some 
 wandering Hercules picked up our luckless Arctic explorers, 
 packed them into a Brobdignag s wagon, and rumbled back 
 with the crowd over an astonished continent! What linger 
 ing agonies of cold, starvation and despair ; what worn-out 
 hopes, what breaking and broken hearts, what useless lavish 
 expense of life and riches, would have been spared to both 
 England and America had all the expeditions both nations 
 have sent out been ended so safely and expeditiously. 
 
 A lithe, active child, full of quaint wit and keen question 
 ing, she ran wild through her earlier years in the pure air and 
 fragrant breath of pine-forests and sea-breezes, laying the 
 foundation of her exceptional health and strength. 
 
 Her childish plays were full of daring : light as a woodland 
 sprite of old mythology, it was her delight to skip about on 
 the logs in the boom, careless that one false step would 
 plunge her forever into the icy waters of the flood below ; or 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 527 
 
 ride the great trunks that slid along with hopeless fatality to 
 meet the huge saw careering up and down in the saw-mill, 
 and elude its teeth just at the right minute . She balanced 
 herself on planks that went shooting down the arrowy water 
 in the sluiceway of the mill, and came out dripping, laughing, 
 and triumphant ; or made brief voyages on the rafts that 
 abounded on that Northern river. 
 
 Few American women who have lived to her age can look 
 back on but one illness in their lives, and that the result of 
 over-exertion ; and few anywhere can boast of the sound 
 mind in a sound body that is her possession. 
 
 Descended from what Dr. Holmes has aptly called the 
 Brahmin race of New England, she took eagerly to the learn 
 ing, which was an inborn taste. " Pre.scott " is a corruption 
 of "Priest s cote," or priest s house, and tells of long descent 
 from that privileged class who were the fountains and 
 guardians of literature from its earliest dawn. Surely there 
 is something in a name when it is in itself a tradition 
 something to be proud of an inheritance to be respected 
 and preserved. 
 
 With this surname her Christian name does not seem to 
 harmonize. "Harriet" suggests the prim, acrid, delicate 
 piece of property of Sir Charles Grandison s days, a creature 
 altogether too good for this world, and too disagreeably 
 punctilious for a better ; and a little anecdote told of Mrs. 
 SpoiTbrd during her Washington life shows how certain is 
 instinct even in these finer matters. A colored woman, who 
 was once in her service there, asked leave to name her baby 
 after the beloved mistress, but when the pickaninny was 
 brought for inspection its name proved to be Genevieve. 
 
 "Why," said Mrs. Spofford, "I thought it was to be called 
 Harriet, after me?" 
 
 "Oh yes, Mis Poffit," replied the smiling mother, "but 
 Genevieve spresses you a great sight better n Harriet does." 
 
 The hardy, active, bright child grew up to be fourteen 
 before she left her home in Calais ; then she went to her 
 aunt, Mrs. Betton, in Newbury )ort, to obtain better means 
 
528 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 of education than the little border town which was her birth 
 place offered her. 
 
 Here also the surroundings of her life were peculiar, 
 and fostered the bent of her nature. Newburyport is one of 
 those grand old towns whose trade and substance is derived 
 from the ocean. Once it was the home of many a Massa 
 chusetts aristocrat ; its streets are lined still with their old- 
 fashioned stately houses, standing high on terraces of grass, 
 and wearing a sort of reserve and dignity, though their 
 builders and makers have long since ceased to live upon 
 earth ; and the revolutions of American life have filled their 
 lordly chambers with the children of those whom they 
 "would not have set with the dogs of their flock." 
 
 " It is the servants now who fill the master s house," said 
 an old inhabitant to me, sadly. Here stands yet the house 
 of that eccentric old " Lord," Timothy Dexter, who made his 
 fortune by sending to the West Indies blankets and warming- 
 pans, eagerly bought by the planters of Cuba and Hayti as 
 strainers and dippers for their sugar-cane syrup, the very 
 irony of fate making this man s fortune out of his ignorance 
 and folly. 
 
 Here, too, is the old house where Caleb Gushing lived, and 
 here are traditions of Hannah F. Gould, one of New Eng 
 land s earlier poets, a strong-minded, angular, strapping 
 woman, eccentric in dress, abrupt in manner, but bright, 
 independent, kindhearted, and not without talent. Indeed 
 the Massachusetts coast as it radiates from Boston is alight 
 with the glories of literary genius, long the proud boast of 
 that old and beautiful cit} r . Lucy Larcom, the poet of daily 
 life, the self-made woman, the delightful friend, dates from 
 Beverly. Whittier, the master of New England poetry, the 
 knight whose keen lance is ever at rest to charge with chival 
 rous zeal upon injustice, cruelty, wrong in any shape and in 
 any quarter ; whose fiery heart throbs like a Paladin s under 
 his Quaker vest, well-nigh ready for such frays as should 
 belie the peaceful introversion of his religious birthright and 
 training, lived for many years in Amesbury, only a few miles 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 529 
 
 from Newburyport ; and there his modest home still stands, a 
 shrine for loving and admiring pilgrims to visit ; and every 
 year he returns to his old haunts for a time to wander on the 
 hills, or break the silver rest of the gently flowing river with 
 the oars of his beloved boat. Near at hand is Salem, forever 
 famous as the home of Hawthorne, whose genius is one of 
 America s proudest boasts, and whose fame is world-wide. 
 
 Other and lesser names of honor are abundant hereabouts. 
 The air is redolent with unwritten poems and unspoken 
 romance ; and into this atmosphere came the slight, active 
 Maine girl to study, as she thought, unconscious that here 
 fame should find her, and love, that is so infinitely more 
 precious than fame, fix her life and her happiness in the old 
 city by the sea. Here she won the prize for an essay on 
 Hamlet, offered by a few gentlemen to the children of the 
 Putnam Free School. This essay attracted the attention of 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a well-known author, who 
 became a friend at once of this brilliant girl, and developed 
 by kindly counsel and generous encouragement the dormant 
 genius his penetration had discovered. Here she also made 
 herself famous among her schoolmates by writing various 
 dramas for their use on days of school exhibition ; for these 
 plays she used historic facts, and poured into them so much 
 of her surprising knowledge and vivid language, making 
 these dry bones of the valley of vision clothe themselves 
 with palpitating flesh once more, and spring up to life, love, 
 and battle ; that her fame still clings to the traditions of the 
 school, and makes the otherwise ordinary building wear a 
 certain halo of memory in the eyes of those who were her 
 companions in study through that period of her life. 
 
 Soon after this time Mrs. Prescott, with her younger chil 
 dren moved to Derry, N. II., and after Harriet had graduated 
 at the Putnam school, she finished her education at Pinkerton 
 Academy. But the bright, careless girl had turned even so 
 early to the dreaming woman ; she had left her heart behind 
 in Newburyport, and no doubt added the weight of strong 
 will and wish to such family counsels as resulted in the 
 
530 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 removal of her mother and sisters to a permanent home in 
 the city by the sea. Here ensued a period of struggle and 
 deprivation, and the slight creature, whose lithe and delicate 
 shape seemed to indicate a continual need of ease, luxury, 
 and rest, showed of what fibre she was made. She began to 
 write stories for what are commonly called " story papers," 
 and worked with persistent energy for small gains, small, yet 
 needful to help those nearest and dearest to her, the toiling 
 mother, the young sisters, the helpless father. 
 
 What she wrote in those days has never been collected, 
 perhaps never known except by her own family, and is there 
 fore safe from criticism ; but her after-work leaves no doubt 
 that even these earlier efforts were lit with the spark of 
 genius, and that this unwearied practice gave to her hand the 
 power and skill with which the public were soon to be 
 astonished. 
 
 We all know how delicate and pallid are the blossoms of 
 our New England hills ; what scant gray vegetation covers 
 their rocks ; what hardy verdure, in what half-toned tints, 
 decks our villages and forests except in their gorgeous death ; 
 we traverse field after field to find nothing more than pathetic 
 and fragile bunches of the fairy-like "innocents," the soft 
 gray "pussy," the abundant but scanty-petalled saxifrage; 
 or, hidden under withered grass and driven dead leaves, the 
 baby blossoms of shy arbutus ; and when in summer s glow 
 and prime we hunt the solitary steeps for some bloom that 
 shall express the long-delayed heats of the } r ear, and harmon 
 ize with burning sun and flashing storm, we see only the 
 humiliated low stars of the five-finger, the dull blue fruit of 
 the dwarfed and stiff huckleberry, the late dandelion here 
 and there, or the half-budded aster in funereal purple, for as 
 yet the rod of Aaron has not evolved its golden tips ; but 
 suddenly, in the dust and heat and grayness, we come upon a 
 flame ; here, on the arid roadside springs up a lily, lavish 
 and gorgeous as the cactus of Mexican plains, lifting its vase 
 of fire to drink the concentred sunbeams, and flecked within 
 with passionate gloom and velvet luxury. It was with a sen- 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 531 
 
 sation akin to his who suddenly comes upon this tropic-souled 
 fire-lily, in the typical New England landscape, that readers 
 of the " Atlantic Monthly" took up the February number of 
 its third volume, the volume of 1858-59, and lost themselves 
 in the story " In a Cellar." 
 
 Hitherto the fiction of this young magazine had been 
 chiefly of the distinctive American type^, and Americans, like 
 the English footman, do "love a lord ;" the joys and sorrows 
 of our next neighbor grow uninteresting even to the few, and 
 are " caviare to the general ; " but this new and brilliant con 
 tribution dazzled us all with the splendors, the manners, the 
 political intrigues, the sin-spiced witchery of Parisian life. 
 
 The literary world of the day quivered with a new excite 
 ment : who had done this wonderful thing? Was it or 
 
 or naming by turns the most cultivated travellers 
 
 of this country, and the most practised authors abroad ; it 
 could hardly be believed, except by her own confidants and 
 kin, that the still, shy, brown-haired, blue-eyed Maine girl, 
 who lived in Newburyport as quietly as a gentle Quakeress, 
 had truly written this scintillation of genius and culture. 
 But as time went on, and story after story glittered in the 
 "Atlantic" pages, as older contributors laid down their pens 
 in despair, not unmingled with envy, and ceased to compete 
 with the new contributor, Harriet Prescott vindicated any 
 doubt of her power or authorship of "In a Cellar." Under 
 her qufet aspect, wistful regard, and shy manner, lay a soul 
 full of imagination and passion, and a nature that revelled in 
 the use of words to express this fire and force. In her hands 
 the English language became sonorous, gorgeous, and burn 
 ing. She poured out such luxury of image, such abundant 
 and splendid epithet, such derivative stress, and such lavish 
 color and life, that the stiff" old mother-tongue seemed to 
 have been molten and fused in some magic crucible, and 
 turned to liquid gold and gems. 
 
 And through all her fiction here and there a brief verse 
 sung itself to the motif of the situation, or the caprice of the 
 character, that showed she had also in reserve the heart and 
 
532 HARRIET TRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 tongue of a poet, though her poetry was as yet unrhymed, 
 and wore the alias of prose. But not only in the lavishness 
 of imagination, in depicting passion, luxury, and sensuous 
 situation, was her genius to expend itself. 
 
 Newburyport has, beyond its mansions, its bowery streets, 
 its spired churches, and its gray gardens, a waterside, where 
 fishermen live, and from whose poor huts they push out on 
 the savage and treacherous ocean to toil for their daily bread. 
 Here the dreadful romance of poverty and danger dwells, 
 and haunts the beholder ; from these battered homes wives 
 and mothers watch the outgoing boats that will return no 
 more ; they watch in vain from these house-tops, and stare 
 with weary eyes from the low windows, perhaps to see the 
 men they love and live for tossed from their vessels by the 
 angry, bellowing waves, and dashed to death on the pitiless 
 rocks, or swallowed in the great rolling, foaming waters that 
 break over the harbor bar. 
 
 To a stranger the outlook is bewildering and lovely. At 
 low tide nnd toward sunset the coloring of sea and land is 
 wonderful ; shades of green no painter ever imagined or 
 could ever reproduce, melt and mingle on the still surface of 
 the harbor ; a pink haze dims and glorifies the further shore, 
 shadowy bars of rose and amber glow in the western sky, and 
 in tender reflets change nnd interchange with the green 
 shadows of the sea ; cold and clear the evening star rises 
 above this riot of delicate color, and the sky deepening to 
 sapphire above can only recall the pavements beneath the 
 divine throne "as the body of heaven in its clearness." 
 
 But the fishermen s wives and daughters do not live in the 
 beauty of the sea, rather in its dread and terror; and fully 
 entering into the tragic significance of their lives, Miss Pres- 
 cott wrote one of her best stories, "The South Breaker," a 
 story of humble life, but of the passion, sin, suffering, and 
 late-delaying peace that is not the experience of low or high 
 class, but of all humanity ; and through the sad excitement 
 of the vivid recital breathes the very atmosphere of ocean. 
 You can hear the recoil and thunder of its crested beryl 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 533 
 
 waves ; feel the swing; and force of its cruel bosom ; cringe 
 
 O J o 
 
 at the sweep and wail of its winds ; and feel in your very 
 heart how mournfully true it is that " there is sorrow on the 
 sea ; it cannot be quiet." 
 
 It has been said of Miss Prescott s work by certain object 
 ing critics that she does not write with a definite moral pur 
 pose ; that the stern rectitude of the New England character 
 is not exploited in her stories. No doubt they are all the 
 more readable and popular for this undeniable fact. Yet who 
 can re-read "Sir Rohan s Ghost" re-read, 1 say, for its 
 wonderful diction and luxuriant coloring serve to hide its 
 strength on a first perusal without perceiving that it is a 
 strong and trenchant exposition of the awful power of con 
 science? that the ghost of the story was the conscious 
 memory of a sin never expiated or atoned for, avenging itself 
 on the sinner by the mere but unerring result of natural laws 
 acting in their ordinary sequence on a human soul. And the 
 resistless force of moral law breathes its stern diapason 
 through ." The South Breaker," like the note of threatening 
 waves on the reef itself, or the sullen roar that preludes and 
 gives warning of a storm. 
 
 Such also is the tone and temper of " A Thief in the 
 Night," another powerful and dramatic tale, worthy of 
 repeated readings ; an unintended sermon on those awful 
 words, " The wages of sin is death." 
 
 In 18 05, after many years of engagement, Miss Prescott 
 was married to Mr. Richard S. Spofibrd, a lawyer of New- 
 buryport, and the boy and girl in whose childish hearts beat 
 mutually the great throb of life even on their first meeting, 
 now man and woman, entered into that domestic companion 
 ship sacred even from the comment of a friend. Yet so 
 much is said about the incapacity of literary women for 
 domestic life, so many sneers are hurled at them as a class, 
 that it is certainly a duty owed to them to record the truth 
 that Mrs. Spofford is as devoted a wife, sister, and friend as 
 the most uncultured of her sex could be, and withal a careful 
 and intelligent housekeeper. 
 
534 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 That there are literary women who earn and deserve such 
 sneers it is vain to deny, for they are women of like passions 
 and short-comings with those who earn their bread or amuse 
 their leisure in another manner ; but it is hard to say 
 that they are unpractical, unreasonable, and jealous be 
 cause they are literary. There are hundreds of women 
 who sew, who teach, who work in mills, or stand in shops, 
 quite as erring in these matters as are authors and poets 
 of the same sex ; and there are many writing-women who 
 would be loved, respected, and admired in all the duties 
 and relations of life, wherever or however they earn their 
 bread, even though it be at the pen-point or the editorial 
 desk. 
 
 In the second year of her marriage Mrs. SpofFord s only 
 child was born, and yet in its infancy left her to mourn as 
 only mothers can mourn, refusing to be comforted. 
 
 Some years after his son s death Mr. Spofford purchased an 
 old house, picturesquely situated between Newburyport and 
 Amesbury, on Deer Island. Removed from its ..position 
 slightly, and turned about so that it no longer faced the high 
 way, judiciously altered and repaired, with a French roof 
 added to its already hospitable interior, it became the ideal 
 home of a poet and author. 
 
 The taste that knew already how to choose the purest and 
 most vivid garments for the lofty thought or faithful descrip 
 tion now lent itself to the less arduous labor of making an old 
 house beautiful and homelike, and to-day no one can enter 
 this dwelling without admiration and delight. Even in 
 
 C7 O 
 
 winter the rooms are full of cheer and sunshine, and illumi 
 nated with royal hospitality, and though all the land about 
 lies deep in its dazzling shroud, the gnarled old pines that 
 shelter the spot spread their dusky velvet boughs against the 
 whiteness, and vaunt their fadeless spring : while the rushing 
 blue river sparkles on every tiny ripple of its broad breast, 
 and flows, like a self-appointed guardian about the home of its 
 celebrator and lover, toward the unseen ocean she has also 
 loved and celebrated. 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 535 
 
 The whole place is curiously significant of its inhabitants ; 
 insulated by position from the outer world, its solitude is 
 bridged on either hand, and just in front of the house, cross 
 ing both bridges in a brief space, runs an artery of living 
 communication from the world without, a line of street-cars 
 connecting Newburyport and Amesbury. 
 
 The banks of the river on the mainland sides are thickly 
 set with young pine woods, soft and green, with fragrant 
 shadow ; and on a hill just in view stands the house once in 
 habited by Sir Edward Thornton, a picturesque castellated 
 mansion that in the distance shows like stone, though it is but 
 a wooden pretence. 
 
 Here in this charming dwelling, Harriet Prescott Spofford 
 need ask nothing from the outer world of homage or happi 
 ness, for here, like the woman of Shunam, she "dwells among 
 her own people," and opens both heart and home to her 
 friends, whose name is legion. 
 
 Of late years she has written other things than fiction. A 
 trenchant series of articles on the servant question show that 
 she, too, has the keen and clear New England sense which is 
 the birthright of its daughters. Dealing here with a difficult 
 problem, one w r hich has perplexed and saddened many a 
 woman s heart, she has shown herself capable of justice as 
 well as charity, and sees the relation as it should be seen, 
 from the side of the maid as well as the mistress. 
 
 Here, too, under the singing pines she has gathered for an 
 eager public the seolian strains of her own poems, floating 
 verses of which so long tantalized us in her stories ; and in 
 them we find echoes clear and true of the nature she so 
 deeply loves and thoroughly appreciates. She sings as 
 she speaks, in soft, true, vibrating accents, hinting here and 
 there of unrevealed treasures, depths not for the world to 
 explore, yet giving the anointed eye glimpses of a garden 
 like Aladdin s, full of fruits that are jewels, and paved with 
 fine gold. 
 
 What can be more powerful and beautiful than her poem 
 of " The Pine Tree" which we extract? 
 
536 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 "THE PINE TREE. 
 
 " Before your atoms came together 
 
 I was full-grown, a tower of strength, 
 
 Seen by the sailors out at sea, 
 
 With great storms measuring all my length, 
 
 Making my mighty minstrelsy, 
 
 Companion of the ancient weather. 
 
 " Yours ! Just as much the stars that shiver 
 
 When the frost sparkles overhead ! 
 Call yours as soon those viewless airs, 
 
 That sing in the clear vault, and tread 
 The clouds ! Less yours than theirs 
 The fish-hawks swooping round the river I 
 
 " In the primeval depths embowering 
 
 My broad boughs with my branching peers, 
 
 My gums I spilled in precious drops 
 Ay, even in those elder years 
 
 The eagle building in my tops, 
 
 Along my boughs the panther cowering. 
 
 " Beneath my boughs the red man slipping, 
 
 Himself a shadow, stole away ; 
 A paler shadow follows him ! 
 
 Races may go or races stay, 
 The cones upon my loftiest limb, 
 
 The winds will many a year be stripping ; 
 
 " And there the hidden day be throwing 
 
 His fires, though dark the dead prime be 
 Before the bird shakes off the dew. 
 
 Ah ! what songs have been sung to me : 
 What songs will yet be sung, when you 
 Are dust upon the four winds blowing." 
 
 And who has written anything more tenderly pathetic than 
 the following lines ? 
 
 " SECOND SIGHT." 
 " Under the apple-boughs she sits, 
 
 The sunshine in her flying hair ; 
 Dimpling and laughing through the fall 
 Of rosy flakes about her there. 
 
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 537 
 
 u And as I gaze I picture me, 
 
 Beside this darling of our souls, 
 Two innocents with softer locks, 
 Half ringlets and half aureoles. 
 
 " They frolic with her in the grass ; 
 They listen to the bird, the bee ; 
 They catch the petals as they float ; 
 They babble music in their glee. 
 
 " They teach the little earthling how 
 
 The cherubs play in hallowed courts ; 
 With some great, gracious angel near, 
 And smiling on them at their sports. 
 
 " Oh, do I really look upon 
 
 Those lost delights of vanished years, 
 Or do I only dream them there 
 
 Because I see her through my tears?" 
 
 Here she wrote a practical and exhaustive book on house 
 hold decorative art, which was first printed in " Harper ? 
 Bazaar," a book full of research, curious information, and 
 help for the blundering souls who want to make their homes 
 beautiful, but have neither skill nor knowledge how to do so. 
 
 And here, too, lives Mary N. Prescott, Mrs. SpofFord s 
 sister, whose charming stories arc so eagerly looked for by 
 every reader of our best magazines, and who may well com 
 pete with her eldest sister for the honor of being a remark 
 able writer of short stories, a gift far more rare and a capa 
 city far more in demand than that of the novel writer. 
 
 Mrs. Spoflbrd has published, in the course of her literary 
 career, ten books, i. e., "Sir Rohan s Ghost," "The Amber 
 Gods," "Azarian," "The Thief in (he Night," " Xew England 
 Legends," "Art Decoration Applied to Furniture," "The 
 Servant Question," "The Marquis of Carabas," "Hester 
 Stanley at St. Mark s," and, still in the prime of her intel 
 lect, America has much more to expect from her. Yet who 
 can dare say that a woman beyond the need of labor now, 
 happy in every human relation, the centre of a charming and 
 33 
 
538 HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD. 
 
 loving family, the queen of a delightful home, will care for 
 the demand of an insatiable reading public, who are forever 
 crying, " Give ! give ! " 
 
 Women who are driven by the necessities of their lives to 
 write, as others are to sew, to teach, or to nurse, do not 
 cease their labors till the pen drops from their weary hand, 
 and the exhausted brain refuses to feed the laboring fingers. 
 
 " Work ! work ! work ! " is not only the ." Song of the 
 Shirt," but the song of the Woman, and under that stringent 
 cry we reel off pages of fiction, overridden by the dreamy facts 
 of need, like the spider, spinning not only our dwellings, but 
 our grave-clothes from our own breasts. Happy is she who 
 need not so outwear heart and brain in the effort to live, dying 
 daily ; who is not forced to encounter that publicity and com 
 ment from which every true woman shrinks with real pain, 
 but who can lay down her weapons of war, enter upon her 
 rest and peace in this world, intrenched in " Honor, love, obedi 
 ence, troops of friends," and dwell while life lasts in the dig 
 nities and felicities of home, like Harriet Prescott Spoflbrd. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 ELIZABETH PRESTTISS. 
 
 BY MARION HARLAND. 
 
 Childhood of Elizabeth Payson Her Parentage Death of Her Father 
 The Struggle with Adversity A Glimpse of Her Life at Nineteen 
 "The Night Before Thanksgiving" Fondness and Facility for Writing 
 
 Preparing to Become a Teacher Early Religious Experiences 
 Marriage to Rev. Dr. Prentiss Wife and Mother Mrs. Prentiss First 
 Books A Peep into Her Domestic Life Cares of a Pastor s Wife 
 
 Ill-health and Suffering Patience in Affliction Marvellous In 
 dustry and Courage Writing under Difficulties How "Stepping 
 Heavenward" was Written Its Wonderful Sale Fortitude and Resig 
 nation of a Noble Christian Woman. 
 
 a glorious July day in 1878, a company of 
 tourists turned aside from the public road that 
 leaves the parish church of Arreton on the 
 left to visit a grave, on which the English sod 
 has thickened during eight} r years. 
 
 "Pardon!" said a Frenchman, who having 
 seen others remove their hats, held his in his 
 hand ; " but have the goodness to tell me what 
 it is we have come here to see ! " 
 
 The reply was reverently given : " The grave 
 of a very good woman." 
 
 Legh Richmond tells us little more than this of 
 Elizabeth Walbridge, the dairyman s daughter, whose simple 
 headstone pilgrims regard as devout men once looked upon a 
 shrine. 
 
 In the mountain cemetery of Dorset, Vermont, is a tomb 
 lettered with the name of another Elizabeth, beside which the 
 visitor to this picturesque region stands with bowed head and 
 heart too full for commonplace speech. 
 
 539 
 
T>40 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 "The grave of a very good woman !" And a great if 
 to sway the hearts, to direct the thoughts, and shape the eter 
 nal destinies of tens of thousands go to make up human 
 greatness ; if the act of gathering the riches of a life crowned 
 with love and honor, and offering them in singleness of heart 
 upon one altar be sublime. 
 
 Elizabeth Prentiss was the fifth child of Dr. Edward Pay- 
 son, and was born in Portland, Maine. When the baby- 
 daughter, longed-for by the tender mother, was two days old, 
 he gives in a letter to his parents what sounds to us now "like 
 the key-note of the weirdly-sweet refrain running through the 
 life of the woman who, with her father s genius, inherited a 
 nervous organization so fine and so susceptible that the purest 
 joy was never divorced from its complement of exquisite pain : 
 
 " Still God is kind to us. Louisa and the babe continue as 
 well as we could desire. 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." 
 
 The man who trembled to look upon a draught of earthly 
 delight, in the presentiment that dregs of peculiar bitterness 
 must lurk in the bottom of the cup, dated a letter written on 
 his deathbed, " The Land of Beulah," and spoke of the dark 
 river as " an insignificant rill." At the early age of forty- 
 five he laid down the body racked and rent by years of incon 
 ceivable tortures, often mistaken by him for the bufferings of 
 Satan. 
 
 We are pained, but in nowise surprised, when Elizabeth, 
 at twenty-two, says quietly, "I never knew what it was to 
 feel well." In her "Life and Letters"* than which no 
 nobler memorial was ever raised by conjugal love, we read 
 that "severe pains in the side, fainting turns, sick headaches, 
 and other ailments troubled her from infancy. Her whole 
 being was so impressionable that things pleasant and things 
 painful stamped themselves upon it as with the point of a 
 
 * " Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss. " By George L. Preutiss. 
 A. D. F. Randolph, New York. 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 541 
 
 diamond. Whatever she did, whatever she felt, she felt and 
 did as for her life." 
 
 The father, whom she passionately loved, cherishing all her 
 life a vivid recollection of everything pertaining to his last 
 months on earth, died when Elizabeth was nine years old, 
 and the close wrestle with circumstances, so familiar to the 
 readers of biographies of pastor and missionary, began for 
 Dr. Payson s widow and children. Louisa, the eldest 
 daughter, at eighteen, opened a girls school in New York, 
 the family removing to that city. During the one year they 
 spent (here Elizabeth, a slender, dark-eyed child of twelve, 
 thoughtful and intelligent beyond her years, joined the Pres 
 byterian church. 
 
 The school established by Louisa in 1832 in Portland was 
 very successful. Mrs. Payson s conduct of the boarding- 
 department and her management of her fast-growing boys 
 and girls were alike loving and judicious. To an active mind 
 and much strength of character she joined a warm heart and 
 practical wisdom that enabled her to supplement Louisa s 
 patient toil by skilful economies. The school was the main, 
 if not the sole support of the household. She had been 
 delicately nurtured as the petted daughter of a wealthy mer 
 chant, but the spirit that had not broken when adversity fol 
 lowed bereavement did not bend under the sustained press 
 ure of homelier trials, the accommodation of enlarging wants 
 to a narrow and non-expansive income. That her daughters 
 became admirable housewives was almost an inevitable con 
 sequence of such tutelage. ff Lizzy " was her sister s most 
 promising pupil. Louisa Payson was a woman of extraor 
 dinary intellectual gifts and acquirements, proficient in 
 modern languages, an earnest student of Greek, Hebrew, and 
 Latin, of metaphysics and theology, and a writer so graceful 
 and pertinent that she at length exchanged teaching for 
 remunerative authorship. She married Professor Hopkins 
 of Williamstown, and but for the confirmed invalidism into 
 which she soon afterward fell would have attained to a high 
 place among American literati. 
 
542 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 At the age of sixteen Elizabeth was the grateful occupant 
 of a " snuggery " of her own, a certain "Blue Room," assigned 
 her by the mother who best understood her love of quiet 
 hours for meditation and writing. Her father s desk was hers, 
 and on it she penned, at the suggestion of Mr. Nathaniel 
 Willis, short stories and verses for the " Youth s Companion." 
 Most of these were collected twenty years later, into a little 
 volume entitled, "Only a Dandelion." Here is a hint of how 
 life went on with her at nineteen : 
 
 " NIGHT BEFORE THANKSGIVING. 
 
 " I have been busy all day and am so tired I can scarcely 
 hold a pen. Amidst the beating of eggs, the pounding of 
 spices, the furious rolling of pastry of all degrees of short 
 ness, the filling of pies with pumpkins, mince-meat, apples, 
 and the like, the stoning of raisins and washing of currants, 
 the beating and baking of cake, and all the other ings, 
 thoughts of your ladyship have somehow squeezed themselves 
 in. We have really bidden adieu to Pumpkin Place, and 
 established ourselves in a house formerly occupied by old 
 l j arson Smith. . . . 
 
 " In the midst of our moving, after I had packed and 
 stowed and lifted, and been elbowed by all the sharp corners 
 in the house, and had my hands all torn and scratched, I spied 
 the new Knickerbocker mid a heap of rubbish, and was 
 tempted to peep into it. Lo, and behold, the first thing that 
 met my eye was the Lament of the Last Peach. I didn t 
 care to read more, and forthwith returned to fitting of carpets 
 and arranging tables and chairs and bureaux but all the 
 while meditating how I should be revenged upon you." 
 
 The verses in question had been given to her friend, and 
 sent without the author s knowledge to the " Knickerbocker." 
 
 With all her fondness for and facility in the use of her pen 
 the exercise was at this date mere pastime. She threw off 
 sketch and poem as carelessly as she wrote the letters that 
 add vivacity and glow to her biography. Naturally shy with 
 strangers, and reserved with mere acquaintances, she wrote bet 
 ter than she talked, except to intimate friends. In her home- 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 543 
 
 circle her brilliant sallies and graver disquisitions met with 
 loving appreciation, but even there Louisa s remarkable endow 
 ments would seem to have cast the talents of the younger 
 sister into the shade. This is the only explanation of the 
 fact that Louisa s successes in literature, and the encourage 
 ment given by the founder of " Youth s Companion " and his 
 son, N. P. Willis, to Elizabeth s essays in the same direction, 
 did not suggest to her or her relatives the expediency of adopt 
 ing authorship as her profession and serious pursuit. The 
 educated New England woman of her day, if obliged to 
 maintain herself, knew of but one way in which this could be 
 done in comfortable respectability. Miss Payson resolutely 
 put aside manuscripts and curbed the rebellious flutterings of 
 imagination, forbidding it to soar or sing, and " prepared her 
 self" to become a teacher. 
 
 Before she received the call that was to withdraw her from 
 the studious seclusion of the Blue Room and the shelter of 
 the mother s wing, there came what she ever afterwards 
 termed the " turning-point " in her career. In her twenty- 
 first year occurred an epoch in the spiritual history of this 
 girl, who "did everything as for her life," at the reading 
 of which shallow souls are perplexed and incredulous, 
 upon which those who can enter in some degree into the com 
 prehension of the depths out of which her cry arose to a deaf 
 God, dwell in wonder and compassion that almost break the 
 heart they move. Her father, had he been alive and with 
 her, would have sympathized, pang for pang, in her anguish 
 under the crushing conviction that s.he had rejected the Saviour 
 and grieved away the wooing Spirit, and incurred the just 
 wrath of the Father, in the despair with which she contrasted 
 her own guilt and impotency with the holiness and power of 
 her estranged God. Her husband s sound, sweet nature and 
 clear insight thus explain the glooms of this mediaeval 
 period : 
 
 " The indications are very plain that her morbidly-sensitive, 
 melancholy temperament had much to do with this experi 
 ence. Her account of it shows, also, that her mind was un- 
 
544 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 happily affected by certain false notions of the Christian life 
 
 and ordinances then, and still, more or less prevalent notions 
 
 based upon a too narrow and legal conception of the gospel." 
 
 It is impossible to read the chapter in which this awful, 
 mysterious "passion" is recorded without recalling the preg 
 nant Avords, " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the 
 children s teeth are set on edge." 
 
 Yet we cannot overlook the effect of this winter of the soul 
 in strengthening and maturing the faith that lived through it, 
 the perfected fruitage of which was for the refreshment and 
 healing of many souls. 
 
 " Do not hesitate," she writes to a favorite cousin, "to direct 
 me over and over again to go with difficulties and tempta 
 tions and sin to the Saviour. I love to be led there and left 
 there. Sometimes when the exceeding sinfulness of sin be 
 comes painfully apparent, there is nothing for the soul to 
 do but to lie in the dust before God without a word of ex 
 cuse ; and that feeling of abasement in His sight is worth 
 more than all the pleasures in the world." 
 
 The simple humility of this utterance, made soon after the 
 passing of the great horror of darkness, is like the dewy 
 breath of a May morning following a black frost. 
 
 In 1840 the summons to active duty sounded. She be 
 came a teacher in Mr. Persico s seminary for girls in Rich 
 mond, Virginia. With her acceptance of the principal s 
 offer began for her that stern discipline of character and dis 
 position which is wrought by external influences. With less 
 time for dreamy introspection, and subject to the call of pro 
 saic duties, she was daily stronger and happier, in spite of 
 homesickness and much that was uncongenial in the appoint 
 ments and companions of her new abode. To one corre 
 spondent she confesses that she suffers "excruciating pain" 
 from what some doctors pronounced to be angina pectorit; 
 to another, that the warm weather made her "feel as if she 
 were in an oven with hot melted lead poured over her brain." 
 In close and almost inevitable connection comes the mention 
 of her " encouragement in reading my father s memoir, in 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 545 
 
 reflecting that he passed through greater spiritual conflicts 
 than will probably ever be mine." 
 
 Nevertheless, her letters, nnd the journal she was pre 
 vented in later years from destroying by her husband s re 
 monstrances, show the continued triumph of the blithe, 
 brave, growing inner woman over disease, weariness, and 
 loneliness. 
 
 " There is sunshine enough in my heart to make any old 
 hole bright," she scribbles in " a dowdy chamber, which is 
 in one view a perfect den. I am as merry as a grig from 
 morning till night. The little witches down-stairs love me 
 dearly, everybody is kind, and and and when every 
 body is locked out, and I am locked into this same room, this 
 low attic, there s not a king on earth so rich, so happy as I." 
 
 We smile, well pleased, over this sentence: "We rushed 
 into a discussion about proprieties, and I maintained that a 
 mind was not in a state of religious health if it could not 
 safely indulge in thoughts as funny as funny could be." 
 
 Her year of teaching was so marked in its success that Mr. 
 Persico sent an urgent recall to her in November, 1842. 
 There were changes in the administration of the affairs of the 
 seminary that made the second session far less pleasant than 
 the first. The principal lost heart after his wife s death, 
 could not pay his teachers, and was hopelessly indebted to 
 others. Miss Payson stood gallantly at her post through 
 pecuniary loss and mental discouragement until the dreary 
 summer term closed in the "dog-days" which well nigh 
 exhausted her feeble reserves of physical vigor. 
 
 There was more heroism in this than those about her dreamed 
 of, more than her best friends knew at the time. With 
 infinite tact and delicacy her biographer has withheld from 
 us very many passages of letters and journal that the kind 
 liest stranger-eyes should not read, yet allows us to discern 
 in the tone of these records tokens of a coming change. 
 From between the leaves of her epistles to her dearest girl 
 friend, the "Anna Prentiss" whose close intimacy with 
 herself only ceased with the beautiful life of the former, 
 
546 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 and from the coyly-opened "Diary," steals subtle fragrance 
 that revives our own memories of life s blossom-season. 
 Fortitude in the endurance of crosses becomes buoyancy, the 
 hope of better days is glad certainty. We are sure what all 
 this portends before we read such hurried, palpitating jot 
 tings-down as these : 
 
 "AUGUST 22. Came home. Oh, so very happy ! Dear, 
 good home ! 
 
 "AUGUST 23. Callers all day, the second of whom was 
 Mr. P. 
 
 " SEPTEMP.ER 9. Cold, blowy, and disagreeable. Went to 
 see Carrie H. Came home and found Mr. P. here. He 
 stayed to tea." 
 
 Then falls an eloquent silence upon the girlish prattle. We 
 know, but not from herself, that September 11 was hence 
 forward her " white day." The one other entry in this year s 
 diary is the solemnly significant quotation from " Corinne " : 
 
 " Celle qui a besoin d admirer ce qu elle aime, celle, dont le 
 jugement est p6ndtrant, bien que son imagination exaltee, il 
 n y a pour elle qu un objet dans 1 univers. 
 
 "Celui qu on nime, est le vengeur des fautes qu on a 
 commis sur cette terrc ; la Divinite lui prete son pouvoir." 
 
 The Avorld is better, hearts are fresher and stronger for the 
 modest relation, which is hardly more than a beautiful sug 
 gestion of such a love-story as began on that "white day." 
 In brief, manly phrase, the biographer tells us : 
 
 "Love in a word, was to her, after religion, the holiest and 
 most wonderful reality of life ; and in the presence of its 
 mysteries she was to use her own comparison Mike a 
 child standing upon the seashore, watching for the onward 
 rush of the waves, venturing himself close to the water s 
 edge, holding his breath and wooing their approach, and then, 
 as they came dashing in, retreating with laughter and much 
 fear, only to tempt them anew. " 
 
 On April 16, 1845, Elizabeth Payson married Rev. George 
 L. Prentiss, then the pastor of a church in New Bedford, 
 Mass. 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 547 
 
 There is no need that this page should bear witness to the 
 scholarship, eloquence, and piety of a divine so distinguished 
 and beloved. But as a woman I linger pridefully upon the 
 truth that to other qualities which challenge respect he united 
 that rare nobility of nature that enabled him to value aright 
 the talents of the woman he had wedded ; to foster these 
 wisely and generously, and to rejoice sincerely in her renown. 
 The growth of their dual being into oneness and beauty was 
 never warped or checked by jealousy of a strain we would 
 brand as " unmanly," could we do away with the truth that 
 that man is exceptionally magnanimous, and his self-poise 
 phenomenally steady, who takes pleasure in hearing his wife 
 extolled for the exercise of such powers as he believes him 
 self to possess. 
 
 The chrism of wedded love consecrated Mrs. Prentiss to a 
 new mission. Had she never given a printed line to the 
 world, her labors as a pastor s wife would have entitled her 
 to honorable mention among the representative women of our 
 country and time. Her husband s parish was filled with " our 
 people." Her great, warm heart, ready sympathies, her love 
 for little children, and the nameless magnetism by which they 
 were drawn into her arms ; her efficiency as nurse and house 
 wife, above and animating all, the fervent piety that moved 
 her to love for the household of faith and tender solicitude 
 for the irreligious these, with a genuine womanliness and 
 tact that never failed her, fitted and endowed her royally for 
 the station in which her marriage set her. With gain of 
 years and confidence in her own talents she became a leader 
 in church enterprises. Her Bible readings before large audi 
 ences of her own sex won plaudits from those best qualified 
 to judge of such exercises. 
 
 "I was impressed," says an eminent clergyman, "with her 
 ability to combine rarest beauty and highest spirituality of 
 thought with the uttermost simplicity of language and the 
 plainest illustrations. Her conversation was like the mystic 
 ladder which was set up on the earth, and the top of it 
 reached to Heaven. " 
 
548 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 Passing reluctantly over the idyllic pictures of her early 
 home in New Bedford, we find the busy, popular wife of the 
 pastor of the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church in New 
 York writing to a friend on the last day of the year 1851 : 
 " How little we know what the New Year will brins: forth ! " 
 
 O 
 
 It brought her a weight of woe that was a strain even upon 
 the Everlasting Arms. She had kept a mother s journal of the 
 babyhood of her first boy, the " Robbie" of " Little Susy s 
 Six Birthdays," the "Ernest" of "Stepping Heavenward." 
 The last entry in this bears date of January 16, 1852. 
 
 "Oh," said the gardener, as he passed down the garden 
 walk: Who plucked that flower? His fellow-servants an 
 swered: The Master. And the gardener held his peace." 
 
 Twenty years later she wrote : " Such a child could not 
 go hence without rending and tearing its way out of the heart 
 that loved it." 
 
 A second cloud swept dark and fast upon the first. 
 
 "Our darling Eddy died on the 10th of January. The 
 baby he had so often spoken of was born the 17th of April. 
 I was too feeble to have any care of her. I had her in my 
 arms but twice ; once, the day before she died, and once 
 while she was dying. I never saw her little feet." 
 
 A pencilled scrap of paper found among her manuscripts 
 is entitled, 
 
 "MY NURSERY, 1852. 
 
 "I thought that prattling hoys and girls 
 
 Would fill this empty room ; 
 That my rich heart would gather flowers 
 
 From childhood s opening bloom. 
 One child and two green graves are mine, 
 
 This is God s gift to me; 
 A bleeding, fainting, broken heart 
 
 This is my gift to Thee." 
 
 In 1853 she wrote "Little Susy s Six Birthdays," reading 
 each chapter as she went on to her husband, brother, and daugh 
 ter. She had published nothing in thirteen years, a period of 
 continual accumulation. Sorrow had deepened the channels of 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 549 
 
 thought ; study, shrewd observation of the wider world to 
 which she had been transferred, and association with scholars, 
 had filled the sluice-ways ; love and loving made her life 
 round and rich. 
 
 Those of us in whose homes this inimitable nursery-classic 
 is an ever fresh delight do not wonder at the glad acclaim 
 with which it was at once received. We take Susy into our 
 embrace from the moment she " doubles up her lips and gives 
 her mamma the funniest little bit of a kiss you can imagine," 
 on the day she is one year old. She is a real flesh-and-blood 
 baby not a " goody-goody " image of barley-sugar, or an 
 impossible china manikin, a thing to be cuddled, and 
 hugged, and petted, and as she grows in age and intelligence, 
 is bewitching in her naughtiness, mishaps, and pranks. We 
 grieve over the nine little white blisters on the burnt fingers, 
 and are ready to smother her with kisses when she plays 
 doctor to Robbie and her doll, equipped in cap and spectacles 
 and armed with papa s gold-headed cane. 
 
 In 1854 "The Flower of the Family " was published. It 
 had a cordial reception in America, was issued in France as 
 " La Fleur de Famille" and in Germany as "Die Perle der 
 Familie" 
 
 From this time her pen was seldom idle. The prosperity 
 of her books in the thing whereto she sent them moved to 
 gratitude, hardly to surprise, the devout mind that dictated 
 this confession to the friend of her girlhood : 
 
 "I long to have it do good. I never had such desires 
 about anything in my life, and I never sat down to write 
 without first praying that I might not be suffered to write 
 anything that would do harm, and that, on the contrary, I 
 might be taught to say what would do good. And it has 
 been a great comfort to me that every word of praise I ever 
 have received from others concerning it has been It will 
 do good. This I have had from so many sources that, amid 
 much trial and sickness ever since its publication, I have had 
 rays of sunshine creeping in, now and then, to cheer and 
 sustain me." 
 
550 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 Among the trials were the long illness of her baby her 
 fourth child tl\e deaths of valued friends, and harder to 
 bear than her own intense physical sufferings growing 
 solicitude on account of her husband s failing health. 
 
 In 1856 mothers and children, with almost equal degrees of 
 enthusiasrr , read " Little Susy s Six Teachers," awarding it a 
 place in their affections only second to that given to the " Six 
 Birthdays." 
 
 In 1858 Dr. Prentiss was compelled by enfeebled health to 
 resign the charge of his church, and he decided to take his 
 whole family to Switzerland. They remained abroad two 
 years. Not the least interesting division of the " Life and 
 Letters " is Mrs. Prentiss lively and earnest word-painting 
 of domestic scenes and travelling experiences. 
 
 On their return Dr. Prentiss became the head and heart of 
 a new church enterprise, having for its object the formation 
 of an up-town parish, under the style of "The Church of 
 the Covenant." Of the period at which this was begun 
 he says : 
 
 " Domestic and personal interests were entirely overshad 
 owed by the one supreme interest of the hour that of the 
 imperilled national life. It was for Mrs. Prentiss a period 
 of almost continuous ill-health. The sleeplessness from 
 which she had already suffered so much assumed more and 
 more a chronic character, and aggravated by other ailments, 
 and by the frequent illness of her younger children, so under 
 mined her strength that life became at times a heavy burden. 
 She felt often that her days of usefulness were past." 
 
 How far she was mistaken in this impression the next ten 
 years revealed. In 1862 Mrs. Hopkins, the sister from 
 whom Elizabeth Prentiss had taken her intellectual colorin^, 
 
 O " 
 
 whose example of Christian heroism had taught her latterly 
 other and more precious lessons the tale of whose years 
 of pain is told in "wondrous pitiful" snatches, usually but a 
 few lines in length, but all the invalid could pen entered 
 into rest. The last entry in her diary shows how perfectly 
 attuned were the souls of the twain : 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 551 
 
 " I need not be afraid to ask to be, first, holy and without 
 blame before Him in love ; second, filled with all the fulness 
 of God ; third " 
 
 She finished the petition in the face-to-face audience of the 
 King. 
 
 From the low-lying shadow of bodily anguish Mrs. Pren- 
 tiris never fully emerged until she dropped the load of mor 
 tality. In 1864 there is pathetic but patient allusion to the 
 "horrid calamity," hereditary insomnia, that filled nights 
 with dread and days with languor. "Still," she writes, "we 
 are a happy family in spite of our ailments. It seems to 
 me that the sound of my six little feet is the very pleasantest 
 sound in the world. Often when I lie in bed racked with 
 pain, and exhausted from want of food, for my digestive 
 organs seem paralyzed when I have neuralgia, hearing 
 these little darlings about the house compensates for every 
 thing, and I am inexpressibly happy in the mere sense of 
 possession." 
 
 Such passages excite in us a wonder of admiration at the 
 industry, the unflinching courage, and the love of the \vork 
 she felt was laid to her hand, that added in seven years to 
 the list of her published productions, "Little Susy s Little 
 Servants," "Tales of Early Childhood" (a translation from 
 the German), and "The Little Preacher," the scene of which 
 was laid in the Black Forest. Never, in all this season of 
 toil and pain, were domestic and church duties neglected. 
 From her well-ordered kitchen came palatable food for her 
 own family and delicacies for the sick. Wherever sorrow 
 and disease went she followed, as obeying a direct call from 
 Him who pleased not Himself. She was never too busy to 
 console the bereaved with spoken or written words ; to help 
 her children with their lessons ; to study treatises on science, 
 metaphysics, and theology, and to have a spare hour for 
 lighter current literature. Maternity was with her more 
 than instinct ; it was a passion, triumphing over debility, 
 pain, and the engrossments of literary and pastoral life. 
 "Mamma" was always, when at home, within call, and sel- 
 
552 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 dom so ill that she could not be referee, counsellor, and 
 playfellow. If the suspicion of mysticism obtrudes itself 
 upon him who reads of religious fervors too exalted for the 
 appreciation of the average Christian, he cannot deny that 
 the product of conflict and ecstasy was intensely practical 
 piety. Her achievements for the good of her kind would 
 have been remarkable for a robust woman, to whom headache 
 and sleeplessness were strangers. In her they were simply 
 inexplicable, unless we refer them, as she did, to ever-renewed 
 supplies of strength from an inexhaustible Source. 
 
 In 1867 she reorganized her household in the new parson 
 age in Thirty-fifth street, selected the sight of and planned 
 the cottage home in Dorset, wrote "Little Lou s Sayings," 
 and began " Stepping Heavenward," penning whole chapters 
 of it with her motherless little nephew on her lap. Soon 
 after the completion of this book, and the first summer passed 
 in the beloved Dorset retreat, she was called to receive the 
 last sigh of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Stearns, the "Anna" who 
 had been to her, for thirty years, tenfold dearer than the ties 
 of blood and name, or the accident of companionship could, 
 in and of themselves, have made her. There is nothing in 
 English literature more touching and graphic than the letter 
 describing this death-scene.. She draws it with few and 
 masterly lines, that give it into the keeping of our memories 
 as if we had ourselves watched the translation and marvelled 
 at the transfiguration that preceded the body s dissolution. 
 
 "After her eyes were fixed, hearing Mr. S " (her hus 
 band) "groan, she stopped dying, turned, and gave a parting 
 look," is a thrilling passage, set down with the unconscious 
 ness of childhood, and true genius. 
 
 In all reverence of sympathy we are reminded, in perusing 
 this and many other transcripts of her daily living and 
 thinking, how " Himself took our infirmities, and bore our 
 diseases." The earnestness with which sho throw herself into 
 the joys and griefs of those she loved was a terrible strain 
 upon nervous forces that were tenuous and tangled when she 
 inherited them. 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 553 
 
 Her biographer says of her " relentless activity " of hand, 
 heart, and brain, "Incessant work seemed to be in her case 
 a sort of substitute for natural rest, and a solace for the want 
 of it." 
 
 "I believe," she writes to a friend, "that God arranges our 
 various burdens and fits them to our backs, and that He sets 
 off a loss against a gain. I have to make it my steady object 
 throughout each day so to spend time and strength as to 
 obtain sleep enough to carry me through the next." 
 
 Yet this very friend said of Mrs. Prentiss that she " seemed 
 to be always in a flood of joy." When mind and body were 
 faint to exhaustion the unconquerable spirit made sport of her 
 own evil plight. Letters and sketches sparkle with clear fun, 
 
 Chiding a correspondent who thought General Assembly a 
 bagatelle to a housekeeper, she goes on in this fashion : 
 
 " As if two hundred and fifty ministers haven t worn streaks 
 in the grass around the church, haven t (some of em) been 
 here to dinner and eaten my strawberry short-cake and cot 
 tage-puddings, and praised my coffee and drunk two cups 
 apiece all round, and as if I hadn t been set up on end for 
 those of them to look at who are reading Katy, and as if 
 going furiously to work, after they d all gone, didn t use me 
 up and send me lopping down on sofas, sighing like a 
 what s-its-name. ... I can t imagine why I break down so, 
 for I don t know when I have beon so well as durin" 1 this 
 
 O 
 
 spring ; but Mr. P. and A. say I work like a tiger, and I sup 
 pose I do without knowing it." 
 
 " Katy " is the heroine of ff Stepping Heavenward." It had 
 appeared as a serial in "The Advance," and was issued in 
 book-form in 1869. " Every word of that book was a prayer, 
 and seemed to come of itself," she tells us. 
 
 It was an angel of mercy to thousands of homes ; balm 
 and benediction to hundreds of thousands of women. The 
 story of Katy s loves and mistakes, her aspirations and her 
 despairs, her frolics and her bereavements ; of her steady pro 
 gress in the way that grew less steep as she learned to walk, 
 and not run, toward the brightening and widening horizon, 
 34 
 
554 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 was read with tears and laughter, and sobbed thanksgivings 
 for the strength infused into weary hearts by the practical 
 spirituality of its teachings. Nearly seventy thousand copies 
 were sold in America prior to the author s death. It was 
 reprinted by five London booksellers and in a Tauchnitz 
 edition at Leipsic ; a German translation " Himmelan " 
 had an immense sale and was extolled by German critics ; and 
 the French ft Marchant vers le del " was scarcely less popular. 
 
 She was not? elated by the renown that astonished her, but 
 across the page lettered " 1870," the loving biographer 
 writes " Satisfied" He calls it the " bright consummate 
 flower of her life." In the rich waves of incense that arose 
 from the heart sun-warmed to its depths, the glad humility 
 of her piety is wondrous in sweetness. 
 
 Just after the celebration of her " silver wedding," she 
 writes : 
 
 " I have a very curious feeling about life, a satisfied one, 
 and as if it could not possibly give me much more than I now 
 have. 
 
 " / have lived, I have loved (quoting Thekla s Ick habe 
 aelebt und geliebet }. " People often say they have so much to 
 live for. I can t say so, though I am not only willing but 
 glad to live while my husband and children need me and 
 yet and yet to have this problem solved and to be forever 
 with the Lord ! " 
 
 While no one who knew her would dream that she had 
 described her own life in "Katy s," still less of identifying 
 the clumsy, tactless " Ernest" with the courteous, scholarly 
 gentleman whose watchfulness of devotion to his fragile wife 
 was proverbial, there were not wanting critics and com 
 mentators whoso surmises elicited bursts of whimsical vexa 
 tion : 
 
 "Everybody is asking if I meant in Katy to describe 
 myself. I have no doubt that if I should catch an old toad, 
 put on her a short gown and petticoat and one of my caps, 
 everybody would walk up to her and say, Oh, how do you 
 do, Mrs. Prentiss ? you look more like yourself than com- 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 555 
 
 mon. I recognize the picture you have drawn of yourself in 
 Stepping Heavenward and in The Percys, etc., ad nau 
 seam. The next book I write I ll make my heroine black, 
 and everybody will say, Oh, here you are again, black to 
 the life ! " 
 
 From the Dorset paradise, where she was most happily and 
 joyfully herself, she sends a lively bit of pastoral, an alfresco 
 charcoal sketch to her eldest daughter who was travelling in 
 Europe : 
 
 " M. took me yesterday to see a nest in the orchard which 
 was full of birds, parted into fours not a crack between, 
 and one of them so crowded that it filled about no space at 
 all. The hymn says, Birds in their little nests agree, and 
 I should think they would, for they have no room to disagree 
 in. They all four stared at us with awful, almost embarrass 
 ing solemnity, and each had a little yellow moustache." 
 
 An able critic, in a journal * that cannot be accused of a bias 
 toward orthodox denominationalism, says of the " Life and 
 Letters" : "It is a genuine memoir, singularly transparent in 
 its naturalness and simplicity, and leading us among the green 
 pastures of a life from whose hidden springs came such spon 
 taneous outflows as her best work, * Stepping Heavenward. " 
 
 It deserves all this, and how much more the space allotted 
 to this paper will not allow me to attempt to tell. Nor can 
 we dwell upon the peculiar phase of religious thought of 
 which " Urbane and his Friends " is the expression. 
 
 Of her poetical writings the exquisite hymn, " More Love 
 to Thee, O Christ," too well known to be repeated here, is 
 also the most nearly faultless in form and melodious utter 
 ance, and would have given her a place in the heart of 
 Christendom had she written nothing else. 
 
 On the threshold of 1878 we linger to read that " her weekly 
 Bible-reading, painting in oils and in water-colors, needlework 
 and other household duties left her no idle moments." 
 
 " My fire is so full of irons," she complains in her sprightly 
 vein, "that I do not know which one to take out." 
 
 * u Springfield Republican." 
 
55G ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 Since "Stepping Heavenward" she had published: " Nid- 
 worth and his Three Magic Wands," "The Percys," "The 
 Story Lizzie Told," " Six Little Princesses," " Aunt Jane s 
 Hero," "Urban6 and his Friends," "Griselda" (translated 
 from the German), "The Home of Greylock," and " Pema- 
 quid, a Story of Old Times in New England." 
 
 "I have just finished a short story called Gentleman 
 Jim, " she tells a correspondent under date of January 20, 
 1878. Then after mentioning a letter "the most discrimi 
 nating I ever received about Greylock" she gives us 
 the key to the singular equanimity with which she sustained 
 the praises of her writings. " After the first rush of pleasure, 
 the Evil One troubled me off and on for two or three hours, 
 but at last I reminded him that I long ago chose to cast in my 
 lot with the people of God, and so be off the line of human 
 notice or applause." 
 
 In her answer to the appreciative reader (Mr. J. Cleave- 
 land Cady, the popular architect) she strikes the same chord 
 more strongly. " I am not sorry that I chose the path in life 
 I did choose. A woman should not live for, or even desire 
 fame. . . If I had not steadily suppressed all such 
 
 ambition I might have become a sour, disappointed woman, 
 seeing my best work unrecognized. . . . God has only 
 taken me at my word. I have asked Him a thousand times 
 to make me smaller and smaller, and crowd the self out of 
 me by taking up all the room Himself." 
 
 This sublimity of self-abnegation endues with powerful 
 meaning what is sometimes considered a mystic phrase "a 
 life hid with Christ in God." Mrs. Prentiss knew, as did 
 her husband he feeling it far more than did she that 
 while the rapid sales and translations of her books and the 
 multitude of private testimonials to the blessing they had 
 brought to individual hearts were evidence that she had not 
 spent her strength in vain, still the press in general was 
 strangely reserved as to their literary merit. 
 
 " The organs of literary intelligence and criticism scarcely 
 noticed them at all," Dr. Prentiss says frankly. 
 
ELIZABETH PREXTISS. 557 
 
 When the bright, far-seeing eyes were sealed in the dream 
 less sleep denied so long to restless brain and tense nerves, 
 critics awoke to recognition and confession of the truth that 
 the Christian woman whose highest ambition was " to do 
 good," had possessed genius of no mean order ; that she had 
 wrought artistically as well as prayerfully; that human skill 
 was blent with divine power in the utterances that made our 
 hearts burn within us as she talked with us by the way. She 
 sketched only what she saw, but the drawing is spirited, the 
 management of light and shade masterly. In character por 
 traits she catches a likeness at a glance, gives it with a few 
 rapid strokes, as graceful as bold. In her gayest mood she 
 never degrades her art to the trickery of caricature. She 
 sang only what she felt, but the heart-throbs are set to 
 music that moves us to tears and lifts the soul to holy thought 
 and prayer. 
 
 The last stage of the journey that had bruised sorely her 
 delicate feet, was short, sharp, and all brightness. 
 
 On August 5, returning, happy and unwearied, from a 
 woodland ramble with her two daughters ( ff we three girls," 
 she loved to style the trio), she worked on the lawn and 
 among her flowers so long as to be overcome by the heat. 
 While she seemed to rally from the prostration and nausea 
 that kept her on bed and lounge for two days, there 
 is no doubt that the fatal " stroke " fell on that August 
 noon. 
 
 On the 8th she insisted that she was "well, only weak," 
 and drove in the afternoon to keep an appointment her 
 weekly Bible-reading. She was unusually cheerful, even for 
 her, all day, interested in flower-painting, in watering her 
 plants, and other light duties. "Pray one little prayer 
 for me!" she said, emphatically and sweetly, lifting her 
 forefinger archly, as her husband put her into the carriage. 
 
 One who was her life-long friend gives this description of 
 her person: "In silvering her clustering locks, time only 
 added to her aspect a graver charm. Her e} es were black, 
 and, at times, wonderfully bright and full of spiritual power, 
 
558 ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 
 
 but they were shaded by deep, smooth lids, which gave them, 
 when at rest, a most dove-like serenity. Her other features 
 were equally striking, the lips and chin exquisitely moulded 
 and marked by great strength as well as beauty. Her face 
 in repose wore the habitual expression of deep thought and a 
 soft earnestness, like a thin veil of sadness." 
 
 Her aspect as she took her seat before the ladies assembled 
 in the lecture-room, on this day, was ethereal in its beauty. 
 Her face was pale, but clear and radiant as with the out 
 shining of an inward glory ; her voice was tender and thrill 
 ing. Her theme was " Witnessing for Christ." Had she 
 known that the reading would be her last, she would prob 
 ably have selected the same. One part of the talk was im 
 printed forever by what ensued upon the memories of her 
 auditors : 
 
 "Dying grace is not usually given until it is needed. 
 Death to the disciple of Jesus is only stepping from one room 
 to another and far better room of Our Father s house. And 
 how little all the sorrows of the way will seem to us when we 
 get to the home above ! I suppose St. Paul, amidst the bliss 
 of Heaven, fairly laughs at the thought of what he suffered 
 for Christ in this brief moment of Time ! " 
 
 She had not strength to answer a letter that came on 
 this or the next day from a young English mother who had 
 read "Stepping Heavenward" fifty times, but she drove out 
 with her husband on the 10th, talked animatedly upon many 
 topics, and strolled through the woods she loved so well, in 
 company with her daughter, gathering wild-flowers, and, as 
 much from the force of habit as the wish to transplant it to 
 her lawn, kneeling to dig up a fine root with her scissors. 
 Dr. Prentiss had gone up the glen with a guest, and espied 
 his wife on his return, sitting near the brook, "resting," she 
 acknowledged "for she was very tired." As he led her 
 back to the carriage, she exclaimed, in admiration of a cluster 
 of clematis in full flower, and he cut it for her. It was the 
 last loverly office of this nature he was ever to perform for 
 her whose lightest wish had with him the weight of law. When 
 
ELIZABETH PRENTISS. 559 
 
 they reached home she was "very ill." In four days she 
 stepped quietly across the threshold of the " other and far 
 better room." 
 
 "It is not pain I It is a distress an agony!" was her 
 calm answer to the physician who questioned her as to the 
 paroxysms of pain. With it all, she uttered neither cry nor 
 groan. In an interval of ease, she asked her husband, who 
 was watching beside her, "Darling, don t you think you 
 could ask the Lord to let me go ? " While speaking of the 
 probability of her death as "too good to be true," she gave 
 directions that, should her decease be accomplished at this 
 time, she should be buried at Dorset. The mysterious radi 
 ance that had illumined her face at her last public " witnessing 
 for Christ" did not leave it when she lay, in the early morning 
 of August 13, with heaveless breast and closed lids that had 
 fallen together in the gentle sleep from which she passed into 
 the abiding rest. On the wall above her, placed by herself 
 where her waking glance would fall on them with each 
 returning day, were two illuminated German mottoes 
 
 " Gehuld, mein Ilerz!" (Patience, my Heart!) 
 
 "Stille, mein Wille!" (Be still, my Will !) 
 
 Oh, grand and loving heart 1 Oh, meek and steadfast 
 
 will! 
 
 " Beyond the frost-chain and the fever " 
 
 the body that was the fair tenement of a fairer soul rests in 
 the sweet seclusion of Maplewood Cemetery, Dorset. A 
 delicately-sculptured passion-flower is cast at the foot of a 
 short flight of white marble steps leading up to a crowned 
 cross. Besides her name and age, the monument bears these 
 lines from one of her own poems : 
 
 "No more tedious lessons, 
 
 No more sighing and tears, 
 But a bound into home immortal, 
 And blessed, blessed years ! ! 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 BY ELIZABETH T. SPRING. 
 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ancestry Her Childhood The Old Home at 
 Andover Her Story-telling Faculty Improvising Stories for Her School 
 mates Her Education Pen-portrait of Miss Phelps at Sixteen Mem 
 ories of the War An Unwritten Story An Incident in Her School-life 
 
 "Thimble or Paint-Brush, Which" ? First Literary Ventures The 
 Abbott Mission "The Gates Ajar" Its Enormous Sale and Helpful 
 Influence Miss Phelps as a Lecturer Power Over Her Audiences 
 
 Her Summer Home by the Sea Her Winter Study Interest in 
 Reform Movements Personal Work Among the Gloucester Fishermen 
 The Strength and Sweetness of Her Writings. 
 
 MERSON must have been right in saying that we 
 c* 111 never get away from our ancestors. He him 
 self might have doubted it if he had watched 
 the rushing currents of life on a frontier, the 
 heaving and swaying tides of prairie seas ; but 
 in New England it is peculiarly true. It is 
 noticeably a fact where generation after gener 
 ation is subjected to the same influences, where 
 every ray of light, falling unobstructed through the 
 pure air, strikes in hereditary colors. It is like the 
 trailing arbutus, which blossoms pinkest from soil where 
 the pine-tree needles have gathered in accumulating layers 
 through uncounted autumns. One remembers mayflowcrs, 
 and whatever else is most clearly characteristic of New Eng 
 land, in thinking of Miss Phelps. 
 
 She was born August 31, 1844, in Boston, during her 
 
 father s six years pastorate in that city. In her fourth May 
 
 she was removed to Andover, Mass., on her father s taking a 
 
 professorship in the Theological Seminary there, and Andover 
 
 560 
 
ELIZABETH STUART THELPS. 5G1 
 
 has been the family home ever since. For her it was only 
 returning to play under the same trees and to breathe the 
 same nir that had nourished the genius of her mother and her 
 grandfather. 
 
 Her mother, Elizabeth Stuart, was the eldest daughter of 
 Moses Stuart, one of the bright lights of the Seminary in the 
 days when Andover was a main centre of intellectual and 
 
 theological life in Massachusetts. Professor Stuart was known 
 o 
 
 as a man of moods and variable power, but of exceptional 
 fascination and brilliancy. His daughter Elizabeth inherited 
 the literary gift from him, and though in a style subdued to 
 the tone of the surrounding atmosphere, she wrote several 
 charming stories, largely read at the time. Professor Austin 
 Phelps is known through his widely-circulated book, "The Still 
 Hour." The literary quality was thus present in both parents. 
 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was the eldest of three children, 
 and the only daughter ; and naturally enough as soon as she 
 gave any sign^of herself at all the story-telling faculty was 
 indicated in a marked way. She spun amazing yarns for the 
 children she played with, while dolls were still in the ascend 
 ant ; and her schoolmates of the time a little farther on talk 
 with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for 
 their entertainment. 
 
 With this unusual imagination she developed a conscien 
 tiousness as definite, and while to bend her will was the most 
 difficult of tasks for those who trained her childhood, her 
 truthfulness could be counted on whatever the storm or 
 stress. 
 
 With her surroundings and her nature it was inevitable 
 that her religious development should be precocious. A 
 certain repressed intensity found vent in this direction, and 
 added a deeper tint to what might otherwise have been only 
 the cool spring blossoming of the soul. 
 
 She was christened Mary Gray, for an intimate friend of her 
 mother s ; but on her mother s death, which happened when the 
 child was eight years old, the name Elizabeth was given to 
 
 O O 
 
 her instead. The change had a sort of unguessed pathetic 
 
562 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 significance, for in spite of all that the wisdom and tenderness 
 which were left could do life was altered. The mother had 
 singular fitness for watching over the growth of so sensitive 
 and finely organized a child, and her death was no common 
 loss. The little girl had never been exactly gleeful or merry. 
 She had not quite the temperament keyed for joy, and her 
 almost premature thoughtfulness prevented life even then 
 from seeming like a sunlit holiday. So early the hours began 
 to lose their free dancing step and to follow her day with 
 shadowed faces. 
 
 It was in many respects fortunate for her, at least since 
 women s colleges were not then more than a dream of the 
 future, that so good a school as that of Mrs. Prof. Edwards 
 existed in Andover. The course was thorough, equal except 
 in Greek to that of the best boys schools of the day. The 
 curriculum indeed more resembled that of the college than it 
 was usual at that time to find in the educational facilities for 
 women. This girl s bent was towards rhetorical and philoso 
 phical studies. The natural sciences, except physiology and 
 astronomy, which seemed to her more clearly to assert their 
 raison d etre, did not attract her, nor especially did mathe 
 matics. 
 
 In spite of De Quincey s assertion that curiosity as to the 
 personal appearance of an author is absurdly irrelevant, it is 
 impossible for those who care for what is written not to care 
 a little even for the face of the person who wrote. There is a 
 photograph taken of Miss Phelps at sixteen, which shows a tall, 
 slender figure, a classically turned head with a mass of bright 
 brown hair, a sensitive mouth, and an expression of mingled 
 strength and sweetness. There is an air of timidity in the 
 face, but nothing of uncertainty, and a mature impression 
 wholly unusual at that age. Looking at this picture one 
 cannot avoid the belief that a skilful teacher, who was strong 
 enough, might have guided her into almost any fields as 
 her mind developed ; but at nineteen she left school. 
 
 White flowers and martial music in May, with dim tradi 
 tions of battle and inarch are chiefly what the civil war means 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 565 
 
 now to the young girls who live in the day that followed that 
 darkness ; but there does not live the tragic bard to say what 
 it meant to those whom its midnight overtook. The Greek 
 Simonides tells us of the heroes ^Their country s quench 
 less glory," who "won for themselves the dusky shroud of 
 death " and " live by that same death and its echoing story ; " 
 yet freedom may owe as much to the limitations, the inter 
 ruptions, the conscious and unconscious sacrifices of the 
 daughters " who give up more than sons." 
 
 It was Dr. Holmes who prophesied at the close of the war 
 that the generation which had passed through the terrible 
 strain would have shorter lives, that many years had been 
 compressed into that brief and fiery epoch. However this 
 prophecy may prove, it is certain that the unwritten story 
 of the period, the story with its sequel, would tell of 
 more battles of the wilderness and more prisons than all the 
 histories. 
 
 Many, like Miss Phclps, devoted themselves at the close 
 of the war to philanthropic work. For a few months after 
 leaving school she threw all her energy into mission work in 
 Abbott Village, a little factory settlement a mile or two from 
 her home ; but the forces in her, for which this gave no 
 scope, soon began to assert themselves, and in the spring 
 of 1863 she sent a war story, called "A Sacrifice Con 
 sumed," to " Harper s Magazine." The editor returned her a 
 generous check for it, with the request that she should write 
 for them again. It was appreciation for which she has 
 always been grateful, coming as it did when she was uncer 
 tain of her own power and peculiarly in need of encourage 
 ment. She has been a frequent contributor to that magazine 
 from then till now. " Harper s never refused a story of mine 
 in all my life," she says, with one single exception that 
 not when I was a beginner. To this uniform encouragement 
 I attribute more than to any other one thing what literary 
 success I afterwards had." 
 
 : The Tenth of January " appeared in the "Atlantic" later, 
 and gained literary recognition, besides exciting profound 
 
5G6 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 interest. It was a story of the burning of the Pemberton 
 Mills at Lawrence, a realistic picture, quite as vivid as any 
 the author has made since. 
 
 She had written a little at intervals before ; the first thing 
 she printed being a story in the "Youth s Companion." She 
 was then thirteen. 
 
 The artist element was strong in her nature. She had ex 
 treme sensibility to color, and no little skill with brush and 
 pencil. While she was still walking in the bright mist of her 
 young girlhood, seeing the future through eager eyes, though 
 dimly, the artist life was one of her dearest dreams. 
 
 "With this went a certain distaste for the usual feminine 
 employments, arising from a vague opinion that to sew meant 
 to do little else, and from a positive rebellion against being 
 cramped away from her full native bent. It was in a mood 
 of this sort she one day held up to a school friend a thimble 
 in one hand and a paint-brush in the other, saying: "It is a 
 choice between the two." 
 
 As might be guessed, no poet was dearer to her in those 
 days than Mrs. Browning, and nothing kindled her enthu 
 siasm more than reminders of women who had risen above 
 conventional low tides and dared to be themselves. 
 
 Gradually the play of various forces conveyed her possi 
 bilities mainly into the literary channel, though her sympathy 
 with suffering, quickened by the experiences which gave color 
 to the rest of her life blended with her native earnestness, 
 made certain that active philanthropy in some form would go 
 side by side with the other. 
 
 When the first effort to throw all life into the mission work 
 at Abbott Village had passed, and after the two stories had 
 spoken out like the first notes of a bird after a storm at 
 twenty the plan of " The Gates Ajar " began to form itself in 
 her mind. She was busy in writing this book for two years. 
 It lay for two years in the publisher s hands, and came out in 
 18G8. Although the first, it is the best known of all her books. 
 It reached in this country a circulation of about one hundred 
 thousand copies, and has had a very large English sale. 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELl S. 507 
 
 It has been reprinted in Scotland, and translated into Ger 
 man, French, Dutch, and Italian. Most of the successive 
 books by the same hand have been thus reprinted and trans 
 lated. 
 
 A friend of Miss Phelps, travelling a few years ago, was 
 introduced to an officer of rank in the Prussian court, and 
 Miss Phelps name being mentioned, he said, "Ah, that book, 
 r The Gates Ajar ; I understand it has made more Christians 
 than all the preachers." 
 
 Like most books that have had positive and helpful in 
 fluence, it originated in honest questioning and honest search. 
 There had long brooded over the church of America and 
 England, the shadow of prescribed silence on everything re 
 lating to the future life. Speculation had been frowned upon, 
 as baseless and irreverent, hope had been forbidden to think, 
 and the " better land" lay far off in a frozen mist of negative 
 and unreal glory. 
 
 One could turn to Dante s "Paradise," sombre and massive 
 as Gothic architecture, or mediaeval theology, but the trees 
 by his river of life have little for human nature s daily food. 
 There is something so vague, remote, impersonal in the 
 atmosphere that we do not wonder Ary Schaeffer painted no 
 rapture in the reunion of Dante with his lost Beatrice. 
 
 At the opposite extreme there has been Swedenborg 
 mild as Dante was stern, full of spiritual insight and genius 
 for expanding the tiny tent of certain testimony into a canopy 
 large enough to cover the widest yearnings of human love 
 and aspiration. But Swedenborg had gathered a sect about 
 him. His teachings as to the coming existence were so over 
 laid, too, with other speculations that they were hardly avail 
 able for the every-day comfort of sad and wistful souls who 
 need something appreciable and readily grasped. Eyes tired 
 with weeping for lost friends cannot search through tedious 
 volumes for words of suggestion and hope. Surely it was 
 time for a woman s gentle word a sweet fireside word as 
 far withdrawn from Italian terrors as it was from Swedish 
 dreams. 
 
568 ELIZABETH STUART PIIELPS. 
 
 "The Gates Ajar" was at fir^t doubtfully received by 
 many. The graver part of the community were forced to 
 read but inclined to frown. Pianos and gingerbread seemed 
 startling and trivial contrasted with seas of glass and cheru 
 bim and seraphim, hitherto made so prominent as features of 
 the home of human beings sot free from earthly hindrance. 
 Others eagerly welcomed the new suggestions, for under 
 the teaching that had prevailed, owing to a crude habit of 
 biblical interpretations, so dim, monotonous, and narrow had 
 been the representations of heaven, that to most ardent souls 
 or active minds annihilation seemed hardly less dreary. The 
 framework of the book was so simple and the method of 
 treating the subject so fresh that very many failed to detect at 
 first that its logic might not be less conclusive because it was 
 not ponderous. They forgot that it is a very old tradition 
 which makes the angel come at dawn, in the cheerful morn 
 ing twilight, to guide the souls of the good to paradise, and 
 that twilight fancies are the sober truth of twilight, as mathe 
 matics may be the truth of noon. In story form, and by 
 suggestion, the book attempts to show that the heavenly life 
 must provide for the satisfaction of the whole nature, as well 
 as for the technically religious side, the one department which 
 seeks God directly in personal affection and worship. On 
 reflection, those who had most rigidly confined their hopes 
 of future to white robes and singing, discovered that even 
 
 " The stainless years 
 That breathed beneath the Syrian blue " 
 
 were filled with much besides direct prayer or praise to the 
 heavenly Father, so that imperfection could not attach to this 
 idea of roundness ; and gradually it befell that many who came 
 to scoff remained to be comforted. The book was practically 
 a new gospel. Indeed, "The Gates Ajar" did more than ex 
 pand into appreciable size and surface the neglected germs of 
 truth relating to the unseen world. It marked in a gentle, 
 unaccented way, but it marked the beginning of a change 
 whose end we can hardly foretell. 
 
ELIZABETH STUART THELPS. 569 
 
 The world has long enough seen in every gallery the infant 
 Christ in the arms of a woman ; but it has not always seen 
 that through womanhood it is to receive some essential revel 
 ation of Christianity. It has understood only the surface 
 meaning of Madonnas, and has tired of that ; but at last what 
 art has dimly been foretelling is beginning to be actual. 
 Whether in the cap and kerchief of Sister Dora and Sister 
 Augustine, or with the red-cross badge of Clara Barton, or 
 wearing the unmarked dress of those who feed the hungry 
 and teach the ignorant near and far oft , new Madonnas are 
 revealing something more beautiful than beauty, and holier 
 than any image in shrine. 
 
 Miss Phelps now devoted herself to short stories, which 
 were collected under the title, " Men, Women, and Ghosts." 
 So far as vivacity, proportion, and firmness of touch are con 
 cerned, they contain some of her best work. The "Tenth 
 of January" is included in this collection. There is a study in 
 spiritualistic science called " The Day of My Death " which 
 ends more happily than most of her tales, and goes far to 
 disprove what some critic asserted about her " inevitable tug 
 at the heart-strings." 
 
 Her definite moral purpose became distinct so early in her 
 literary career. As Millet would paint peasants no other 
 than they were, whatever Delaroche might say, she would 
 have sorrowful things show their sadness that they might be 
 helped, and wrong things their evil that they might be 
 righted. 
 
 In the autumn of 1877 a venture full of interest absorbed 
 Miss Phelps thought and strength ; the delivery of a course 
 of lectures on "Representative Modern Fiction" before the 
 Boston University. It was the first thing of the sort ever 
 attempted by a woman in this part of the world, and in the 
 minds of those most interested there was the air of a renais 
 sance in the undertaking. 
 
 The intense vividness with which the ideal presented itself 
 to her, combined with a sensitive timidity which amounted to 
 terror, robbed her of sleep for weeks before the course began, 
 
570 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 and prostrated her with illness after it closed ; yet while 
 constantly under the physician s care she met each engage 
 ment bravely, and loft only one regret in the minds of her 
 friends, that her health had not allowed her to speak in a 
 much larger hall. The lectures have never been published, 
 so that personal impressions are all that we have. 
 
 Her power over the audience is said to have been remark 
 able. While her voice in conversation is singularly low and 
 sweet, some peculiar penetrative quality made it distinct 
 without the slightest effort for the listener in every part of a 
 large hall. The audience was of students of both sexes and 
 different ages, from various departments of the University. At 
 the close of every lecture," says one who was present, " they 
 would gather round her, and it seemed as if they would 
 devour her, following her as far as possible when she went 
 away." Something in her face seemed to ask more for love 
 than praise. To them it seemed as if a new and gentler 
 Hypatia had come to speak a sweeter sort of wisdom. Mr. 
 Whittier, who on another occasion heard the lectures, says 
 of them : " They were admirable in manner and matter. I 
 have never heard a woman speak with such magnetic power." 
 
 In treating modern fiction she concentrated her analysis 
 on George Eliot as representative. President Warren of the 
 University says, " The genius of George Eliot has never been 
 analyzed with superior, if with equal subtility of sympathy 
 and clearness of discrimination." 
 
 So serious were the physical penalties for that use of her 
 undoubted power that she has been obliged to abandon 
 public speaking ; though she made several experiments after 
 this both in hall and parlor reading in every other respect, 
 she says "among the most delightful experiences of her life. 
 An interesting account is furnished of her reading one of her 
 stories for a charity in a private parlor in Boston. It was an 
 audience composed of fashionable ladies, and the story was a 
 very simple one, but before she finished her reading it was 
 said there was not a dry eye in the room a kind of 
 compelling sweetness drew their hearts towards her and pity. 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 571 
 
 In the same autumn of her work at the Boston University, 
 "The Story of Avis" came out. The public feel something 
 in it like the deepening of a singer s voice, as life teaches 
 its lessons, a strength born of patience, and a pathos that no 
 unreflecting outcry can hold. 
 
 The world seems to be divided into three classes : those 
 who do not know there is a sphinx ; those who do, and will 
 not look at it ; and those who, seeing it, are willing to make 
 some sort of effort to unlock the silent lips, to read the riddle 
 of the past into the prophecy of the future. 
 
 For the first, Avis must be as if it had not been written, 
 while to the multitude of those who do not want to be made 
 uncomfortable by thinking of hard things it will not be 
 exactly welcome. There must be many who are willing to 
 think even of perplexities, for many have prized Avis, and 
 have called it Miss Phelps best work. It is said that Long 
 fellow kept it lying on his table, and re-read it often with 
 sympathetic appreciation. 
 
 Avis is a woman such as one has seen strong, gentle, 
 true, with a genius for painting. There is no happier stroke 
 in the book than that which makes her not simply in love 
 with her art and ambitious to excel, but gravely conscious of 
 responsibility for the use of her talent. Her course looks 
 simple and direct till Philip Ostrander, and with him love 
 and the question of marriage, confronts her, sweeping into 
 her life as the tide into the harbor. She resists love, but 
 when her denied lover comes back wounded from the war, 
 the woman asserts herself above the artist. " The deep 
 maternal yearning over suffering, more elemental in woman 
 than the yearning of maiden or of wife," conquers where his 
 pleading had failed, and by exquisite gradations, possible 
 only to a woman of equal fineness and exceptional individ 
 uality, she yields and becomes his wife. 
 
 The very idealizing nature that made her able to paint 
 
 sphinxes, made her mistake in Philip Ostrander subtlety of 
 
 appreciation, sympathy, and the genius of adaptation for 
 
 something deeper. It is made clear that a man less refined. 
 
 35 
 
572 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 and less sensitive could not have won her, and no less evident 
 that refinement often binds the artist-eye to weakness, and 
 that the quicksilver temperament fascinates where it cannot 
 hold. 
 
 Large, sweet, genuine, like Dorothea, Avis does the only 
 thing possible to such a woman, buries her short-lived ideal 
 and takes Philip into the same pitying tenderness which 
 broods over her children ; endures and strives and loves as 
 nobly as any other could who was not conscious of unpainted 
 pictures or any missed vocation. 
 
 Recent American fiction has given us various types of 
 women. We have Marcia in "A Modern Instance," weak, 
 passionate, unreasonable Marcia, swept under by the first 
 swell in the domestic flood. Mr. James has drawn Isabel 
 Archer best of all the women he has tried, and he has made 
 her almost lovable, or would if he knew about women s 
 souls. Despair and flight are her resort when disenchant 
 ment is complete, and pain grows heavy, lie makes us 
 sympathize with her ; but she seems vague, shadowy, and 
 weak beside the nobler figure of Avis. It is impossible to 
 imagine poor Marcia being anything else than petty ; unfit 
 to reform Hartley and unworthy of the better man s devo 
 tion ; and with all that is genuine and earnest in Isabel Archer, 
 it is difficult to think of her in Avis place, bending with 
 conscientious good sense to conquer the homely details of 
 housekeeping, or substitute with so silent a gentleness the 
 maternal for the wifely feeling towards the weaker nature 
 which failed her. 
 
 There are touches in one of the closing chapters of "Avis" 
 which remind us for delicate, fervent purity of faith and 
 insight of the sayings of Lamartine s "Stone-Cutter." In 
 the farewell Philip and Avis whisper to each other when he 
 lies dying in the Florida forest, wo can almost hoar Claude 
 saying, "Life is so small a thing, it is not worth stopping 
 to weep over." Indeed some of the most exquisite qual 
 ities of Miss Phelps appear in " Avis " more clearly than in 
 any other book. Only a pure and exalted soul could have 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 573 
 
 conceived it ; and only a genuine artist could have given it its 
 cast. 
 
 Six years ago Miss Phelps built a little cottage for a sum 
 mer home on the rocks of Eastern Point, at one side of 
 Gloucester harbor. There is hardly a more rugged spot on 
 Cape Ann, or one more lacking in the lovely surroundings 
 those who know her best would have chosen as fit and natural 
 for her. But one forgets all but the picturesqueness of the 
 shore in looking out on the harbor with the quaint old town 
 of Gloucester at its head. The harbor is one of the finest on 
 the Atlantic coast, and there, from June to November, the 
 infinite language of the sea repeats to her its story of beauty 
 and mystery. 
 
 All coasts are lonely in some moods of water and sky, but 
 Gloucester harbor is wide enough to shelter a fleet, and there 
 are always sails standing in or out to sea, playing hide-and- 
 go-seek with the mist, and taking the light and shadow at 
 every turn in new and exquisite tones. A mile away, across 
 the sheltering rim of land, the narrow strip that curves 
 around the harbor s mouth, the surf breaks on the rocks, or 
 rolls in on the sandy shore of the coves that follow one an 
 other out to the extreme point of the cape. 
 
 Miss Phelps still makes Andover her winter home. Her 
 present winter study is in the summer-house of her father s 
 garden, whose windows look out on a lovely grove, and be 
 hind, towards the west, across to the brows of Wachuset ; 
 but her summers, which begin early and end late, find her on 
 the Gloucester rocks. 
 
 The first years of her life here she used to row in her little 
 4ory quite across the harbor, an exercise of which she was 
 very fond. Lack of strength has compelled her to relinquish 
 it of late, and the dory lies idly by the rocks, except when 
 she occasionally steps into it for a few strokes of the oars out 
 into the sunset. What the sea has told her she has mean 
 while given to us in different forms. In her volume of 
 " Poetic Studies," most of the rhymes are tinged with the 
 opal and beryl of the waves ; and we feel through them the 
 
574 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 ebb and flow of tides. 
 
 music words and notes blending in a kind of twilight 
 
 aspiration an unaccented appeal. 
 
 " On the Bridge of Sighs " is an original and apt analogue, 
 fit to. be written under that picture of sun opposite to shadow 
 which every traveller brings home from Venice : 
 
 "O palace of the rose sweet sin, 
 How safe the heart that does not enter in 
 O blessed prison wall ! how true 
 The freedom of the soul that chooseth you." 
 
 w What the Shore says to the Sea " and " What the Son says 
 to the Shore," and the last poem in the collection, " A]l the 
 Rivers," are perhaps the best translations she has made of 
 that speech she has heard where there is no voice nor lan 
 guage. " O Love ! " the shore says at ebb-tide to the sea : 
 
 " Steal up and say, is there below, above ; 
 In height or depth, or choice or unison 
 Of woes, a woe like mine, 
 To lie so near to thine, 
 And yet forever ,nd forever to lie still?" 
 
 And at flood-tide the sea answers 
 
 " Till thou and I were riven apart, 
 Never was it known by any one 
 That storms could tear an ocean s heart. 
 When unheard orders bid me go 
 Obedient to an unknown Will, 
 The pain of pains selects me, so 
 That I must go and thou lie still ! 
 
 "All the rivers is a word of peace 
 All the rivers run into the sea, 
 Why the passion of a river ? 
 
 The striving of a soul ? 
 Calm the eternal waters roll 
 Upon the eternal shore 
 
 At last whatever 
 Seeks it finds the sea." 
 
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 575 
 
 Yet the poetry of the ocean has not made her deaf to its 
 tragic prose. 
 
 " Sealed Orders," a collection of short stories published not 
 long after " Avis," has one or two pictures, not easily forgot 
 ten, of winter storms in the ice-bound harbor, the cruel 
 struggles of the fishermen for scanty bread, and the more 
 cruel watching and waiting at home "for those who will 
 never come back to the town." 
 
 Critics have called "The Lady of Shalott," one of the 
 sketches in this collection, the best American short story. 
 It shows, like the rest, the subjection of the sesthetical to the 
 ethical, the artistic to the sympathetic in her nature ; but 
 here as elsewhere the unused brush and palette assert them 
 selves in spite of denial. What she sees inevitably shapes 
 itself into a picture, and what she might have done had she 
 chosen to paint with her pen all such pictures as would 
 charm, we can only guess. If she had, we should have 
 known less about the lonely little dressmaker in "No. 
 Thirteen," or the two brothers in "Cloth of Gold," trying to 
 get to Florida with far too little money, and walking where 
 they could not ride, with Dan, between his coughs, insisting 
 that he felt very strong, and that it did not hurt him at all. 
 We should not have cried over the "Lady of Shalott," and 
 tenement houses with death in the cellar, and nankeen vests 
 at sixteen and a quarter cents a dozen, and the blessed 
 "Flower Mission," and we should not have felt as whoever 
 reads such tales will that something must be done to help 
 those who cannot help themselves. 
 
 It adds always to the force of one of these lessons in phi 
 lanthropy or reform to know that the teacher is herself in 
 earnest, and "recks the rede" she gives. 
 
 That Miss Phelps roses have all true stems that will not 
 wither we can tell by tracing her life. She was trying to 
 save the tempted in the Abbott mission when she wrote 
 " Hedged In " ; and the evils of factory life depicted in " A 
 Silent Partner" she learned by personal work for factory 
 girls ; and from her loyalty to the purer, larger, and freer 
 
576 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 Womanhood that all dream of and wait for she has never 
 swerved. Hers was not the only sensitive intuition that fore 
 saw, when slavery and the war rolled away together in fire 
 and smoke, that the right development of women would be 
 the next great question for America. 
 
 It is said that Warwick Castle in England is so arranged 
 that the visitor who looks through the outside keyhole looks 
 at the same time through those of the thirty or forty apart 
 ments that lie beyond ; and so in this matter of making the 
 higher, larger womanhood a fact, one cannot begin without 
 finding that woman is so entangled in the heart of things that 
 all must be righted if she is. 
 
 The first glance told that her physique must be improved. 
 As early as 1869 Miss Phelps was invited to give an address 
 before the New England Woman s Club of Boston on health 
 ful dress for women. The time was ripe, and the sugges 
 tions of the speaker s practical common sense were instantly 
 adopted. Rooms were opened for the manufacture and sale 
 of improved garments ; competition followed, and the dress 
 reform, so widespread and increasingly influential now, is 
 said to have grown from this. Miss Phelps address, some 
 what enlarged, was published, with the title, "What to 
 Wear," and she herself adopted and has always adhered to 
 the system proposed, abjuring trains, and excessive trim 
 mings, and tight waists, and modifying her theory only in 
 such non-essential points as experience and good taste dic 
 tated. It seems hardly possible now that, at the time she 
 took this course, a lady could not walk the length of a hotel 
 drawing-room in a short dress without an embarrassing sense 
 of singularity, so universal was the absurdity of sweeping 
 skirts everywhere and on all occasions. 
 
 No sooner was Miss Phelps summer home planted on the 
 Gloucester shore than the temperance movement appealed to 
 her as vitally connected with the object of her lasting enthu 
 siasm. She saw how intemperance on Eastern Point added 
 a cruel weight to the hard lot of fishermen s families, and 
 through her efforts a Reform Club of sixty-five members was 
 
ELIZABETH STUAKT PHELPS. 577 
 
 sustained there. A club-room had been otherwise secured ; 
 it was brightened with pictures and music ; addresses were 
 delivered and sermons preached to the men ; but her per 
 sonal work was of a deeper and more wearing sort. She 
 made herself the friend of each one. They came to her 
 house with their hopes and despair, their temptations and 
 troubles. As might have been feared, this nervous strain of 
 sympathy and anxiety, in connection with her literary work, 
 was an overtax, and four years ago her strength gave way, 
 forcing her to drop the care. From this nearly fatal break 
 she has not yet physically recovered. 
 
 Since 1879 we have had two books from her, both origi 
 nally published as serials in the "Atlantic Monthly," and 
 aside from these, some noticeable magazine articles of a 
 semi-theologic cast in the " Atlantic " and " North American 
 Review." The one in the "Atlantic," entitled, "Is God 
 Good?" called out an amount of discussion surprising when 
 one considers how long ago it was that mild old Dr. Paley 
 ventured to speak of "The goodness of God as proved from 
 nature." 
 
 Her argument is that immortality is necessary to justify 
 the earthly life, and is not more than a deduction from the 
 gently suggested premise no one quarrels with from the 
 lips of St. Pierre, " If life be a punishment, we ought to 
 wish for its end ; if it is a trial, we may ask that it may be 
 short." 
 
 "Friends a Duet," has been variously criticised, a cer 
 tain intensity of adjectives and repetition of favorite words, 
 which some objected to in "Avis," giving fresh offence to re 
 viewers in this book. 
 
 It may be worth while to mention that Miss Phelps never 
 reads any reviews or notices of her own books, thinking per 
 haps the nervous force required for this better expended in 
 persistent effort to speak out in her own way the things life 
 has taught her. She has certainly a sufficiently illustrious 
 precedent for her habit in this respect, since it is said that 
 George Eliot herself had the same practice. 
 
578 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 " Friends " is a study of a new phase of the same old 
 mystery. A delicate, difficult phase, but pressing as the 
 question how to manage steam, fire, or electricity. The 
 voices in the " Duet " are better harmonized than were those 
 of Philip and Avis. In the rise and fall of gentle and sweet 
 music, the question and answer of a simple natural progress, 
 there is a wistful search for knowledge Avhether between men 
 and women there cannot be, as in other times there has been, 
 friendship without love and marriage ; a May of tenderness 
 and mutual help that does not " glide outward into June " 
 affection without passion. It ends as some songs end, with 
 a strain, more an appeal than a conclusion, a little sad 
 as if we heard again Schiller say " Never can the there be 
 here." 
 
 There is something about it all that makes one think of the 
 wild pink roses with which the dqwns of Eastern Point are 
 covered in the summer, and with which Miss Phelps house is 
 always filled. There is a delicate mirth, a sweet, refined, 
 protected atmosphere in it, yet though more hidden than 
 sometimes, we find on it the same sign of the cross as before. 
 Still, as Millet s seashore "Storm" or " Angelus" would do 
 more than make us note the massing of clouds and the rage of 
 the water, or the wide peace of the fields at the hour of even- 
 ning prayer ; as he is not content till we ask, " What can be 
 done for the bowed and laden creatures who are the centre of 
 the scene? " so, in "Friends," we are compelled to do more 
 than watch the rose-red glow that slowly and faintly kindles 
 in the gray sky that overhangs the principal figures. The 
 story leaves us as the "Scarlet Letter" does, looking toward 
 the time " when the whole relation of men and women shall 
 be established on a surer ground of mutual happiness." 
 
 "Dr. Zay," Miss Phelps last story, is pitched in the major 
 key. It has been a surprise to the public, so long used to 
 listen for the minor in every strain of hers. There is morn 
 ing in this picture. " Avis " was sad because there was in it 
 only the wish for the day. " Dr. Zay " stands out clearly in 
 the light of dawn. 
 
ELIZABETH STUAKT PHELPS. 579 
 
 Miss Phelps has felt the change of atmosphere within the five 
 years, since she said at the close of "Avis," "Horizons with 
 which her own youth was unacquainted beckoned before her ; 
 the hills looked at her with a foreign face ; the wind told her 
 that which she had not heard ; in the air, strange melodies 
 rang out." One of these melodies is caught and rendered 
 for us here. It is a glimpse of 
 
 "Man and woman 
 Solving the riddle old." 
 
 It seemed to have occurred to none but Mr. Howells before 
 (unless we except Charles Reade), that there is suddenly a 
 new type of woman for the novelist to deal with, and "Dr. 
 Zay " was already half- written when " Dr. Breen s Practice " 
 appeared in the " Atlantic." Mr. Howells woman physician 
 has not Lowever "the scientific mind." She was, after all, 
 only the old sort of woman ho knows so well, masquerading 
 with a medicine-case. Dr. Zay means it all and does it too. 
 
 Without a stretch or twist, very simply and naturally, 
 though we must believe not without intention, the ordinary 
 conditions are precisely reversed. It is her chance patient, 
 Waldo Yorke, who is passive, unoccupied, "a beggar for a 
 kind word." It is she who is preoccupied, active, happy in 
 a full and satisfied life. That marriage is not to be entered 
 into unadvisedly in the new order of things is made suffi 
 ciently plain by her long hesitation hesitation under his 
 wooing, and by the high-mindedness with which she refuses 
 to let him err through any glamour of gratitude, loneliness, 
 or circumstance. Not till his choice is tested by change and 
 absence, and hers by persistent work, does she yield, like 
 other women who cannot prescribe carbo vegetabilis or set 
 broken arms. 
 
 The book is full of smiles and west wind and hope, in 
 stinct with prophecy, already beginning to turn to facts. It 
 is all natural and direct, quite free from morbid or one-sided 
 views. Whoever reads it is apt to be carried on by Miss 
 Phelps theories in spite of himself, since he finds such a new 
 
580 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. 
 
 kind of woman as Dr. Zay proves to be, a very charmino- 
 and inspiring sort of creature. He inclines to agree with 
 Mrs. Isaiah Butterwell, that there might be worse things 
 than "having a woman like Doctor to turn to, sharin the 
 biggest cares and joys a man has got, not leanin like a water- 
 soaked log against him when he feels slim as a pussy-willow 
 himself, poor fellow, but claspin hands as steady as a statue 
 to help him on." 
 
 The vigor and sparkle of " Dr. Zay " make us believe we 
 have better things yet to expect from Miss Phclps in spite of 
 the baffling, almost crushing, hindrance of ill-health. That 
 bar once removed, what fine insights, what holy inspirations, 
 what pictures of the droll as well as the pathetic side of 
 things, may we not anticipate from a nature so strong and 
 beautiful, gifted with so rare a genius of expression? 
 
 If fate should deny it, her life and work, as they stand, are 
 among our choicest treasures. Her high-minded constancy 
 to her difficult ideals adds to her personal charm the haunting 
 fragrance of a purely spiritual force, and wherever her words 
 fall, unfading flowers spring up. 
 
 In her, and in her writings, force and sweetness so blend 
 that we cannot tell whether it is the beautiful that draws us, 
 or the good and the true that stimulate and content us. If 
 the flower is a lily, it is an Easter lily, with comfort and 
 ministry in its grace, an ethereal and immortal meaning 
 folded in its rare, white petals. 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 HAKKIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 BY ROSE TERRY COOKE. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe s Father, Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher His Fame and Worth His 
 Wife, Roxana Foote Mrs. Stowe s Early Training Incidents in Her 
 Childhood A Famous School Reminiscences of Her Girlhood Early 
 Passion for Writing Marriage to Prof. Calvin E. Stowe Life on the 
 Banks of the Ohio Where and How She Received Her First Impres 
 sions of Slavery What Led to the Writing of " Uncle Tom s Cabin" 
 Difficulties Under Which it was Written How it was Received 
 Excitement it Created Mrs. Stowe s Visit to England Her Recep 
 tion The True Story of "A Vindication of Lady Byron" Celebrating 
 Mrs. Stowe s Seventy-first Birthday Her Two Homes Looking Toward 
 the Other Side of Jordan. 
 
 ELIZABETH BEECHER was born at 
 Litchfield, Conn., June 14, 1811. 
 
 She was the seventh child of the Rev. Lyman 
 I; Beecher and Roxana Foote, his wife. Her 
 7: parents were both remarkable people. Mr. 
 Beecher was a man of keen intellect, great 
 moral courage and energy, whose mental force 
 gave him almost directly after he entered the 
 ministry a high place among his compeers. His 
 inauguration of the temperance reform ; his strug 
 gles for the permanent establishment of the church of Christ 
 in New England at a time when heresy and infidelity 
 threatened its existence as an organization ; his advocacy of 
 revivals, and his active agency in bringing them about, will 
 keep his name famous in the ecclesiastical annals of Con 
 necticut as long as those records last ; and his name will be 
 always revered at Lane Seminary, near Cincinnati, Ohio, as 
 not only the head of that institution for many years, but its 
 founder in a sense more vital far than the mere contribution 
 
 581 
 
582 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 of funds. Beside his deep piety, his stern courage nnd devo 
 tion, he was a man of infinite humor and playfulness, and 
 made his children thoroughly happy as children. 
 
 Eoxana Foote, his wife, was a woman of rare virtues : culti 
 vated, highly educated, and accomplished ; in the simplicity 
 of her nature and the purity of her warm young heart she mar 
 ried this penniless minister, and took up the work of a minis 
 ter s wife with unshrinking devotion ; she was indeed the 
 intended woman of Paradise, "a helpmeet unto him." In 
 poverty, in sorrow, in struggle of every kind, the heart of her 
 husband trusted in her, and leaned upon her as a strong staff; 
 and when she died he said afterwards that his " first sensation 
 was a sort of terror, like that of a child suddenly shut out alone 
 in the dark." Yet she, with all her clarity of mind, her ful 
 ness of lofty thought, and keen enjoyment of literature and 
 art, never cried out for her " rights," or clamored for suf 
 frage. Calm, serene, tender, 
 
 " A perfect woman, nobly planned 
 To warn, to comfort, to command. 
 But yet a spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light," 
 
 she moved on through the crowding duties of an arduous life, 
 became the mother of nine children, one of whom went before 
 her, and died in a peace that was triumph and a strength 
 that was rapture. 
 
 Beside these pillars of the home temple, Harriet Beecher 
 was also compassed about with other and similar stimulating 
 companionships. Her aunt, Mary Hubbard, a beautiful and 
 fascinating girl, who married early a West-Indian planter, and 
 after a few years of sinking health and failing heart came 
 home to die, rallied in her native air, and filled the Beecher 
 homestead with sparkling life for a few short years. 
 
 Although Harriet was but a baby when this aunt died, no 
 doubt what she heard of her in the family tradition, especially 
 of her horror of slavery, sank into that receptive mind and 
 was brooded over till an ardent sympathy was established 
 
HARRIET BEECIIER STOWE. 583 
 
 there, ready to welcome the fugitive American slave when 
 she lived on the banks of the Ohio in later years, and to 
 appreciate with her great tender heart the sorrows of those 
 men and women whose crime was being born, not of another 
 blood, but with another skin than their masters. 
 
 Her mother s mother, with whom the child spent much 
 time, was a serene and kindly lady of the old days ; a great 
 reader and thinker ; and Harriet Foote, the aunt, whose 
 name Harriet Beecher bore, was a woman of keen and versa 
 tile wit ; while Esther Beecher, her father s sister, was a prac 
 tical, unselfish, utterly devoted woman of vigorous intellect 
 and quiet humor, who measured out the things of this life as 
 conscientiously and accurately as if they were the outer court 
 service of the temple in which her inner soul devoutly 
 adored. 
 
 Born of such parents, living in such an atmosphere, it is 
 not wonderful that the children grew up so remarkable in 
 their development and individuality, that an old saying was 
 readapted for them, and it became a proverb that " There 
 are three kinds of people in the world : the good, the bad, 
 and the Beechers." 
 
 Nor, in the wisdom of her home training, was the pre 
 cocious child allowed to sacrifice her health ; her home was 
 on that wide and breezy hill in Litchfield from which can 
 be seen still a long stretch of characteristic New England 
 scenery ; rolling hills, sad brown stretches of fallow field and 
 rocky upland, here and there a glimmering pond ; then, great 
 sweeps of forest, far and near ; and over all a broad, bright 
 sky, its vast azure expanse swept with fleecy clouds, darkened 
 with the black banners of the thunder, or livid with north 
 eastern rains. She ran wild among these trees and hills, 
 went nutting in the gorgeous haze and blaze of October ; or 
 gathered the wistful delicate blooms of spring; the red 
 strawberries, fragrant and sweet beyond the giants of to-day, 
 enticed her into the June-sweet pastures ; and the gorgeous 
 lilies of the hay-field tempted her in summer ; there was 
 nothing foreign or unknown to her in the kindly fruitage of 
 
584 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 the earth about her, and she learned at the very lips of the 
 great mother those ineffable lessons only to be so learned. 
 
 As she says herself: "I was educated, first and foremost 
 by nature, wonderful, beautiful, ever-changing as she is in 
 that cloudland, Litchfield." 
 
 Yet her home-life went hand in hand with the out-of-door ; 
 her heart kept even beat with the cheery, social, mirthful, 
 happy course of her daily living ; and her mind was fed with 
 conversation of the sort that is not concerned with the day s 
 gossip, or the hasty and hard judgment of neighbor and friend. 
 
 In that crowded parsonage, about the fire at night, books 
 and authors were discussed ; the awful realities of religion 
 reverently explored ; the moral situation of the church and 
 the world expounded and agitated ; and all regarded from but 
 one standpoint, that outlook from the side of God the Crea 
 tor and Governor, which lifts the human soul above the misty 
 passions of earth and gives to its vision the width and clear 
 ness of heaven. 
 
 In the light of her after-life it is significant that she heard 
 and remembered an incident which happened one day in her 
 childhood, and is best recorded in her own words : 
 
 " I remember hearing father relate the account of Byron s 
 separation from his wife ; and one day hearing him say with 
 a sorrowful countenance, as if announcing the death of some 
 one very interesting to him : 
 
 "My dear, Byron is dead, gone. 
 
 " After being a while silent, he said : 
 
 " Oh, I m sorry Byron is dead. I did hope he would have 
 lived to do something for Christ. What a harp he might 
 have swept ! 
 
 * The whole impression made upon me by the conversation 
 was solemn and painful. I remember taking my basket for 
 strawberries that afternoon and going over to a strawberry- 
 field on Chestnut Hill, but I was too dispirited to do anything, 
 so I lay down among the daisies and looked up into the blue 
 sky, and thought of that great eternity into which Byron 
 had entered, and wondered how it might be with his soul." 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 585 
 
 When Harriet Beecher was but five years old her beautiful, 
 tender mother, after a brief illness, went home to the land 
 which indeed she seemed only to have left for a short time to 
 bless this earth, leaving behind her an undying memory, an 
 unfading love and sorrow. Eight motherless children were 
 left to mourn her, and not one cou\<l. recollect an impatient 
 word, an unjust judgment, even when Harriet, like a very 
 little pickle as she was, beguiled her brothers and sisters to 
 eat up a bag of rare tulip-roots under the impression that they 
 were onions and very nice, using thereto all the persuasion 
 her baby-language and coaxing eyes could bring to the sub 
 ject. She herself says that when her mother entered on the 
 scene, 
 
 "There was not even a momentary expression of impa 
 tience, but she sat down, and calmly, sweetly, told them what 
 lovely tulips would have risen from those roots had they 
 spared them." 
 
 Perhaps only as passionate a lover of flowers as Roxana 
 Beecher was can appreciate this wonderful temper. 
 
 A year passed by under dear and good Aunt Esther s house 
 hold rule, and then a new mother came to govern and guide 
 at the parsonage. She too was a lovely and gifted woman, 
 and, as far as any woman can, filled a mother s place to the 
 children. She liked the home she came to from the first, 
 and relates that Harriet, with her instinctive love of justice 
 ignorantly aflame, said to her : " Because you have come and 
 married my father, when I am big enough I mean to go and 
 marry your father ! " 
 
 But for all the quaint child s threat, she admired and loved 
 the beautiful young stepmother heartjly, who in turn speaks 
 of her as "amiable, lovely, affectionate and bright, as ever I 
 saw." 
 
 Catherine, the oldest sister, herself afterward a distinguished 
 and excellent woman, records how Harriet, not yet seven 
 years old, "is a very good girl. She has been to school 
 all this summer, and has learned to read very fluently. She 
 has committed to memory twenty-seven hymns and two long 
 
586 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 chapters in the Bible. She has a very retentive memory, and 
 will make a good scholar. She says she has got a new 
 mother, and loves her very much, and means to be a good 
 child." 
 
 Yet this forward scholar was also a hearty, rosy, strong 
 girl ; with flying curls of sunny brown, and sweet, keen, blue- 
 gray eyes ; ready for fun and play ; a happy, childish creature, 
 "quite pretty," rejoicing in this life, yet weighted to some 
 extent with the prospects of the life which is to come, 
 never ignored or neglected in that hill-top parsonage. 
 
 We hear of her a year or two later, begging for an 
 " epithet " for the grave of her beloved cat ; and discern the 
 germ of that humane spirit that in her womanhood loved and 
 recorded the lives and doings of so many of these " spirits in 
 prison," from "Mr. Black Trip," to "Hum the Son of Buz." 
 
 Litchfield was then the very place for a child like Harriet 
 Beecher to develop in. The Wolcotts, Judge Gould, John 
 Allen, Jabez Huntington, Uriel Holmes, Seth P. Beers, Dr. 
 Sheldon, John P. Brace, Judge Tapping Reeve, Mrs. Sarah 
 Pierce, the Tallmadges, and the Champions are all names that 
 in Connecticut were synonymous with learning, intellect, and 
 high character. On this isolated hill clustered a society of 
 the most cultivated kind, and the minister s family, ex officio, 
 took rank with the highest. Lyman Beecher s household did 
 honor to the rank ; from no other house in that wide green 
 street did such fame and worth send out representatives into 
 the world. 
 
 And here, too, was situated the best school in Connecticut. 
 Nominally under the conduct of Mrs. Sarah Pierce, a well- 
 educated and superior woman, its real head and guide was 
 her nephew, John Pierce Brace, a teacher still held in grate 
 ful remembrance, and one to whom the writer of- this article 
 owes a debt of deep gratitude for the zeal, the patience, and 
 the affection that not only stimulated, but guided and sweet 
 ened her continuous school-life. 
 
 No teacher can ever have " educated " his pupils in the true 
 sense of the word better than Mr. Brace : less of a martinet 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 587 
 
 and drill-master than the modern schoolmaster, he understood 
 by some subtle intelligence the Avay to influence every mind 
 brought into contact with his own ; he knew what we were 
 and what we needed with infallible instinct, and made study 
 a keen delight when he taught, whatever was the lesson. 
 Under the name of " Jonathan Rossiter " Mrs. Stowe has 
 described him in the latter part of " Oldtown Folks " with a 
 vigor and detail that paint him to the life. And she says in 
 a letter to her brother, "Mr. Brace was one of the most 
 stimulating and inspiring instructors I ever knew. He was 
 himself widely informed, an enthusiast in botany, mineralogy, 
 and the natural sciences generally, beside being well read in 
 English classical literature. 
 
 " He exceeded all teachers I ever knew in the faculty of 
 teaching composition. In my twelfth year, by two years of 
 constant practice under his training, I had gained so far as to 
 be appointed one of the writers for the annual exhibition. 
 . . . The subject was Can the Immortality of the Soul be 
 Proved by the Light of Nature ? ...! chose to adopt 
 the negative. I remember the scene at that exhibition, to 
 me so eventful. The hall was crowded with all the literati 
 of Litchfield. Before them all our compositions were read 
 aloud. When mine was read, I noticed that father, who was 
 sitting on high beside Mr. Brace, brightened and looked 
 interested, and at the close I heard him say, 
 
 " Who wrote that composition ? 
 
 " Your daughter, sir, was the answer. 
 
 "It was the proudest moment of my life. There was no 
 mistaking father s face when he was pleased, and to have 
 interested him was past all juvenile triumphs." 
 
 No doubt, long years after, when his teaching days were 
 over, and his heart wrung with loss and disappointment, 
 when the daughter of all his children most like her father lay 
 in an early grave, and life grew dark before him, John P. 
 Brace looked back upon this child of genius, and smiled to 
 think of the wonderful " composition," which, she had then: 
 36 
 
588 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 but just sent out for an astonished world to hear. It was to 
 his care that the child of seven was committed, and in this 
 school she says, "I ran loose, a little girl, at the foot of a 
 school of a hundred grown-up girls." 
 
 And here her destiny and duty began to be manifest. 
 "From early childhood I had a passion for writing, and 
 printed my meditations and reflections before I learned to 
 write, and scribbled incessantly afterward. Miss Pierce used 
 to hold me up as a dreadful warning, one who, as she phrased 
 it, was always bowing down to the idol scribble ; and she 
 predicted all sorts of dreadful results, which never came to 
 pass." 
 
 Here she studied history, rhetoric, and wrote compositions 
 every week ; taking still her vivid interest in nature all 
 abroad, in the prowess of her father s fishing-rod, in the 
 "wood-spells" of winter, in the little brothers and sisters now 
 and then added to the fulness of the " minister s blessings," 
 in dogs, cats, cows, in all living things ; for, like the dear 
 Aunt Esther, she knew and "sought out" the "works of the 
 Lord," being one who found "pleasure therein." 
 
 But a change of base was coming. Catherine, the oldest 
 of the family, engaged to Professor Fisher, of Yale College, 
 a man of great promise and already distinguished perform 
 ance, was suddenly bereaved by his death. On the way to 
 Europe, where he proposed to study and travel for a year, 
 the vessel in which he sailed was lost. Of all its passengers 
 and crew only one was saved to tell the tale ; and the brilliant 
 girl, whose heart, full of love and hope, was wrecked with her 
 lover, fell into a state of rebellious melancholy, which her 
 helpful spirit and practical education fought against nobly. 
 She had already learned, or perhaps instinct taught her, that 
 work is God s remedj T for grief of any kind ; and a year later 
 she setup a school for girls in Hartford, Conn., which became 
 a success, and in the end famous. 
 
 To this sister s care and teaching Harriet, now twelve 
 years old, was confided. No more scrambles now over hill 
 and dale after huckleberries or honeysuckle apples ; no more 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 589 
 
 nutting frolics or fishing excursions to Bantam Pond ; apple- 
 cuttings, wood-spells, strawberry-hunts, and expeditions after 
 winter-green were all over 5 she must " buckle-down " now to 
 serious work without these alleviations ; and beside her own 
 studies she taught Latin and translated Virgil into English 
 heroic verse, becoming in due time an assistant pupil in the 
 school then and still known as the Hartford Female Seminary, 
 and flourishing for many years after Miss Beecher left it 
 under the rule of the same John P. Brace who was previously 
 her teacher. 
 
 In November, 1825, Harriet Beecher became a member of 
 her father s church in Litchfield, a fact recorded with joy by 
 Mr. Beecher, whose heart s desire it was that all his children 
 should be converted to Christ. It is pathetic to see in the 
 record of this good man s life how faithfully and eagerly he 
 exhorted, watched, and prayed for the souls of all his family ; 
 it was the burden of his days and nights, and at last his song 
 of thankfulness, that they were all gathered into the church 
 on earth before he departed for the church in heaven. 
 
 In 1826 Mr. Beecher, after a long and anxious self-com 
 muning, made up his mind that he had no right to live longer 
 in debt for want of a sufficient salary. It has always been 
 the disgrace of New England that her country ministers have 
 had to starve or accept charity. Many of them have been 
 forced to eke out the pittance allotted to them by farming on 
 weck-da} r s instead of studying, or by writing school-books or 
 compiling histories, or in later da} r s taking agencies for 
 popular articles; but none of these things were available to 
 Mr. Beecher ; he believed it his duty to devote all his time 
 and strength, just as far as it could be spared from the abso 
 lute needs of rest or relaxation, to the work of the ministry ; 
 and the father of eleven children could not, in any case, have 
 provided that hearty and hungry flock with food and clothing 
 for eight hundred dollars a year. 
 
 He took no counsel of man, but in the silence of his study 
 made up his mind to leave Litchfield as soon as he could find 
 a more remunerative parish, and twelve hours after, a letter 
 
590 HARRIET BEECIIER STOWE. 
 
 reached him inviting him to the Hanover Street church, Bos 
 ton, Mass. 
 
 But here his influence was so powerful, his controversies 
 with Unitarianism and the Finney S3 r stems of revivals so 
 trenchant and triumphant, that his fame went abroad in all 
 the land ; and he seemed to be the man of all others to help 
 build up a Western school of theology. 
 
 He was called to a professorship in Lane Seminary, Cin 
 cinnati, in 1832, and his whole family followed him. Here 
 Catherine and Harriet set up another school, and here the 
 latter, at the age of twenty-five, on January 4, 1836, married 
 Calvin E. Stowe, Professor of Biblical Criticism and Oriental 
 Literature in Lane Seminary. 
 
 Her life on the banks of the Ohio river, the boundary line 
 betAveen the Western slave and free States, opened to Mrs. 
 Stowe a new field of observation and sympathy. 
 
 In the constant occupations and toil of a wifo and mother, 
 hampered by narrow means and those necessities of position 
 which make it so much harder to be respectably poor than to 
 be poor without respectability, she never lost her broad, 
 observant outlook on the aspects of our common humnnity, 
 or her ready and abundant sympathy with human loss and 
 woe. 
 
 Here she was in the very seethe and foam of slavery s des 
 peration ; on the other edge of the broad Ohio men and 
 M omen were bought, sold, tortured, and murdered, with no 
 help from earth or heaven ; on her side the slave was free, 
 but only nominally, for the hunters of men forced the laws to 
 their side of the question, and not till his foot touched the 
 cold soil of Canada was the fugitive free indeed. 
 
 Mrs. Stowe s husband and all her own family were ardent 
 Abolitionists. What else could be expected of men who had 
 been trained from birth to look at the right and wrong of all 
 things, instead of their expediency or profit? 
 
 Whenever opportunity offered these brave men held out 
 both hands to welcome and aid the escape of their brethren 
 in bonds ; riding by night to conceal them ; planning by clay 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 591 
 
 how to forward them to their final safety, and being brethren 
 indeed to the despised and lowly. 
 
 Here Mrs. Stowe saw and heard the agonies of mothers 
 torn from their children, of husbands hopelessly separated 
 from their wives, knowing they were sold into the black 
 depths of involuntary sin and helpless crime. She educated 
 her own children herself, and finding there was no school 
 whatever in Cincinnati for colored children, she admitted a* 
 many as she could care for to her own little flock, and shared 
 with them her instructions. 
 
 One of these children was claimed as the " asset " of an 
 estate in Kentucky, and the weeping and wailing mother 
 came to tell the beloved teacher that her bright boy was a 
 slave, and was about to be haled back as a chattel into the 
 hell from which she had recovered him. Mrs. Stowe promptly 
 came to the rescue, and taking up subscriptions in her neigh 
 borhood was able to pay the boy s ransom and return him to 
 the arms of his grateful mother. 
 
 Here, too, in Cincinnati, during her life there, began a 
 series of agitations on the slavery question which kept it 
 seething in her mind ; here Theodore Weld lectured and 
 prayed, and a great proportion of the Lane Seminary stu 
 dents became ardent Abolitionists ; mobs raged and raved 
 about the city, and the " fanatics" were threatened with their 
 lives; (ho very excitement and fury that the vexed subject 
 caused showed how deep was the volcano which so flamed 
 and roared. Dr. Bailey, " a wise, temperate, and just man, a 
 model of courtesy in speech and writing," who proposed to 
 discuss slavery openly and fairly, was driven from the city 
 by a mob of Kentucky slaveholders, and went to Wash 
 ington, where afterward he printed Mrs. Stowe s greatest 
 work in his paper, the " National Era." 
 
 And here, too, the wife and mother began her public 
 literary career, writing " A New-England Story," in competi 
 tion for a prize of fifty dollars, which she gained. This 
 story, afterward published in " The Mayflower," was a faithful, 
 touching reproduction of those old-time Yankee characters, 
 
592 HARRIET DEECHER STOWE. 
 
 full of humor and pathos, whom sho has so often chronicled 
 to the life. 
 
 Finding herself able to add to her resources in this way, 
 she wrote other slight sketches, but nothing of importance, 
 till with her young family she returned to New England. 
 Professor Stowe removed to Brunswick, Maine, just as the 
 Northern States began to be excited and aroused by the 
 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. 
 
 Hitherto Mrs. Stowe had not thought of slavery except as 
 a dreadful gulf of horror, despair, and guilt ; into which no 
 Curtius could leap except to give it cause to boil up and rnge 
 anew 7 , like the Icelandic geysers ; a wrong and shame that 
 could only be relegated to the shades where hope never enters, 
 and treated after the wisdom of the old Roman proverb, 
 f: JVe moveas Camerina." But the voluntary stupor of 
 Southern self-interest was at last broken by the lashing of a 
 sullen Northern tempest of aw r akened opinion ; and, aroused 
 to the need of aid and furtherance from the free States, the 
 South framed and pushed through this iniquitous law, Avhich 
 meant death and destruction to happy families and peaceful 
 homes. Mrs. Stowe heard constantly from her many friends 
 in Boston heartrending tales of the results of this law amon^ 
 
 O O 
 
 the respectable colored people who had escaped to that city, 
 and were quietly earning their bread there. 
 
 A reign of terror had begun, and even in the pulpits of 
 Christian churches no man cared or dared to lift up a voice 
 of demur or warning ; " no man cared for their souls ; " the 
 church and the world joined hands against the oppressed, and 
 openly or tacitly sided w r ith the oppressor. 
 
 It seemed to Mrs. Stowe that slavery as it really was must 
 be unknown to these people, who would not have tolerated 
 tyranny or oppression anywhere else. Her heart burned 
 within her, and in those sacred flames arose and flashed scene 
 after scene, founded on incidents she had seen or known in 
 the dark life of slavery. Even at the communion-table the 
 pictures filled her soul ; she went home to write down what 
 were to her real inspirations, and her young children burst 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 593 
 
 into tears as she read to them the story that was yet to draw 
 like tears from millions of readers. For this wonderful book 
 was indeed "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 
 Behold ye the way of the Lord, make His path straight ! " 
 She was like a pen in the hand of a strong angel, and while 
 the woman might well have cried out, " How can I sing the 
 Lord s song in a strange land? " the soul within answered, 
 "Speak ! Lord, for thy servant heareth." 
 
 "Worn down with the duties of a mother, to whose little 
 flock a baby had been lately added, the only New-England- 
 born of them all; with pupils resident in the family, whom 
 she taught with her older children ; harassed by the ineffi- 
 cicncy of servants, and the myriad trials of a housekeeper in 
 the country ; still the inspiration laid hold of her, and would 
 not be ignored ; she had in her soul if not upon her lips the 
 words of her Master : " How am I straitened until it be 
 accomplished ! " for in Ilis power and following His footsteps 
 she also brought life and liberty to them that were lost in the 
 shadow of great darkness. 
 
 This story of stories was first offered to Dr. Bailey, for 
 the " National Era," and the offer eagerly accepted ; though at 
 first it was only proposed to run through a few numbers of the 
 paper, but the tale was too mighty for the teller to say " thus 
 far shalt thou go and no farther." It held her as the ancient 
 mariner held the wedding-guest, and like that listener she 
 "could not choose but hear." 
 
 While it was in course of publication in the " Era," a young 
 publisher of Boston proposed to issue it in book-form, and 
 Mrs. Stowe consented ; but Mr. Jewett, seeing how the tale 
 progressed, objected ; he wrote to the author that it was out 
 growing the limits of one volume, and the subject was too 
 unpopular to bear further elaboration, but she replied, as a 
 prophetess might have, that she could not control the length 
 of the story, it "made itself," and she could not stop writing 
 it till it was done. 
 
 And when at last it was done, a deep and heavy depression 
 came over her; the inspiration had fled, the " afflatus " was 
 
594 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 gone ; and the woman, no longer a prophetess, began to 
 wonder at her folly. Who would read these incendiary 
 volumes? Who would turn aside from the respectabilities 
 of law and order to hear the trumpet- tones of the Gospel 
 story ? She felt despair enter her soul like an iron spear ; 
 but she was not born of the plucky little parson on Litchfield 
 Hill to deny his good blood in her veins when need came ; 
 she determined to help on her message in every way her 
 good sense and brave spirit could suggest. She wrote a 
 letter to Prince Albert, whose name Avas a synonym for good 
 ness and justice, and whose consort was queen of a realm 
 whose boast it is that slaves cannot breathe in its air. She 
 wrote to Macaulay, whose father had once been a prominent 
 anti-slavery man ; to Charles Dickens, whose nature was 
 widely sympathetic, as his writings showed ; to Charles 
 Kingsley, then an ardent believer in the freedom of man, and 
 to Lord Carlisle, accompanying each letter with an early 
 copy of her volume. 
 
 But she needed no help from the great of the earth ; her 
 word had been in its measure the word of the Lord ; nat 
 urally the weak and weary woman trembled under her mes 
 sage and doubted its acceptance ; but He who said of old, 
 "It shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish that 
 which I please, and prosper in the thing whereto I sent it," 
 kept his promise therein. 
 
 "Uncle Tom s Cabin" was published March 20, 1852. 
 Ten thousand copies were sold in a few days, and over three 
 hundred thousand within a year. Eight presses were run 
 day and night to supply the enormous demand. 
 
 No book of human origin was ever so rapidly sold, so 
 widely and universally read ; the author had herself felt in 
 the depths of her heart what she wrote out with tears and 
 righteous indignation, and the throbs of millions of other 
 hearts replied to the true beat of hers. Far and wide the 
 light of its burning truth shone and lit up the habitations 
 of cruelty ; the latent sympathy of thousands who had sinned 
 in ignorance awoke to action, and the colored race testified 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 595 
 
 to a direct and surprising change in their treatment by the 
 whites. 
 
 Part of its success was owing to its candid justice. Mrs. 
 Stowe painted the limitations, the hard position, the kindly 
 feeling of many slaveholders as truly and pitifully as she 
 drew the woes and disasters of the slave. Letters poured in 
 upon her from all quarters, letters of praise, of sympathy, of 
 congratulation, but also of hate, insult, threats, blasphemy, 
 and all unclean ness. The South as one man reviled and 
 abused her; they could not even appreciate the justice of her 
 portraits, she had laid the axe at the root of the tree, and 
 all the foul birds in its branches rent the air with their cries 
 of fury ; no less a tribute to her wonderful success than the 
 laud and glory of her admirers. 
 
 It was not the artistic value of this book that made its suc 
 cess, for its author has since written much more careful and 
 delicate studies of life and character, and painted with tender 
 and more exquisite colors the beauty of humanity and nature ; 
 but " Uncle Tom s Cabin " touched the deepest springs of 
 humanity s heart, and bade the imprisoned waters arise and 
 overflow. The hour had come for this good grain to be sown, 
 and a woman s hand had scattered it. Many a tedious day 
 wore on before its harvest waved on hillside and savanna, to 
 be reaped in tears and blood instead of sun and dew, with 
 swords instead of sickles, and gathered in with cries of battle 
 in place of the gleaner s song. But at last that mighty fruit 
 age is garnered, and the slave is free forever ! Brief words 
 to write or read, but eternal fact and immortal reality. 
 
 Not only in America did this book achieve its wonderful 
 success ; England also was moved from its wonted cold con 
 tempt for her offshoot; and the sneering question, "Who 
 reads an American book ? " received once for all its answer 
 / Everybody!" 
 
 When Mrs. Stowe went abroad a year after " Uncle Tom " 
 was published, she was received with the highest honors. 
 Addresses were poured in upon her signed by thousands of 
 women of every class, and from the inhabitants of separate 
 
596 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 cities and towns, all expressing their esteem for, and sym 
 pathy with, the author of " Uncle Tom s Cabin." Brief 
 sympathy, it is true, for when the war of the rebellion began, 
 the English nation forgot the sorrows of the slave and held 
 out pitiful hands to the slaveholder as the " aristocrat " of 
 America besieged by its commonalty ! 
 
 One incident of Mrs. Stowe s experience in England was 
 almost prophetic. She was presented with a solid gold 
 bracelet made in shape of a slave s fetters, inscribed with the 
 words, " We trust it is a memorial of a chain that is soon to 
 be broken." On one link was engraved the date of the abo 
 lition of the slave-trade, and on another that of the abolition 
 of slavery in all England s territories. To-day this bracelet 
 bears upon its other links the dates of emancipation in the 
 District of Columbia ; of the President s proclamation abol 
 ishing slavery in rebel States ; of freedom proclaimed in 
 Maryland and in Missouri ; while the clasp bears the date of 
 the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery forever in 
 the United States. Its record is finished, and its wearer has 
 the sublime and blessed consciousness that she laid the train 
 which has blown the direst work of hell on earth to utter de 
 struction, and left it only an ignominious memory. 
 
 But not only where its native language was spoken has 
 this book been read ; it has been translated into nineteen dif 
 ferent tongues. Twelve French editions by various transla 
 tors have been issued, and eleven German. In the eloquent 
 verse of Dr. Holmes, read upon Mrs. Stowe s seventieth 
 birthday, at a garden party, given by Messrs. Houghton 
 and Mifflin in her honor, he alludes to this peculiar circum 
 stance : 
 
 "If every tongue that speaks her praise 
 For whom I shape my tinkling phrase 
 
 Were summoned to the table, 
 The vocal chorus that would meet, 
 Of mingling accents harsh or sweet, 
 From every land and tribe, would beat 
 
 The polyglots of Babel. 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 597 
 
 "Briton and Frenchman, Swede and Dane, 
 Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, 
 
 Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, 
 High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, 
 The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, 
 Arab, Armenian, and Mantchoo, 
 
 Would sho ut, We know the lady ! " 
 
 In the library of the British Museum there are thirty-five 
 editions of the original English, complete, and eight abridg 
 ments or adaptations. 
 
 But after such a success the triumphant pen could not be 
 idle : Mrs. Stowe s visit abroad was chronicled in a charming: 
 
 7 O 
 
 volume called " Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands." She 
 wrote then a small "Geography for my Children," and that 
 was followed by a powerful tale of slavery, called " Dred," 
 afterwards renamed " Nina Gordon." Then came a slighter 
 sketch on the training of children, " Our Charley" ; and then, 
 published first as a serial in the "Atlantic Monthly," "The 
 Minister s Wooing," an exquisite story of old New England, 
 full of pathos, delicate humor, subtle character-painting, and 
 high religious thought. Mary Scudder is a picture of a 
 Puritan maiden, almost too saintly for real life, yet true to 
 such a life as in those days did sometimes flower into " a lily 
 of the Lord " ; Miss Prissy, the queer, kindly, penetrating 
 old maid ; Mrs. Scudder, pious, thrifty, ambitious, and stern ; 
 sad Mrs. Marvyn, worn out in soul and body with the awful 
 weight of theologic questions and morbid conscientiousness ; 
 gay, capricious, sunny, and stormy Madame de Frontignac ; 
 and plausible, courtly, devilish Aaron Burr, set over against 
 the great-hearted and high-souled doctor, make a portrait- 
 gallery of real personages in the memory of the reader ; and 
 show what power and versatility belong to that genius which 
 had already electrified the world. 
 
 This was followed by "Agnes of Sorrento," the scene of 
 which is laid in Italy, and does not afford room for the free 
 dom and grace with which the author writes of her own land 
 and people. 
 
598 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 Next was " The Pearl of Orr s Island," a touching story of 
 our New England coast ; with characteristic touches of de 
 scription that show how keen and appreciative is the writer s 
 observation of nature ; and how vivid her enjoyment of all 
 its manifestations. 
 
 After this came " Oldtown Folks," a story of country life 
 in New England ; part of which is laid amid the scenes 
 familiar to her in Litchfield, her early home, and which dis 
 plays a panorama of village life and society, true m every 
 racy detail, sparkling with humor, and solemn with theologic 
 contemplations and controversies. 
 
 After this came " Sam Lawson s Fireside Stories," dear to 
 every heart that keeps a youthful throb, and longs to be a 
 boy again at the old story-teller s knee. This was followed 
 by a few papers on family life, called "The Chimney-Corner," 
 and in natural sequence by " House and Home Papers, a 
 volume which vindicates the practical, household, feminine 
 side of Mrs. Stowe s nature ; and prove her not only to be a 
 great and unique genius in a literary point of view, but one 
 who deserves the praise of Lemuel s mother in that chronicle 
 of the "virtuous woman" whose "price is far above rubies," 
 whose " children arise up and call her blessed, her husband 
 also, and he praiseth her"; for truly "strength and honor 
 are her clothing," and her house is the home of peace, cheer, 
 health, and kindly Christian living. 
 
 After these came a small volume of " Religious Poems," 
 full of pure aspiration and unfaltering faith. Mrs. Stowe is 
 no bigot ; a member of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, whose 
 pastor is her well-known and distinguished brother, Henry 
 Ward Beecher, she fraternizes with the Episcopal church in 
 Mandarin, her winter home, and enters into all their good 
 works ; and in her " Religious Poems " sectarianism finds no 
 place ; they are simply and earnestly religious. 
 
 The poems were followed by a small book called "Little 
 Foxes" articles on domestic ethics. Then came "My Wife 
 and I," "We and Our Neighbors," "Pink and White Tyranny" 
 all household stories ; and after them the second great sensa- 
 
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 599 
 
 tion created by Mrs. Stowe in her literary career an article 
 published in the " Atlantic Monthly " called " A Vindication 
 of Lady Byron." 
 
 While Mrs. Stowe was abroad she became very intimate 
 with that unfortunate lady, who confided to her under the 
 seal of absolute secrecy as long as Lady Byron herself lived 
 the reasons for her separation from her husband. Mrs. 
 Stowe, however, was requested by Lady Byron, if ever a 
 necessity arose after her death, to make her secret known to 
 the public. 
 
 When a "Life of Byron," edited by the notorious Countess 
 Guiccioli, was published in England, and aroused new inter 
 est in the poems and character of Byron, being written by a 
 woman who had shared his licentious and indecent life, Mrs. 
 Stowe felt that the time had come when Lady Byron s char 
 acter as a wife needed to be vindicated from the implied or 
 open assertions of Byron s mistress ; and, accordingly, she 
 gave to the public the painful and not by any means delicate 
 story of Lady Byron s wrong and suffering. 
 
 In doing this, Mrs. Stowe was impelled, as all who knew 
 her thoroughly understood, by a generous and brave affection 
 for the dead woman who had been her lovely, living friend. 
 It was an act of heroic justice, such as such a woman alone 
 could have done. 
 
 Whether Lady Byron was deranged at the time her sor 
 rows and her solitude began, or whether by long brooding 
 over her loss in her worse than widowed loneliness, she created 
 out of her suspicions what seemed to her grief an actual fact, 
 or whether her story was indeed true to the letter, is still 
 a matter of conjecture with most people ; but it is certain 
 that Mrs. Stowe believed her story implicitly, and was filled 
 with the deepest pity and indignation when she heard it ; and 
 made its revelation in a conscientious desire to do good and 
 not evil! 
 
 But a tale like this, which in vindicating the character of 
 one woman blasted in a peculiarly dreadful manner the repu 
 tation of another, and involved, collaterally, persons yet liv- 
 
600 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 i 
 
 ing, in the black shame and crime of near and dear relatives, 
 could not fail to arouse a storm of indignation and disgust in 
 England, and give rise to much low scoff and vulgar comment 
 wherever it was read. 
 
 It is a melancholy reflection on human nature that it is 
 never safe to trust its nobler instincts in a matter like/this, 
 the story which Mrs. Stovve s best friends must regret that 
 she ever published became a weapon in the hands of her 
 enemies ; and instead of vindicating her deceased friend from 
 the attacks of post-mortem slander, she not only aroused them 
 to fresh vigor, but drew upon herself a cloud of misrepresen 
 tation and scandalous sarcasm that pained all her myriad 
 admirers, and must, no doubt, have wounded and discom 
 fited her woman s delicate nature. 
 
 Still, with the rare, unflinching courage of her birthright, 
 which has ever been one of her prominent characteristics, she 
 says to-day, under her own hand, W I am never sorry for 
 having written it, spite of the devil and all his angels ! " 
 
 "Poganuc People," a sketch of old Litchfield and its in 
 habitants, is the latest volume from her pen, though she still 
 writes brief articles for the public. But her working days 
 are merged at last in the rest which she has so well earned 
 and deserved. 
 
 On the occasion of her seventy-first birthday her Boston pub 
 lishers, Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin, gave a garden party 
 in her honor, at the house of Governor Claflin, of Newton, 
 Mass., near Boston. Here were assembled all those brethren 
 of the literary guild who delighted to honor their queen, and 
 here too were the veterans of the abolition " Old Guard ; " 
 quaint, simple, "fanatical" as ever, but calm and satisfied as 
 never before, for their prophetess had ceased to prophesy, 
 fulfilment having come. On a stage, under the kindly shade 
 of a great tent, sat the sweet, kindly-faced woman whose 
 clustering curls had whitened to snow-wreaths in the service 
 of humanity ; praise was showered upon her like incense ; 
 poems read in her honor ; and before her gathered a crowd of 
 friends with love and laud in every eye, on every lip ; but it 
 
HARRIET BEECDER STOWE. 601 
 
 was not for the praise of man to ruffle her serene countenance 
 or disturb the dreamy peace of her eyes, that seemed bent on 
 some far distance, where the babble of earth is heard no 
 more, but the silent welcome of heaven is ready and waiting. 
 
 She received her ovation with the calm simplicity of a 
 child, and in a few words of gracious thanks and counsel dis 
 missed her guests when all their speech had been uttered, 
 and went out with her husband, her son, and her grand 
 children into the fresh June air, the young summer verdure, 
 and the crowding flowers, and away to her home and its 
 duties, as a saint to her cell, untouched by the hot breath of 
 flattery, unmoved by the loud plaudits of men, calm in that 
 mild consciousness of devotion and duty that is deeper and 
 dearer than this life s most earnest homage, or its richest 
 gifts. 
 
 She says of herself, "I am seventy-two years old, and am 
 more interested in the other side of Jordan than this, though 
 this still has its pleasures." 
 
 Mrs. Stowe has two homes : one in Hartford, Connecticut, 
 where she spends her summers ; and one in Mandarin, 
 Florida, where her winters are passed. Long may it be, 
 prays every soul that knows her, before she leaves them for 
 the city which is in heaven. 
 
 Earth will be bereft indeed when her gracious presence 
 forsakes it to go home forever ; and leaves us only a memory, 
 holy and mighty though that memory be, of America s great 
 est woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
 
CHAPTER XXYI. 
 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 BY LAURA CURTIS BULLARD. 
 
 George Sand s Inquiry Mrs. Stanton as the Originator of the Woman Suf 
 frage Movement Birth and Parentage Early Sympathies with ill-treated 
 Women Tries to be a Boy Studies Law in Her Father s Office Her 
 Marriage and Wedding-Tour Meets Lucretia Mott, and Decides upon a 
 Future Career Calls the First Woman Suffrage Convention Frederick 
 Douglass Her only Helper Effect of the Convention Progress of the 
 Movement Lectures and Addresses Edits " The Revolution " Travels 
 in France and England Her Wit Anecdotes Her Personal Appear 
 ance and Characteristics The Future of the Cause. 
 
 you know Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton? was 
 the first question put to me by Madame George 
 Sand, when I met her a few years ago in Paris. 
 " Yes, I know her well," I replied. The fa 
 mous Frenchwoman inquired minutely concern 
 ing my distinguished friend her personal ap- 
 rt, pearance, her views and purposes, her style as 
 a writer and speaker, and her method of reform 
 atory agitation. As I then found it no easy 
 matter, even during a long and free conversa 
 tion, to answer all these queries, so now I find it still more 
 difficult to make a fit record, in a few pages, of the busy 
 career and varied labors of a lady who, in addition to the 
 cares of a large family, has been the originator of one of the 
 chief public movements of our times, and who has also been 
 an active participant in many kindred reforms. For although 
 Mrs. Stanton is best known as the leader of the agitation for 
 woman suffrage, she is not "a person of one idea," but has 
 been among the foremost of the many zealous laborers, both 
 American and English, who have striven for the abolition of 
 602 
 
ELIZABETH CADT STANTON. 603 
 
 slavery for temperance for a working day of eight hours 
 for the suppression of usury for the co-education of the 
 sexes for co-operative industry and last, but not least, 
 for international arbitration and peace. In fact, a complete 
 biography of this representative woman would include a his 
 tory of the political, social, and religious thought of the last 
 two generations. Moreover, not even such a history could 
 reflect a faithful image of such a life s work ; for Mrs. Stan- 
 ton s public efforts have taken the evanescent form of lectures, 
 speeches, resolutions, protests, criticisms, and editorials 
 all growing out of the events of the day, and which it is not 
 possible to reproduce at a later period in their original vital 
 ity, however accessible they may be in the archives of the 
 various movements - which have called them forth. But 
 though her finest intellectual productions have been of an 
 ephemeral type, like those of any other speaker or journalist, 
 yet in her representative capacity as the head and front of a 
 movement peculiarly her own a novel reform whose nov 
 elty seems never to wear out Elizabeth Cady Stanton, now 
 in her green and sunny old age, is still what she has been 
 for the last thirty years an object of affection to one class 
 of her countrywomen, of aversion to another, and of curiosity 
 to all. 
 
 As the movement for woman suffrage has proved of suffi 
 cient vitality, since it was first set on foot by Mrs. Stanton in 
 this country, to have made itself seriously felt also in other 
 lands, and notably in England, France, and Italy, I will 
 detail with some minuteness the early beginnings, in this able 
 woman s mind, of those strong and bold thoughts which she 
 was the first to promulgate nearly forty years ago, and which 
 have since resulted in a new system of political philosophy. 
 
 She was born November 12, 1816, at Johnstown, N.Y. 
 Her father, Judge Daniel Cady, was a jurist whose legal 
 learning and blameless life have passed into the traditions of 
 the bar of the Empire State. Her mother, Margaret Liv 
 ingstone, at the time of Elizabeth s birth, was a } T oung lady 
 of high spirit, dash, and vivacity, retaining to a remarkable 
 37 
 
604 ELIZABETH CADT STANTON. 
 
 degree these qualities of her youth to an octogenarian age. 
 It was natural that the daughter of such parents should in 
 herit (as she did) the chief intellectual traits of both ren 
 dering her equally skilful at the logical argument, or a witty 
 repartee. From her father she imbibed a love of philosophy, 
 and from her mother that dauntless independence of thought 
 and speech which, for want of a better name, is called the 
 courage of one s convictions. 
 
 Elizabeth Cady became a champion of women long before 
 she was herself a woman ; in fact, I feel warranted in saying 
 that the whole after- bent of her life and career was fixed even 
 before she was nine years old ; in other words, as soon as she 
 could intelligently read. I have seen a letter of hers in which 
 she says, " In my earliest girlhood I spent much time in my 
 father s office. There, before I could understand much of the 
 talk of the older people, I heard many sad complaints, made 
 by women, against the injustice of the laws. We lived in a 
 Scotch neighborhood, where many of the men still retained 
 the old feudal ideas of women and property. Thus, at a 
 man s death, he might will his property to his eldest son ; 
 and the mother would be left with nothing in her own right. 
 It was not unusual, therefore, for the mother who had per 
 haps brought all the property into the family to be made 
 an unhappy dependant on the bounty of a dissipated son. 
 The tears and complaints of these women, who thus came to 
 my father for legal advice, touched my heart ; and I would 
 often childishly inquire into all the particulars of their sor 
 row, and would appeal to my father for some prompt remedy. 
 On one occasion he took down a law-book, and tried to show 
 me that something called f the laws prevented him from put 
 ting a stop to these cruel and unjust things ; in this way my 
 heart was filled with a great anger against those atro 
 cious laws. Whereupon the students in the office, to 
 amuse themselves by exciting my feelings, would always tell 
 me of any unjust laws which they found during their studies. 
 My mind was thus so aroused against the barbarism of the 
 laws thus pointed out, that I one day marked them with a 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 605 
 
 pencil, and decided to take a pair of scissors and cut them 
 out of the book supposing that my father and his library 
 were the beginning and end of the law ! I thought that if I 
 could only destroy those laws the poor women would have 
 no further trouble. But when the students informed my 
 father of my proposed mutilation of his volumes, he explained 
 to me how fruitless my childish vengeance would have been, 
 and taught me that bad laws were to be abolished in quite a 
 different way. As soon as I fairly understood how the thing 
 could be accomplished, I vowed that, when I became old 
 enough, I would have such abominable laws changed. And 
 
 O O 
 
 I have kept my vow." 
 
 During the same early period of life to which she refers in 
 the preceding extract, the little Elizabeth became the pet of an 
 old Scotch clergyman in Johnstown, the Rev. Simon Hosack, 
 who loved to take her with him in his buggy on his daily 
 drives. The bright-eyed girl, who had a boy s love for a 
 horse (and w r ho afterwards became a Di Vernon in equestrian 
 exercise), would take the reins in her small hands, and while 
 she gently urged the parson s slow-going steed the old man 
 would read aloud to her, or answer her questions concerning 
 the birds and flowers, or repeat to her the Indian traditions 
 of her birthplace. The early influence which Dr. Hosack 
 exerted upon her has lasted till this day. I have seen tears 
 in her eyes at the mention of this old clergyman s name fifty 
 years after his death. 
 
 Judge Cady entertained the feudal notion (not yet extinct) 
 that the dignities and honors of a fine old family like his own 
 ought to descend from father to son, and not from father to 
 daughter. His hopes of the perpetuation of his name and 
 estate had centered on a favorite and only boy a youth of 
 great promise. The sequel shall now be told by Mrs. 
 Stanton herself. "I was about ten years old," she writes, 
 " when my only brother, who had just graduated at Union 
 College with high honors, came home to die. He was my 
 father s pride and joy. It was easily seen that, while my 
 father was kind to us all, the one son filled a larger place in 
 
606 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 his affections and future plans than the five daughters together. 
 I well remember going into the large dark parlor to look at 
 my brother s corpse, and finding my father there, pale and 
 immovable, by his side. For a long time my father took no 
 notice of me. At last I slowly approached him, and climbed 
 upon his knee. He mechanically put his arm about me, and, 
 with my head resting against his beating heart, we sat a long, 
 long time in silence. At length he heaved a deep sigh and 
 said, O my daughter, I wish you were a boy! Then I 
 will be a boy, said I, and will do all my brother did. All 
 that day, and far into the night, I pondered the problem of 
 boyhood. I thought the chief thing was to be learned and 
 courageous, as I fancied all boys were. So I decided to learn 
 Greek, and to manage a horse. Having come to that conclu 
 sion I fell asleep. My resolutions, unlike most of those made 
 at night, did not vanish in the morning. I rose early to .put 
 them into execution. They were resolutions never to be 
 forgotten, destined to mould my whole future career. As 
 soon as I was dressed I hastened down to meet our good 
 pastor in his garden, which joined our own. Finding him 
 there at work as usual, I said, Doctor, will you teach me 
 Greek? Yes, he replied. Will you give me a lesson now ? 
 Yes, to be sure, he added. Laying down his hoe, and taking 
 my hand, Come into my study, said he, and we will begin 
 at once. Having no children, he loved me very much, entered 
 at once into the sorrow which I had felt on discovering that 
 a girl was less in the scale of being than a boy, and praised 
 my determination to prove the contrary. The old grammar 
 which he had studied in the University of Glasgow was soon 
 in my hand, and the Greek article was learned before break 
 fast. For months afterwards, at twilight, I went with my 
 father to the new-made grave. Near it stood a tall poplar, 
 against which I leaned, while my father threw himself upon 
 the grave with outstretched arms, as if to embrace his child. 
 The good doctor and I kept up our lessons. I taxed every 
 power in hope some day to hear my father say, Well, a girl 
 is as good as a boy, after all. But he never said it. When 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 607 
 
 the doctor would come to spend the evening with us I would 
 whisper in his ear, Tell my father how fast I get on. And 
 he would tell him, and praise me, too. But my father would 
 only pace the room and sigh, Ah, she should have been a 
 boy ! At length I entered the academy, and, in a class 
 mainly of boys, studied mathematics, Latin, and Greek. As 
 two prizes were offered in Greek I strove for one and got it. 
 Now, said I, f my father will be satisfied. I hastened home, 
 rushed into his office, laid the new Greek Testament (which 
 was my prize) on his lap, and exclaimed, There, I have got 
 it. He took the book, looked through it, asked me some 
 questions about the class, the teachers, and the spectators, 
 appeared to be pleased, handed the book back to me, and 
 when I was aching to hear him say something which would 
 show that he recognized the equality of the daughter with the 
 son, he kissed me on the forehead, and exclaimed with a sigh, 
 Ah, you should have been a boy! That ended my pleas 
 ure. I hastened to my room, flung the book across the 
 floor, and wept tears of bitterness. But the good doctor, to 
 whom I went, gave me help and courage ; at last one day, as 
 we sat alone, and he was ill and nigh to death, he said, Dear 
 child, it is your mission to help mould the world anew. 
 Promise me one thing, and that is that you will always say 
 what you think. My old Greek lexicon, Testament, and 
 grammar, which you and I have thumbed so often together, 
 I shall leave to you when I die. After his death, when his 
 will was opened, sure enough, there was a clause in it, saying, 
 My Greek lexicon, Testament, and grammar I give to Eliza 
 beth Cady. " 
 
 In her fifteenth year, on leaving the Johnstown Academy, 
 she set her heart on filling her dead brother s place as 
 a student at Union College, then under the famous presi 
 dency of Dr. Nott. Never once had the thought occurred 
 to her that her sex would be a barrier to her admission. 
 Some of the chief colleges and universities of the world 
 are now partially open to women ; but the co-education of 
 the sexes (except of children) was a thing undreamed of in 
 
608 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 those days. On being informed by her father that in order 
 to enter any college she should have been born a boy, her 
 vexation was a little short of rage ; for she felt that the dis 
 crimination against her on account of her sex was equivalent 
 to saying that girls did not possess sufficient capacity to 
 pursue a college course ; nor was she appeased when, as 
 some compensation for not being allowed to enter college, 
 she was sent to the celebrated female seminary, of which Mrs. 
 Willard was at the head, in Troy. " If there is any one 
 thing on earth," wrote Mrs. Stanton twenty years later, 
 " from which I pray God to save my daughters, it is a girls 
 seminary. The two years which I spent in a girls seminary 
 were the dreariest years of my whole life." 
 
 During the next seven years, a period which, as yet, was 
 one of 
 
 " Maiden meditation, fancy free," 
 
 she lived at her father s house, or rather in her father s law- 
 office. She found what I suppose hardly any other young 
 woman (except, perhaps, Portia) ever did find ; and that 
 was a fascination in reading law-books. Elizabeth s vivacious 
 mother, it is true, insisted that her daughter should be daily 
 bound down for a few hours to music, water-colors, and 
 embroidery ; but the old jurist (who was much his wife s 
 senior, and who regarded these occupations as fashionable 
 follies), counterpoised their levity by giving his daughter 
 Blackstone, Kent, Story, and even the Revised Statutes. 
 "Read these books," said he ; " they will give you something 
 sensible to say to Mr. Spencer and Mr. Reynolds when they 
 next make us a visit," referring to well-known practi 
 tioners who came periodically to attend his court. 
 
 If I seem to have lingered too long over these details of 
 Mrs. Stanton s early life it is because they foreshadow her 
 subsequent career ; for the powerful impressions produced 
 upon her in her father s law office made her what she after 
 wards became, the legal advocate of all her sex. 
 
 I must add another to the early motive powers which 
 directed her later life. This was the stormy contention 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. GOO 
 
 against negro slavery. She had a Northern woman s sym 
 pathy for the chattel of the cotton-field. It was an era of 
 mobs. In the early and most trying days of this great agita 
 tion, when it required more moral courage to speak against 
 slavery at a public meeting than it afterwards did to fight 
 against it on the battle-field, Miss Cady not only gave her 
 heart to the anti-slavery cause, but gave her hand to an anti- 
 slavery orator. This was Mr. Henry B. Stanton, whose 
 early celebrity as one of the best of platform speakers has 
 been followed by a later and well-earned repute as a lawyer 
 and editorial writer. Their wedding-tour was to London, 
 her husband bearing a commission as a delegate to the 
 World s Anti-Slavery Convention at Freemason s Hall, in 
 that city, June 12, 1840. It was a meeting which has ever 
 since been historic, not because of any known influence 
 which it exerted for the abolition of slavery, but because it 
 excluded from its deliberations a large number of able and 
 eminent women excluded them simply because they were 
 women ; for in those days women were supposed to have no 
 right to appear on any other public stage than that of a 
 theatre, opera-house, or concert-hall. Among the women 
 who attended as spectators were Lady Byron, Elizabeth Fry, 
 Mary Howitt, and Amelia Opie. Among the women who 
 presented themselves as delegates from America were Lucre- 
 tia Mott and others. The fair bride, Elizabeth Stanton, was not 
 a delegate. Nevertheless the affront offered to these other and 
 elder ladies was resented by the young wife just as warmly as 
 she had resented, during her girlhood, every similar imputa 
 tion of inferiority cast upon her sex. I am sure that Mrs. Stan- 
 ton with her studious tastes and her love of domestic life 
 had never planned for herself a public career, until goaded 
 to it by the bitterness of spirit under which she groaned 
 during her attendance on this convention. In a fortunate 
 hour she opened her heart to Lucretia Mott that noble 
 woman who, I think, possessed the loftiest moral nature 
 which has ever been seen in our country, whether among 
 women- or men. " Mrs. Mott," said Mrs. Stanton to me, 
 
610 ELIZABETH CADY ST ANTON. 
 
 " was the first liberal-minded thinker whom I had ever met 
 among my own sex. She was a revelation to me ; she put 
 into words all that I had ever thought and felt concerning 
 
 o O 
 
 women ; she seemed to understand, as no other woman did, 
 the wrongs, the rights, the capabilities, and the aspirations 
 of all womankind." Mrs. Mott, during her London visit, 
 may be said to have laid her hands upon the head of her 
 young friend, Mrs. Stanton, and to have consecrated her for 
 her future work. Lucretia Mott was a cousin of Benjamin 
 Franklin, and, like him, exerted a remarkable personal 
 influence on other minds. She used to say that on the island 
 of Nantucket, where she was born, women were always 
 counselled with by men concerning the fisheries, the markets, 
 the schools, the municipal government, and the church. She 
 imbued Mrs. Stanton fully with the idea that women have an 
 equal duty and responsibility with men in all these interests 
 and institutions. The seed was sown in prepared ground. 
 Mrs. Stanton at once resolved that, so far as was compatible 
 with the new domestic duties which she had assumed in 
 marriage, she would devote her life to the social and moral 
 elevation of her sex. 
 
 I have had from Mrs. Stanton an interesting anecdote of 
 the first day which she and Mrs. Mott spent together. It 
 was during that vexing month of June, 1840. They had 
 proposed to solace themselves by visiting the British Museum ; 
 but on reaching the great building, and sitting down to rest 
 for a few minutes at the entrance before giving themselves up 
 to sight-seeing, they began to talk of woman s sphere and 
 rights, and continued to sit, until, in their absorption in each 
 other, they at last found that they had sat and talked for 
 three hours ; whereupon they came away, never having gone 
 a step further into the Museum ! To a friend in America, 
 who afterwards put to Mrs. Stanton the question, "What 
 most interested you in all London?" she replied, "Lucretia 
 Mott." In later years, after Mrs. Mott s death, Mrs. Stanton 
 told me, with deep feeling, that she owed to her dear dead 
 friend as great a debt as one mind could owe to another. 
 
ELIZABETH CADY ST ANTON. Oil 
 
 On returning to her native land, in 1840, Mrs. Stanton 
 gave the next half-dozen years to the duties and delights of a 
 young mother ; but in the intervals of her household cares 
 she pursued a systematic study of the position of woman in 
 all times and lands. This long course of reading convinced 
 her that the advocates of woman s higher interests had hither 
 to failed to perceive one of the most essential of them all, 
 namely, woman s proper position in the body-politic. Mrs. 
 Mott had claimed for her sex the right to a wider range of 
 remunerative employment, the right to hold property after 
 marriage, the right to a university education, and especially 
 the right of private judgment in religion the latter being a 
 topic on which, forty years ago, many able thinkers, both 
 women and men, were far less enlightened than at present. 
 Being a Quaker preacher, Mrs. Mott s supreme topic was 
 always religion. But Mrs. Stanton the daughter of a 
 jurist, the wife of an advocate, and the student of law-books 
 felt that if there ever was to be an improved status of 
 woman, its basis must be laid in the law of the land ; in other 
 words, that the political safeguards of the two sexes should 
 be identical. This was a claim which had not, in our gener 
 ation, been made either by women or for women. Of course, 
 I do not forget that in New Jersey, in the early part of this 
 century, under a liberal construction of a loosely-worded 
 statute, a few women voted at occasional elections; but this 
 constructive liberty did not long avail them, for it was 
 promptly abolished by a positive repeal. 
 
 There were abolitionists before William Lloyd Garrison, 
 and there were women suffragists before Elizabeth Cady Stan- 
 ton ; but if it can, with any justice, be said that Mr. Garrison 
 originated the American anti-slavery crusade, it can be said 
 still more undeniably that Mrs. Stanton originated the Ameri 
 can woman-suffrage movement. Indeed, Mr. Garrison had 
 an immediate predecessor in Benjamin Lundy of Baltimore, 
 to say nothing of the British nation, which had just abolished 
 slavery in the West Indies, when he first demanded its aboli 
 tion in the United States. But Mrs. Stanton was without a 
 
612 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 national example, or an individual forerunner. Her re 
 formatory movement was the product of her own mind and 
 heart. 
 
 She gave the enterprise its dSbut in June, 1848, at the 
 town of Seneca Falls, N.Y., where she issued a call for a 
 public convention, to be held in the Wesleyan Cliapel ; and 
 to attract the public she promised that Lucretia Mott would 
 be present. The call has been preserved as a relic, and I 
 copy from it a single phrase to show its scope : " The ob 
 ject of the convention," it says, "is to discuss the social, 
 civil, and religious condition and rights of women." It will 
 be observed that no mention is here made of political rights. 
 Mrs. Stanton often relates, with a twinkle of humor, the 
 somewhat comical interior history of that famous first con 
 vention. Although the word " political " was not in the call, 
 she meant that women s political rights should be brought 
 prominently before the meeting. Accordingly she prepared 
 in advance a declaration of sentiments, and a series of resolu 
 tions, to form a basis for the discussions. This declaration 
 was closely modeled after Jefferson s Declaration of Inde 
 pendence, and may be called a serious parody on that docu 
 ment. I will quote a few necessary extracts : " The his 
 tory of mankind," says this close copy, " is a history of re 
 peated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards 
 woman, having in direct object the establishment of an abso 
 lute tyranny over her. To prove this let facts be submitted 
 to a candid world. 
 
 "He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable 
 right to the elective franchise. 
 
 o 
 
 "He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law civilly 
 dead. 
 
 " After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if 
 she be single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to 
 support a government which recognizes her only when her 
 property can be profitable to it. 
 
 " He has denied her the facilities for obtaining an educa 
 tion, all colleges being closed against her. 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 613 
 
 " He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the 
 world a different code of morals for men and women, where 
 by moral delinquencies, which exclude women from society, 
 are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. 
 
 " He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, 
 claiming to assign for her a sphere of action, when that be 
 longs to her conscience and her God." 
 
 In addition to the foregoing extracts from Mrs. Stanton s 
 declaration of sentiments, I will quote only a single one of 
 the eleven resolutions with which she accompanied it ; but 
 that one became the keynote of the new movement : " Re 
 solved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to 
 secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective fran 
 chise." 
 
 The preceding extracts constitute the earliest recorded 
 public demand made for woman suffrage within the memory 
 of persons now living. The instinct for heirlooms, which has 
 preserved the table on which Magna Charta was signed at 
 Runnymede, has led a patriotic Quaker family in Philadelphia 
 to preserve the table on which Mrs. Stanton wrote the char 
 ter of her new reform. 
 
 As the young reformer had called the convention on her 
 own impulse, and in her own town, and as she had never, up 
 to that time, made a public speech, she began to be terrified 
 as the hour of assembly drew nigh ; and she has unheroically 
 confessed to me that she felt like " suddenly abandoning all 
 her principles and running away." Her husband, who had 
 drawn up for presentation to the convention a series of ex 
 tracts from laws bearing unjustly against woman s property 
 interests, was thunderstruck when she showed him, confiden 
 tially, her proposed demand for the ballot. He remonstrated 
 with her against her intention to introduce such a novelty into 
 the meeting, and begged her to abandon her purpose. " No," 
 she replied, "I must declare the truth as I believe it to be." 
 * You will turn the proceedings," replied her husband " into 
 a farce ; I wash my hands of the whole business ; I shall not 
 enter the chapel during the session." Mrs, Stanton adhered 
 
614 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 to her plan ; .and her husband kept his word. Lucretia Mott 
 also the idolized rnonitress of Mrs. Stanton said, 
 "Lizzie, thou wilt make the convention ridiculous." I>ut 
 Lizzie was of a different opinion ; and she withstood Mrs. Mott 
 with modest courage and independence a fact to which Mrs. 
 Mott was fond of alluding in after years. Mrs. Stanton has 
 told me that she found only one person among the delegates 
 who was willing from the first to champion her novel demand. 
 This was the brave and high-souled Frederick Douglass, to 
 whom she successfully appealed, saying, " You, like myself, 
 belong to a disfranchised class, and must see that the root of all 
 our social and legal disabilities lies in our deprivation of the 
 right to make laws for ourselves. Will you urge the conven 
 tion to adopt this protest against injustice? I have never 
 spoken in public, and cannot defend my own resolutions. I 
 want your help." " You shall have it," was the reply. Mr. 
 Douglass, with his ready genius as an orator, proved more 
 than equal to the occasion. Mrs. Stanton, too, greatly to her 
 surprise, found that her tongue was loosed, and that she 
 could rise and reply to objections with happy success. It is 
 a remarkable tribute to her woman s tact and wit, to her ex 
 tensive knowledge of her subject, and to her earnest enthu 
 siasm, that the convention, after two days discussion, adopted 
 unanimously her declaration of sentiments and her eleven 
 resolutions, including her demand for the elective franchise 
 exactly as she had originally drafted it. 
 
 The popular effect of this initial convention exceeded all 
 anticipation. One-half the newspapers treated it with de 
 rision, and the other half assumed a tone of virtuous indig 
 nation. Friends and sympathizers, the convention had none 
 or too few to make themselves felt. Even some of the 
 delegates, who had signed the declaration and resolutions, 
 requested in a few days the expunging of their name?!. But 
 the reform itself could not be blotted out ; the revolution was 
 begun, not to go backward. 
 
 I will not stop to mention the many early conventions 
 which quickly followed, and which, like a series of Leyden 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, 615 
 
 jars, gave a succession of electric shocks first in New York, 
 then in Ohio, and soon afterwards in other States. These 
 belong rather to a history of woman suffrage than to a 
 biography of Mrs. Stanton. But I ought to record one 
 interesting fact connected with these early meetings ; and that 
 is, that at many of them the leading spirit was Lucre! iu Mott, 
 who no longer said, " Lizzie, thou wilt make the convention 
 ridiculous." Mrs. Mott had, in fact, become the chief 
 advocate of Mrs. Stanton s demand for the ballot. When 
 this demand received more and more public favor, Mrs. Mott 
 addressed a great convention in Cleveland in 1853, and 
 proposed the adoption of the declaration of sentiments put 
 forth at Seneca Falls in 1848 a proposition which, at her 
 suggestion, was unanimously carried. " She thought," says 
 the official report of the proceedings, "that this would be a 
 fitting honor to her who initiated these movements in behalf 
 of the women of our country Mrs. Elizabeth Cady 
 Stanton." 
 
 When Mrs. Stanton s reform was two years s old, she made 
 the acquaintance of a woman who was henceforth to be her life 
 long co-worker and friend Miss Susan B. Anthony. These 
 two names belong, not only to the history of woman suffrage, 
 but to the history of what William R. Alger styles " the 
 friendships of women." To anybody who has long known 
 Miss Anthony s zeal for woman suffrage, it may bo surprising 
 to learn that there ever was a time when this " Napoleon of the 
 struggle," as William H. Channing has called her, was filled 
 with laughter at the new reform, and had to be argued with 
 before she was persuaded to become a woman suffragist ! 
 But so it was. Mrs. Stanton s pronunciamento at Seneca 
 Falls originally seemed to Miss Anthony as ridiculous as it 
 did to Mrs. Mott. But when Mrs. Stanton won over Miss 
 Anthony to her side, she gained the same kind of doughty 
 help which Bismarck found in Moltke. Mrs. Stanton s 
 mission has ever since been to furnish to the movement its 
 philosophy and rhetoric, while Miss Anthony s has been to be 
 its executive manager and superintendent. During more 
 
616 ELIZABETH CADT STANTON. 
 
 than a quarter of a century, these two woman have been so 
 inseparable that to speak of the one has been to think of the 
 other. Their union in toil has been as close as that of the 
 brothers do Goncourt, or of Erckmann and Chatrain. It is 
 to the equal honor of both ladies that no petty jealousies, and 
 no dissensions as to their joint methods of work, have ever 
 interrupted the steady course of their warm and loyal friend 
 ship. Although many other able women have devoted their 
 best years to this cause among whom I am proud to mention 
 such early names as Ernestine L. Rose, Paulina Wright 
 Davis, Frances D. Gage, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Black well, 
 Olympia Brown, Clarina Nichols, and, of later date, Julia 
 Ward Howe, Mary A. Livermore, and Lillie Devereux 
 Blake yet it is simply a fact of history that the founder of 
 the reform was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and its chief practical 
 manager has been Susan B. Anthony. " Never forget," 
 writes Mrs. Stanton, "that if I have done anything for the 
 women of my country it is not I it is Susan and I." 
 
 In 1866 Mrs. Stanton, who had previously become a 
 resident of the city of New York, offered herself to the electors 
 of its eighth congressional district as a candidate to represent 
 them at Washington. The self-nomination of candidates is a 
 
 O 
 
 common practice in England ; and she adopted it in New York 
 in order to remind the people that, though the constitution of 
 the Empire State denies to woman the right to vote, it does 
 not deny to her the right to be voted for. Mrs. Stanton 
 announced her candidacy in a pithy card, in which she said : 
 "Belonging to a disfranchised class, I have no political ante 
 cedents to recommend me to your support ; but my creed is 
 free speech, free press, free men, and free trade the car 
 dinal points of democracy." Her chief opponent was the 
 Hon. James Brooks, then the democratic "leader of the 
 House." There have been candidates who were fairly 
 elected and unfairly " counted out ; " Mrs. Stanton never 
 complained that she was a victim of this political injustice. 
 Out of nearly twenty-three thousand votes polled she 
 received exactly two dozen 1 
 
ELIZABETH CADT STANTON. 617 
 
 In 1868 she joined with Miss Anthony, Parker Pillsbury, 
 and others in establishing and editing "The Revolution," 
 a journal in the interests of woman s rights, and which, at a 
 later period, I also had the honor for two years to conduct. 
 
 The paper was at length merged in " The Liberal Christian," 
 then edited by the Rev. Henry W. Bellows, D.D., as an organ 
 of the Unitarian faith. When "The Revolution" had thus 
 finally lost its indentity in that of a religious weekly, Mrs. 
 Stanton facetiously remarked that " it had found Christian 
 burial in consecrated ground." 
 
 After her discontinuance of her editorship, she devoted 
 herself for fourteen years (during the winter seasons) to 
 public lecturing ; appearing before nearly all the lyceums of 
 New England and the Western States, and also attending, as 
 opportunity offered, woman s rights conventions. Her 
 lectures and addresses are written with care, and often rise to 
 eloquence. Few American orators, whether men or women, 
 have so frequently been called to speak on "great occasions." 
 One such occasion was that of her address before the joint 
 session of the New York Legislature, on the proper legal 
 status of women ; another, a speech in San Francisco to an 
 audience of women exclusively, three thousand in number, on 
 the duty and dignity of maternity ; another, an address to a 
 similar audience during the Richardson and McFarland trial ; 
 another, a memorial discourse pronounced in Lincoln Hall, at 
 Washington, on the death of Lucretia Mott. On these and 
 other occasions the platform has usually been decorated with 
 flowers ; and the spectacle of the wrapt audience, listening to 
 the dignified speaker, has been most impressive. 
 
 In a biography of Mrs. Stanton by her friend and confrere, 
 Theodore Tilton, ef I have seen," he says, " the old and tat 
 tered manuscript of the first set speech which she ever deliv 
 ered ; " and he mentions that it was lost for many years, and 
 that at last, when the author recovered it, she wrote upon the 
 margin this inscription : 
 
 "<DEAR MAGGIE AND HATTIB, This is my first lecture. It 
 was delivered several times immediately after the first woman s 
 
018 ELIZABETH CADY ST ANTON. 
 
 rights convention. It contains all I knew at that time. I did not 
 speak again for several years. The manuscript has ever since 
 been a wanderer through the land. Now, after a separation of 
 nearly eighteen years, I press my first-born to my heart once more. 
 As I recall my younger days, I weep over the apathy and indif 
 ference of women concerning their own degredation. I give this 
 manuscript to my precious daughters, in the hope that they will 
 finish the work which I have begun." 
 
 Mrs. Stinton, after having travelled many thousand miles 
 a year, for fourteen years, in fulfilment of her public engage 
 ments, has of late ceased from these exhausting pilgrimages, 
 and now lives in her library, writing and compiling a " His 
 tory of Woman Suffrage," a Avork to be comprised in three 
 huge volumes, of a thousand pages each, in which she will 
 preserve all the principal documents that have marked the 
 successive stages of the movement, together with biographical 
 sketches and engraved portraits of the most eminent women 
 who have devoted themselves to this reform. Associated in 
 this literary project with Mrs. Stanton are Miss Anthony and 
 Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage. The prefaces, the introduction, 
 and the general arrangement of the three volumes are Mrs. 
 Stanton s own ; and the work contains also her principal dis 
 courses, letters, and reports, though, with characteristic 
 modesty, she has displayed the labors of others to the over 
 shadowing of her own. 
 
 Mrs. Stanton s views on other topics than woman s rights 
 are briefly these : As to her political preferences, she feels 
 that she has little to choose between the Republican and 
 the Democratic parties, since she is disfranchised by both. 
 As to her social theories, she holds to the sacredness of mar 
 riage (like all other good women) ; but when an unhappy 
 marriage destroys the ideal family relation, and when the 
 children born of such a union are the innocent and wretched 
 victims of the vices or mistakes of their parents, she believes 
 as John Milton did) in a wise freedom of divorce. As to 
 political economy, she has a doctrinaire s devotion to free 
 trade, to co-operative industry, and to the rights of labor aa 
 
ELIZABETH CADY ST ANTON. 619 
 
 opposed to the tyranny of capital though her chief interest 
 in these questions is because, as she says, "Woman is the 
 great unpaid laborer of the world." As to religion, like many 
 another person brought up under the Calvinistic system, she 
 first passed through a long period of mental suffering in a vain 
 attempt to solve problems which lie beyond the finite mind, and 
 at last abandoned what she calls "a theology inconsistent with 
 enlightened reason, and inadequate to the wants of the soul." 
 
 In 1882 Mrs. Stanton went to France, on a visit to her son 
 Theodore and his wife, and spent three months at the Convent 
 of La Sagesse, in the old city of Toulouse. This son, as 
 warm an enthusiast for woman suffrage as his mother is, gave 
 her a glad surprise by putting into her hands the manuscript 
 of an elaborate treatise which he had written (and has since 
 published) on the " Status of Women in Europe." 
 
 In 1883 she held conferences in England with John Bright 
 and many other public characters, both men and women, on 
 her favorite theme. Her residence while in that country was 
 with her gifted daughter, Mrs. Harriet Stanton Blatch, at 
 Basingstoke. Mrs. Stanton may thus be said to have three 
 homes, one in America, another in France, and another in 
 England ; and she has lived to find her name a household 
 word among the advanced thinkers of three nations. 
 
 In conversation Mrs. Stanton is quick and apt in her 
 retorts. During the civil war, Horace Greeley said to her : 
 " Madame, the bullet and the ballot go together. If you want 
 to vote, are you ready to fight?" " Certainly, sir," said she, 
 to the amusement of the company ; ff I am ready to fight just 
 as you have fought by sending a substitute." At the close, 
 of one of her addresses before a State Legislature, one of the 
 auditors, a highly conservative lady, said to her : " When you 
 go before the public, what do you do with your children?" 
 " Oh," replied Mrs. Stanton, " it takes me no longer to come 
 here to speak than it does you to come to listen. What have 
 you done with your children during the two hours 3 r ou have 
 been sitting here ? " Lord Shaftesbury, at a parlor meeting 
 at his house, said to her: "I fear the effect of womaa sufr- 
 38 
 
620 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 frage on domestic harmony ; for what if husband and wife 
 should differ in politics?" "What if they should," she 
 replied ; " would you, my lord, deny the right of a woman 
 to go to church simply because she might happen to be more 
 orthodox than her husband?" After holding a convention in 
 Newport, during the fashionable season, she was accosted by 
 a lady who commented on the immodesty of a woman s speak 
 ing in public. " Really," replied Mrs. Stanton, "you surprise 
 me. Our convention this morning was not more public than 
 your ball-room last evening; and as to female modesty, it is 
 a question whether it is less modest to be plainly dressed, 
 and to speak words of soberness and truth on a public plat 
 form, than to exhibit one s bare arms and shoulders at a public 
 dance, in the embrace of a strange gentleman." 
 
 It is always pleasant to know something of the personal 
 appearance of a distinguished man or woman ; but, as a rule, 
 nothing is more illusive and shadowy than a verbal descrip 
 tion, and nothing more vague than the impression made by 
 such a portrait upon one who has never seen the subject of 
 it. I will try, however, to tell what manner of Avoman Mrs. 
 Stanton is. First, then, she is noticeably fine looking : in any 
 crowded assembly she would command attention, and people 
 would wish to know who she was. She is above the medium 
 height ; rotund of figure ; fair of complexion ; with bright, 
 fearless, and sparkling blue eyes, and a rosy, wholesome 
 mouth, filled with fine white teeth, which she shows in her 
 frequent smiles ; for she is pre-eminently a mirthful, sunny- 
 tempered woman, abounding in 
 
 " Quips and cranks and wanton wiles, 
 Nods and becks and wreathed smiles." 
 
 Her features are all regular, and her white hair, which curls 
 naturally, is so abundant and beautiful that many a young 
 girl might envy its quality and profusion. She has often 
 been likened in looks to Martha Washington. Her manners 
 are genial and courteous, and she has the rare gift of putting 
 everybody at ease who comes into her presence ; while she 
 
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 621 
 
 herself is equally at home in the simplest cottage in the 
 far West, or in the fine residences of the nobility of England, 
 where she has been cordially welcomed. She is n democrat, 
 pure and simple, and values individuals according to their 
 just deserts, quite apart from their social surroundings. She 
 does not despise a man because he is rich (as some radicals 
 do) any more than she looks down on one because he is poor. 
 She ignores every mere external consideration in her estimate 
 of people, and weighs their moral and intellectual worth, 
 judging them accordingly. She is a woman of scientific and 
 philosophic tastes ; but still more she is a practical worker 
 for humanity ; and she loves her fellow-beings as if they all 
 were near of kin to her. Her temperament is sweet and buoy 
 ant, and she has borne all the vicissitudes of a life full of 
 labors and duties most cheerfully. She once snid to me, 
 " Submit to the inevitable, for it is the true philosophy of 
 life ; " and she has acted on her own theory not only sub 
 mitting, but submitting gracefully. " The ills of life," she 
 says, " are sufficiently hard to bear without adding to them the 
 wear and tear of discontent and rebellion." 
 
 Mrs. Stanton is the mother of seven children (five sons and 
 two daughters), all of whom are living. Her sons are young 
 men of culture, two of whom are successfully following their 
 father in the law. Both her daughters are married and 
 beginning life for themselves. All these children, in the 
 words of the Wise Man, " rise up and call her blessed." John 
 Stuart Mill said long since that the homes of clever and 
 public-spirited women were the pleasantest which he had ever 
 seen. Mrs. Stanton has been one of the most successful 
 home-makers in the land. Of late years she has lived at 
 Tenafly, N.J., where as a visitor I have witnessed her skill 
 in the art of housekeeping, and have seen her matronly checks 
 aglow from sporting with her full-grown children in the open 
 air under her ancient chestnut and cedar trees. It is a pet 
 theory of this model mother that one of the first rights of the 
 child is the right to individual development. She believes in 
 the widest liberty and the fullest education, not only as the 
 
022 ELIZABETH CADY STANTON. 
 
 salvation of the state, but as the perfection of the home circle. 
 Like Herbert Spencer, she thinks a man should be educated 
 with reference to the system of government under which lie 
 is to live. She not only disapproves of a European training 
 for a youth who is to make America his residence, but believes 
 that the first lesson of a child who is to be an American 
 citizen should be self-respect and self-restraint, and not as 
 people of the old school (and many of the present day) main 
 tain, unquestioning obedience to authority. She regards 
 sickness as a crime, since it is an evidence of a violation of 
 gome physical law ; and I have heard her say that she hoped 
 and believed the time would come when people would be as 
 much ashamed to admit that they had headache or indigestion 
 as they would be to admit that they had committed theft or 
 told a lie. Her own health is so perfect, and her spirit so 
 joyous, that she seems like a woman who has never had an 
 ache to endure, or a grievance to redress. I have seen some 
 women who excelled her in animal spirits, but never one who 
 possessed an equal measure of habitual cheeriness in all 
 situations. 
 
 It is from this hopefulness of nature this habit of looking 
 at the bright side of things that she borrows her impetuous 
 methods of appealing to the public mind. She is always see 
 ing the goal, not as afar off, but as near at hand. Years ago, 
 Mr. Mill said to me that while he admired Mrs. Stanton 
 greatly, he thought she was sometimes premature in her 
 public utterances ; and he added that after he had written his 
 book on the ff Subjection of Women," he retained it in his 
 writing-desk for twenty years before venturing on its publi 
 cation. Mrs. Stanton, on the other hand, has said, "The 
 time is ripe for the expression of any thought as soon as the 
 person is found who is ready to utter it." It is a favorite 
 idea with her that " There is no use in saying what people are 
 ready to hear." On making the acquaintance of Daniel 
 O Connell, during the Repeal excitement, she asked him if 
 he really expected to secuVe a repeal of the Union. "Oh, 
 no," he replied, " but I claim everything, that I may be sure of 
 
ELIZABETH CADT STANTON. 623 
 
 getting something." This has ever since been her method like 
 wise. Thus, during our national discussion of the fourteenth 
 amendment, which provided the franchise for the freedmen, she 
 insisted that the same amendment should be so interpreted as to 
 secure the like privilege to women. But what scorns radical 
 to-day becomes conservative to-morrow. Mrs. Stanton has 
 long since outlived (as Lucy Stone has done) the early 
 criticisms which denounced both these women as visionaries 
 and fanatics. The world has a good habit of outgrowing 
 itself, and is thereby getting better and better. With each 
 successive generation women become freer, wiser, and more 
 capable. In 1790, after our forefathers had been awakened 
 by the American Revolution to a new perception of the rights 
 of men, they suddenly caught a clearer glimpse of the capaci 
 ties of women. As a consequence, the novel practice of 
 school-teaching by the female sex was then for the first time 
 introduced. But the New England " sehoolmarm" is now 
 not only a person, but an institution no longer a radical 
 innovation, but a conservative safeguard of society. If it 
 took so long a time and so great a crisis to prove to the 
 American people that a woman could safely be a school 
 teacher, it may take an equal time and struggle to show that 
 she may properly be a voter. I will hazard no prophecy of 
 my own concerning the future triumph of woman suffrage, 
 whether it be remote or at hand ; but I may quote what has 
 been predicted of it by so acute a discerner of politics as 
 Senator Anthony of Rhode Island. " The time has not come 
 for it," says he, " but it is coming ; it is coming with the 
 progress of civilization and the general amelioration of the 
 race ; it is coming with the triumph of truth, justice, and 
 equal rights." These words were spoken in the Senate of 
 the United States by the senator of longest service in that 
 body. If they be sound and valid, as I believe they are, 
 their fulfilment (whether soon or late) will confer upon 
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, cither in her lifetime or after her 
 death, a name of perennial eminence in our political history. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 (" AIAIUON HARLAND"). 
 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 Popular Fallacy "Marion Harland" A Versatile and Successful 
 Author A Visit to Her Home Her Domestic Life A Peep into Her 
 Kitchen An Inviting Place Her Husband, Rev. Dr. E. P. Terlmne ; 
 the Man and His Power A Characteristic Letter from " Marion liar- 
 land" An Interesting Bit of Autobiography Her Own Account of 
 Her Early Life Reminiscences of Her Girlhood Her First Book Its 
 Marked Success Career as a Novelist A New Departure Her 
 " Cookery Books" Their Enormous Sale A Boon to Housekeepers 
 Her Love for Little Folks What She says about Santa Glaus Sound 
 Advice to Girls and Wise Words for Wives A Gifted Woman. 
 
 JTERARY and unpractical have been synony 
 mous terms for years in connection with 
 women who have devoted a part of their time 
 to authorship, or who were suspected of hav 
 ing a tinge of " blue " about them. And al 
 though we are gaining ground, there is still 
 in the hearts of many men an innate shrinking 
 from a blue-stocking. 
 
 An engraving in an English annual of thirty 
 years ago illustrates the popular sentiment at that time. A 
 luckless husband is walking the floor with a screaming baby, 
 his expression indicative of insanity or deep despair ; while 
 Madame, his scribbling spouse, all unconscious of the situa 
 tion, unless perhaps annoyed by the cries of one or the 
 heartfelt groans of the other, is perched up in bed, with 
 tangled locks flowing, and eyes wildly rolling, as she rounds 
 some fine sentence, or with gaze uplifted is waiting for fur 
 ther inspirations. 
 
 624 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 625 
 
 You have all seen pictures of this type, and the prejudice 
 behind the burlesque has been real and intense, and this in 
 spite of the cheering and convincing facts on the other side. 
 
 Both in England and this country there are many literary 
 women who are also good wives and mothers ; women in 
 happy homes of their own, with husbands proud and fond, 
 and may I add sure of three square meals a day, and 
 every button on ! 
 
 And the vast array of spinster authors are by no means 
 ignorant of homely duties. 
 
 Go back to the days of Dr. Johnson and listen to his testi 
 mony about Elizabeth Carter, the best Greek scholar in Eng 
 land. He said: "A man is in general better pleased when 
 lie has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks 
 Greek. My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding 
 as well as translate Epictetus, and work a handkerchief as 
 well as compose a poem." Eliza Leslie and Catherine 
 Beecher prepared excellent cooking-books. Hannah More 
 and Harriet Martineau were capital housekeepers, and both 
 made nearly two hundred thousand dollars by their pens. 
 
 If it comes to money-making, remember that dear Mary 
 Mitford supported her disreputable old father for years, and 
 there is a large army of literary women who support half a 
 dozen relatives and never boast of the fact. All this has been 
 suggested by writing Mrs. Terhune s name at the head of this 
 article, for she is my crowning illustration of the fact that a 
 woman can make a fortune by her pen, attain a most enviable 
 reputation as a versatile and successful author, and yet be 
 a perfect housekeeper, a model minister s wife (as well as 
 the wife of a model minister !), a devoted mother, a queen in 
 society, and a sympathetic, satisfying friend. That sounds 
 extravagant and perhaps fulsome, but as it is strictly true I 
 glory in saying it ; I do not know any other woman who 
 combines so many virtues. And all this without one bit of 
 pedantry, parade, or pretension. 
 
 If, with all her other achievements, Mrs. Terhune was a 
 slovenly housekeeper, she would then be a most uncommon 
 
G2G MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 woman, but I know the beautiful method by which her house 
 is managed, and her thorough acquaintance with everything 
 from attic to cellar, and parlor to kitchen. Her kitchen, by 
 the way, is one of the most attractive places in the whole 
 establishment, everything arranged in the wisest manner for 
 convenience, neatness, and comfort. I always feel when I go 
 through it a longing to stay and try my luck with some of her 
 receipts. I have been so fortunate as to be a frequent visitor 
 in her happy home, and trust these bits of confidence will 
 not seem in bad taste, for I know there is nothing she desires 
 more eagerly than to disabuse the public of the silly and false 
 notion that a woman cannot be both literary and domestic, 
 and shine in each department. 
 
 I remember her words as we were talking once on this 
 subject : " It is my ambition to relieve literary domesticity 
 from the odium that now rests on it." So let me assure the 
 incredulous world that Mrs. Terhune does not come down to 
 breakfast in a dingy, tattered wrapper, with dishevelled hair, 
 and shocking slippers, a pen behind her ear, ink on her 
 second finger, manuscript sticking out of her pocket, and 
 in a generally helpless and oblivious condition. But that 
 she is the first of the family to appear, overlooks the morn 
 ing meal, gives the final touches to the table, and often 
 finds time to write a paragraph or two while her family are 
 assembling. 
 
 It is unnecessary to say that her table is a picture at all 
 times, with its tasteful arrangement of color in the china, etc. ; 
 and with the delicious things to eat, and the charming con 
 versation, there is a threefold treat. 
 
 I must emphasize her habit of saving or occupying every 
 minute that might otherwise be wasted the secret of her 
 hein able to do so much more than the rest of us. Mrs. 
 
 o 
 
 Delaney, you remember, did some wonderful embroidery 
 while waiting for her tea to cool, and Madame de Genlis 
 compiled a huge and valuable volume of early French poetry 
 during the daily quarter of an hour that the Duchess de 
 Chartres kept the dinner waiting. 
 

 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 " MARION HARLAND." 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 629 
 
 You have heard of the wise remark of the old Indian to 
 one who complained of lack of time. " You have all the 
 time there is ! " growled the red man ; and I always think of 
 this, and make a host of good resolutions after a visit to my 
 friend. But it seems miserably selfish to bo talking in a 
 superior manner of my visits to Mrs. Terhune. I will now 
 invite you all to go with me and see for yourselves. 
 
 She lives in Springfield, Mass., in a very attractive house, 
 designed entirely by her husband and herself. "Let s play," 
 as the little girls say, that we are at the door and have rung 
 the bell. Peep in through the glass and see the benignant 
 face of Longfellow looking a welcome from an easel opposite. 
 AValk in, and while we are waiting for the lady look about 
 at the pictures, books, and bric-a-brac just enough. Every 
 thing in harmony, nothing crowded. No effort at the antique 
 or esthetic. That crayon head is the best picture I have yet 
 seen of Mrs. Terhune, but her face is not one that is fairly 
 represented by a picture. Those water-colors are by her, 
 also that pen-and-ink sketch, and the dining-room has several 
 of her oil-paintings of fish and fowl. The library is just 
 opposite the parlor, and the room at the end, separated from 
 us by that heavy portiere, is her sanctum. There she works 
 and there her friends enjoy many a cosy chat and delicious cup 
 of tea. 
 
 "How does she ever find time for painting? " Well, that I 
 confess is a mystery to me. 
 
 The furniture of her chambers is most beautifully decorated, 
 and with such originality that I wander from one room to 
 another, wishing for the power to copy such dainty designs. 
 I remember one on a bureau called "Summer s Dead," a 
 picture of an empty nest, swung by a bit of red yarn, which 
 had been woven in, to a bare twig ; a bit of grape-vine, and 
 a few Avithered grapes above, a faded leaf just hanging to the 
 branch below a breath would send it fluttering down. 
 
 But here she comes ; a bright-faced, keen-eyed, self-poised 
 woman, with a great deal of individuality and energy. 
 Perfectly natural, a fine talker, full of anecdote, repartee, and 
 
630 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 humor, with a latent power of sarcasm, which is seldom used. 
 She is most even in her manner to her friends, and as you see 
 her to-day you will find her always if you are deserving of 
 her regard. But she has her bonnet on, and you hear her say 
 that she is expected to preside at a missionary meeting this 
 very hour, so let us leave ; and if you like to come in fancy to 
 my sanctum I will go on with my monologue. 
 
 So few literary women in this country have husbands, and 
 those few have generally married late, and a man considerably 
 younger than themselves, that I rejoice in Mrs. Terhune s 
 ideal home life, and have a real pride in speaking of the Rev. 
 Mr. Terlmne, who is never by any chance thought of as 
 "Marion Ilarland s husband," but is widely known for his 
 own sake and by his own grand work. Even the hackman 
 whom I asked to drive me to Mrs. Terhune s on the occasion 
 of my first visit said, "I s pose ye mean Minister Terhune s, 
 don t ye?" Every inch a man, every inch a gentleman ; and 
 when those inches amount to a generous six feet, with well- 
 proportioned breadth, that is a good deal to say. 
 
 A clergyman who met and listened to him while they were 
 both in Home says : " His voice is singularly adapted to the 
 pulpit. There is a solemnity in its tones without the slightest 
 affectation of solemnity. It seems to be gauged by his sub 
 ject, and not to his subject. His gestures are appropriate, 
 and, when occasion requires, emphatic. He does not make 
 them ; they are quite spontaneous. His analysis of a text 
 and deductions from it are as natural as the branches of u 
 cedar of Lebanon. It seems as if he just tapped his text 
 and the essence runs out. You never feel that he is wander 
 ing from the subject. He uses no stereotyped phrases in his 
 prayers, no cant in his exhortations. His manner as well as 
 matter is solemn and impressive. Out of the pulpit he is 
 exceedingly genial, but never so much so as to detract from 
 true dignity." 
 
 This extract gives after all a feeble conception of the man 
 and his power. In his crowded church, or with his largo 
 Sabbath-school class, you feel that God is near him. His 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 631 
 
 earnestness and personal magnetism have the divine blessing 
 constantly added. He is a thoroughly trained physician as 
 well, and gives much of his time to healing the poor of his 
 congregation, and yet is remarkably well-read, up with the 
 times in every particular, a man with whom you cannot talk 
 five minutes without learning something fresh and delightful. 
 And I am sufficiently sentimental to enjoy looking back to 
 those romantic idyllic days, when the eloquent young minister 
 fell in love with and wooed the brilliant young Southern girl, 
 already known to the public as a successful writer. We all 
 like genuine sentiment the story never grows old. As a 
 gentleman said to me yesterday when speaking of the first 
 time he met his wife: "We always fancy that that is the 
 perfect day of the year. It is always bright and sunshiny." 
 And he added smiling: "I too have been in Arcadia." 
 
 A great deal of stuff has been written about the " wives 
 of literary men" and the marriages of literary people in gen 
 eral. I assert that these marriages are as happy as those of 
 other people, only a calcium light is placed on the back-door 
 step of every notable, and a keen ear is at the keyhole of the 
 bed-chamber, and every minute detail, every petty bit of 
 gossip, is proudly paraded before the public. 
 
 We hear of the unhappiness, of the jarring moods, from 
 letters that should never have been published, from careless 
 words that should have never been repeated, and we say that 
 people of genius are unendurable in the marriage relation. 
 Mrs. Norton, Mrs. Hemans, Mrs. Jameson did have most 
 ungracious and ungrateful specimens for husbands ; but con 
 trast Avith them Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Howitt, Mrs. S. C. 
 Hall, Mrs. Craik, and many others in England and America, 
 in whose homes happiness reigns the year round. 
 
 I wish this fallacy could be placed with the equally false 
 idea of a literary woman, as given earlier, and packed off into 
 everlasting obloquy. 
 
 At any rate, I can say with entire truth that I have found 
 the choicest companionship, the most perfect hospitality, and 
 the best things to eat ! in the homes of my literary friends, 
 
632 MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 happy homes, where every year the love grows stronger and 
 deeper, and the characters develop into new power and 
 beauty. Mr. and Mrs. Terhune have three living children, 
 and the daughters are trained to have a profession that is, a 
 specialty by which they can support themselves the eldest 
 is now making a practical and most successful test of her 
 knowledge of literature. 
 
 Now, after this general view, I will go back to the begin 
 ning and proceed more systematically. But I shall not start 
 with a date. As Madame de Genlis said, in writing her 
 
 O 
 
 autobiography : "What has a woman to do with dates?" It 
 spoils the charm in talking of a dear and living friend to pin 
 myself to statistics. 
 
 I wrote to Mrs-. Terhune for a few facts, and she kindly sent 
 the following as " a bone or two" for my skeleton, which I 
 do not like to mar by any changes of my own : 
 
 " 151 MAPLE STREET, 
 "SPRINGFIELD, MASS., March 3, 1883. 
 
 " MY DEAR Miss SANBORN, I confess that my sentiments 
 on the subject of a biographical notice may be summed up in 
 the needy knife-grinder s exclamation, Story ! Lord bless 
 me, sir ! I have none ! None that would interest the public. 
 To myself, and in myself, life has been very full and round 
 and rich, and sorrow has made the channels of some years 
 very deep. He who sent the grief knows why and for what 
 end. With this the world has nothing to do. 
 
 " Please don t give a post-mortem air to your paper by re 
 cording the date of my birth, with a blank left for death. I 
 enclose a newspaper article written ten years ago, from which 
 you may extract something. It turned up the other day in 
 the bottom of an old trunk. I have never kept such as a 
 rule, or notices of my books. Cui bono 9 Being a believer 
 in heredity, I take genuine pleasure in tracing what authorly 
 gifts I have back to my maternal grandmother, Mrs. Judith 
 Smith of Olney, Virginia, a woman of rare intellectual and 
 personal gifts. A part of her library and volumes of her 
 correspondence that have descended to me corroborate family 
 
MART VIRGINIA TEROUNE. 633 
 
 and friendly traditions of her tastes and accomplishments. 
 She died before my birth, but my very handwriting and 
 voice are said to resemble hers. My mother was a refined, 
 gentle lady, born and bred with quiet domestic and literary 
 tastes, faithful and conscientious in all things. My father was 
 a man. If I have pith and earnestness, if my ends are wor 
 thy, I may thank him, under God, for it. His library was 
 such as was found in many Virginia homesteads at that day 
 a collection of British classics that would give strength and 
 dignity to f complete modern book-shelves. He had a whole 
 some horror of light reading, and his rule of his household 
 being somewhat autocratic, I remember devouring by stealth, 
 on rainy Saturdays, an old Shakspeare, from which both 
 tacks were gone, under the impression that he might confis 
 cate the treasure-trove if he found me at it. I was then ten 
 years old. I could not have been more than eleven when I 
 started guiltily at his hand on my shoulder, one summer after 
 noon, as I sat curled up on the stairs deep in (don t laugh \) 
 the fifth volume of Ilollin s Ancient History. I had ab 
 stracted it, one volume at a time, from the shelves in his sit 
 ting-room, thinking it best not to ask permission lest it should 
 be denied. I can see his face now, the massive, mobile 
 visage that set the weather daily in our home, as he rend 
 the title of the page before me, and glanced into my fright 
 ened eyes, with a smile half-quizzical, half-fond. 
 
 " That won t hurt you, he said. Whenever you want 
 books of that sort ask me for them. When you have read 
 those in the house, I ll buy all you will read. 
 
 " My sister and I read The Spectator aloud to our mother 
 as she sat busy with fine needlework, and learned whole books 
 of Cowper s Task and Thomson s Seasons ; knew Para 
 dise Lost as girls do Tennyson in this day; rushed 
 through Plutarch s Lives with breathless eagerness no 
 novelist could now provoke ; believed in James Montgomery, 
 and on Sundays pored over Pilgrim s Progress," Pollok s 
 Course of Time, and Young s Night Thoughts. Our 
 mother took The New York Mirror and Graham, and 
 
034 MARY VIRGINIA TERIIUNE. 
 
 Godey, and the Saturday Evening Courier. Mrs. Caro 
 line Lee Hentz, Mrs. Emma C. Embury, Mrs. Ann S. 
 Stephens, and Miss Leslie were the favorite contributors 
 to these. On winter nights my father relaxed his objec 
 tions to light reading so far as to read aloud from these col 
 umns, and the two girls who had been snugly bestowed in 
 the bedroom adjoining early in the evening, hearkened as to 
 fairy tales to reading and comment. 
 
 "At nine years of age I was so happy as to fall under the 
 care of a governess who thought me quite old enough to 
 write compositions. I had often thought I could do some 
 thing like the neat essays given in on Monday mornings by 
 the older girls. They hated the work, and what they did 
 was very stupid reading ; but the proposal that I should 
 write something on any subject I pleased was indescribably 
 tempting. 
 
 " One Friday night my father talked at supper-time of the 
 almost certainty that The President was lost at sea. Other 
 gentlemen were present, and their conjectures as to the man 
 ner of her fate held my eyes waking long into the night- 
 watches. The next day I drew my favorite playfellow aside 
 in a corner of the garden and showed her a copy of four 
 verses in pencil, On the Loss of the President. I have 
 forgotten all about them except that two lines ran somewhat 
 in this fashion : 
 
 " She started full of life and hope, 
 Being strong in every mast and rope. 
 
 But I have never been so stirred by the writing of anything 
 else. 
 
 " r Miss won t let you copy poetry for compositions ! * 
 
 said my critic, disdainfully. Compositions must be made up 
 out of your own head ! 
 
 " I made that ! said I, coloring hotly with the confession. 
 
 " To this day I shrink from saying / wrote that, and talk, 
 except with intimate friends, of my books is indefinably and 
 inexpressibly painful to me. 
 
MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 635 
 
 " She did not believe me. The governess did, and so did 
 my father. 
 
 " It is not poetry, of course, my daughter, said he, judi 
 ciously, but I think you have some talent for composition. 
 I want you to improve it. 
 
 " From that hour until the day of his death, twenty-seven 
 years later, he believed in me. He was a sharp critic of the 
 crude essays and sketches which I began at fourteen to send 
 anonymously to daily and weekly papers. But if my heart 
 quailed as I saw his brows drawn together over the printed 
 column 1 tremblingly owned as my production, there was 
 always genuine appreciation of what merited any portion of 
 praise, and his hearty Try again, child ! was like a trumpet- 
 call to my daunted spirit. 
 
 " One night how well I remember it I took advantage 
 of a benignant mood to bring forward a subject I had been 
 revolving for months. Diplomacy never wrought well with 
 his straightforwardness. I plunged in medias res. 
 
 " Father, I have been writing a book I 
 
 " Ah 1 in nowise surprised. For how long? 
 
 " I wrote the rough draught three years ago. Within a 
 year I have written it out in full. I should like to publish it. 
 
 " Very well, knocking the ashes from his cigar, I will 
 see about it. 
 
 "The Richmond bookseller to whom the MS. was com 
 mitted, gave it to his reader the late John R. Thompson, 
 editor of the Southern Literary Messenger for examina 
 tion. Mr. Thompson kept it for three months, and on my 
 father s demand that it should be returned, sent the publisher 
 a note to the following effect : 
 
 " I send back MS. of Alone, by Marion Harland. I regret 
 that the young author s impatience to regain possession of her 
 bantling has rendered it impossible for me to read more than three 
 pages of the story. From what I have read, however, I judge 
 that it would not by safe to publish it on speculation. 
 
 " I never meant that you should, retorted my father, to 
 whom the publisher showed the note. Bring it out in good 
 
36 MARY VIRGINIA TERIIUNE. 
 
 stylo, printing and binding, advertise it properly, and sond 
 bills to me. " 
 
 And here I must interpolate that "Alone" appeared in 
 1854. More than one hundred thousand copies were sold in 
 twenty years in America, and within two years it received 
 the honor of a Tauchnitz edition. All that Mrs. Terhune 
 writes has the selling quality, a great point gained in an 
 author s career. At sixteen she published a story in 
 Godey s Lady s Magazine," called " Marrying through Pru 
 dential Motives," which was copied into an English paper, 
 translated into French for a Parisian journal, re-translated 
 into an English periodical, finally copied in America as an 
 English story. 
 
 Mrs. Terhune alludes modestly to the large sale of all of 
 her books : " Why they sold I frankly confess myself 
 unable to decide. They are pure, as far as morals go, and 
 deal naturally with every-day life. Had I my life-work to go 
 over again I should avoid, resolutely, compliance with tue re 
 quests of editors and publishers, and write one book where I 
 have written five. I love them all, my simple tales, but I 
 wish I could boil them down, to use a culinary phrase." 
 
 This certainly shows her entire freedom from conceit, and 
 her constant desire for improvement and growth, for we re 
 member how eagerly her novels were sought for, indeed 
 demanded, by her admirers. I do think it true that -with 
 most novelists (excepting of course the very highest names) 
 the first book is written because it was in the author s mind 
 and heart, and it must come into permanent form ; those that 
 follow for pay, or fame, or because the publisher has advertised 
 it in advance. We meet the same type of hero and heroine in 
 each effort, only each time more unreal and monotonous. This 
 not as a criticism upon Mrs. Terhune s numerous novels, but 
 as a general remark. I seldom use that word " criticism," or 
 Httempt to play the critic in a small way without thinking of 
 my own utter inability to approach the work I might be in 
 clined to crush as florid, crude, stilted, or unnatural. There 
 is nothing that amuses me so much in literature as the pom- 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 637 
 
 pous, high and lofty, ex cathedra criticisms of the day on art 
 by a man who couldn t draw a cat so that it would be recog 
 nized ; on music by omniscient beings who couldn t get 
 through " Money Musk " successfully ; on novels by persons 
 doubtless well read and wonderfully wise, but who would 
 utterly fail to make a story interesting. 
 
 That s the art. And when a novel sells by thousands and 
 tens of thousands, and another is straightway called for, and 
 the publisher is getting his pockets filled, and the author is 
 able to go to Europe on the profits I do not feel inclined to 
 smile or sneer. There must be power and tact and magnet 
 ism behind the pen, and I admire the ability to create such a 
 genuine success. "It is the first duty of the novelist to con 
 struct an interesting story." Mrs. Terhune has certainly 
 done this, and I agree with Mr. Warner, who says in his 
 recent able article on " Modern Fiction," that " the faculty of 
 telling a story is a much rarer thing than the ability to ana 
 lyze character, and even than the ability truly to draw char 
 acter. It is a natural gift, and it seems that no amount of 
 culture can attain it, any more than learning can make a 
 poet." So much for Mrs. Terhune s career as a novelist. 
 
 The " Common Sense Series " was a new departure from the 
 beaten track. When she proposed a " Cookery Book" to Mr. 
 Carleton, who had long been her lucky publisher, he laughed 
 outright. He was poisoned by the popular prejudice, you see, 
 and he suffered by it, for, not caring to be ridiculed when she 
 proposed to give to American housewives her precious, oft- 
 tried store of receipts, she went quietly to Scribner and 
 offered the volume. Mr. Scribner was a semi-invalid at the 
 time, and lying on the lounge in his private office ; he heard 
 from a partner her proposition. It struck him also as a little 
 comical, a little hopeless and unfeasible, but he knew the 
 lady s reputation and power. So he said, " Tell her we shall 
 be glad to publish it," but added, "It will probably be a loss, 
 but in that case we may get her next novel ! " 
 
 Publishers are shrewd, far-seeing ; they want only the best 
 thing. Just so with the anxious young wives of this land 
 39 
 
638 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 and the overworked women of more experience. They too 
 wanted the best. And they found it in Marion Harland s 
 " Common Sense Series." In ten years one hundred thou 
 sand copies sold, and there is no flagging in the demand. 
 From my earliest days I have revelled in reading receipts. 
 The blissful possibilities, the luscious capabilities of a brief 
 series of directions, the tempting permutations of sugar and 
 butter, and eggs, and flour, with the "two teaspoonfuls of 
 cream-tartar, one of soda, and spice to your taste." My hap 
 piest hours in young girlhood were positively spent in the 
 kitchen, away from satin and long seams, with my fingers 
 sticky and a big smirch of flour on my glowing cheeks. 
 
 Mrs. Terhune s books bring back that peculiar feeling, that 
 epicurean glow. I know how " awfully " good all her delica 
 cies are, and my mouth fairly waters as I taste in imagination 
 her various dainty dishes. 
 
 I like her off-hand, familiar, friendly fashion of talking 
 straight to the young and perplexed. She not only gives 
 plain directions, but you are sure of her sympathy. If your 
 cake should fall just as you take it out of the oven, when you 
 have carefully tested it with a bit of broom, you know that 
 she too would be heartily sorry. 
 
 In her directions for making mince pies occurs this rather 
 unusual but delightful digression : " I take this opportunity 
 of warning the inexperienced reader against placing any con 
 fidence whatever in dried currants. I years ago gave over 
 trying to guess who put the dirt in them. It is always 
 there ! Gravel-stones, lurking under a specious coating of cur- 
 ranty-looking paste, to crucify grown people s nerves and 
 children s teeth ; mould that changes to mud in the mouth ; 
 twigs that prick the throat, not to mention the legs, wings, 
 and bodies of tropical insects a curious study to one in 
 terested in the entomology of Zante. It is all dirt, although 
 sold at currant prices." After urging a thorough soaking, 
 cleansing, and draining, she closes with : " Then spread them 
 upon a large dish, and enter seriously upon your geological 
 and entomological researches." 
 
MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 639 
 
 And how true is this which so few remember : * The recom 
 mendation of the eye to the palate is a point no cook can 
 afford to disregard. If you can offer an unexpected visi 
 tor nothing better than bread and buttet and cold ham, 
 he will enjoy the luncheon twice as much if the bread is 
 sliced thinly and evenly, spread smoothly, each slice folded 
 in the middle upon the buttered surface, and piled sym 
 metrically ; if the ham be also cut thin, scarcely thicker 
 than a wafer, and garnished with parsley, cresses, and 
 curled lettuce. Set on mustard and pickles ; let the table 
 cloth and napkin be white and glossy ; the glass clear and 
 plate shining clean, and add to these accessories of comfort 
 a bright welcome." Follow such sensible advice, and all 
 necessity for excuses an4 embarrassment over a chance guest 
 will be needless. 
 
 All women who do a grand work in the world are in danger 
 of killing themselves while trying to fulfil the claims laid 
 upon them and keep up with their own ambition. The 
 " advanced " woman of the day tries to do the work of three 
 ordinary women, and usually breaks down. No wonder that 
 men say we are unfitted for such a life when in our enthu 
 siasm we take three times too heavy a load. This is a lesson 
 that the American woman has not yet learned. The only 
 teacher that produces any impression on them is " nervous 
 prostration " with its attendant horrors. They then have 
 time to think and realize their wicked waste of vitality and 
 brain power, and if they are strong enough to ever get up 
 again they are usually more prudent. 
 
 Mrs. Terhune writes on this point with feeling : " Not until 
 I broke down physically, under the combined pressure of pub 
 lic charities, church duties, social calls, literary work, and 
 the death of my precious, gifted child, did I understand that 
 the labor we delight in may be carried beyond bounds. I 
 had a hard two years lesson, one that may add length of 
 years and understanding to me." 
 
 But that two years was also a period of helpful rest abroad, 
 and gave to her the health she longed for, and to us her 
 
640 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 w Loiterings in Pleasant Paths," another fresh and chatty record 
 of a woman s travels in Europe, full of historical allusions, 
 anecdotes, and practical information, written in a most pleas 
 ing and informal style, like homo letters from a bright, 
 woman. 
 
 Mrs. Terhune does not aspire to poetical honors, and in 
 sists that she only " rhymes " now and then when her heart is 
 full ; but I shall give you two specimens, that you may see 
 her versatility. These verses will compare favorably with 
 many that are published as poetry : 
 
 "BABES ALWAYS." 
 
 BY MARION HARI..AND. 
 
 Tis late in my lone chamber, 
 
 Borne through the echoing hall, 
 I hear the wind s hoarse sobbing, 
 
 The raindrops plashing fall. 
 The street-lamp on the ceiling 
 
 Throws many a restless form, 
 Tree-shadows, swinging madly 
 
 In the fury of the storm. 
 
 Called I my vigil lonely ? 
 
 The door is shut and fast; 
 O er threshold and o er carpet 
 
 No mortal foot has passed ; 
 No rustle of white raiment 
 
 Or warm breath stirs the air, 
 Yet I speak aloud my greeting, 
 " My darlings ! are you there ? " 
 
 Not the three who by me kneeling, 
 
 Said " Our Father " hours ago, 
 Whose cheeks now dent the pillows, 
 
 Live roses on the snow. 
 They dream not of the graveyard 
 
 And of the hillocks twain, 
 Snow-heaped to-night (Lord, help me!) 
 
 And glazed by wintry rain. 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 641 
 
 Twelve years ! a manly stripling 
 
 Our boy by now had grown. 
 Is it four years or twenty 
 
 Since I kissed the eyelids down 
 Of her whose baby-sweetness 
 
 Was our later gift from God, 
 And straightened in the coffin" 
 
 Wee feet that never trod ? 
 
 These are not stranger-glances 
 
 That joyfully meet mine; 
 I know the loving straining 
 
 Of the arms that me entwine. 
 Thou hast kept them babes, O Father i 
 
 Who, not in heaven s bowers, 
 Learning the speech of angels, 
 
 Forget this home of ours, 
 
 Or her who braved death-anguish 
 
 To win them to her breast. 
 If they fled into the sunshine, 
 
 Free birds from narrow nest, 
 They come to me when longing 
 
 And pain are at their height 
 To tell me of the safety, 
 
 The love, and the delight 
 
 Of that eternal dwelling 
 
 (Our name is on the door!) 
 The ring of baby-voices 
 
 Gladdens forevermore; 
 Till neath the tender soothing 
 
 I lift my heart and smile, 
 And gather faith and courage 
 
 To wait my " little while." 
 
642 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 A SUNSET PROPHECY, 
 
 HY MARIOM HARLAND. 
 
 " Jerusalem the Golden ! 
 I languish for one gleam 
 Of all thy beauty, folden 
 In dhtance and in dream. 
 My thoughts, like palms in exile, 
 Climb up to look and pray 
 For a glimpse of that dear country ( 
 
 That lies so far away I " 
 
 Up to my window thrills the fresh young voice. 
 
 I drag me from rny bed of pain, 
 Where through the heartless sheen of sunny hours 
 
 I and my old, old grief have lain. 
 All the heat has passed from the western sky 
 
 (Pale-green, and barred with sunset glow) 
 Mid the burnished leaves of the maple-boughs 
 
 A girl swings lightly to and fro. 
 
 " Jerusalem the Golden I 
 When tunsefi in the West 
 It seems the gate of glory , 
 Thou city of the blest! 1 
 
 Ah ! but the way is long, the gate is high, 
 
 The shining stair is hard to win ; 
 Glory is there my load of care is hew, 
 
 Present my sorrow. Is it sin 
 That voices spent with weeping cannot shout? 
 
 Remember, Lord, the finger laid 
 Upon Thy garment s hem, and turn to me 
 
 With " Daughter ! peace ! be not afraid ! " 
 
 " Jerusalem the Golden! 
 Where loftily they sing, 
 O er pain ant? sorrow olden, 
 For ever triumphing ! " 
 
 I think, were I this very hour to stand 
 
 In that dear Land, unbound and free, 
 I should not even hear the echoing psalms 
 
 That tell the singers mastery. 
 With scarred hands crossed, with tired lids folded down 
 
 On eyes that could know tears no more, 
 I d lie a battered shallop, moored at last, 
 
 In some calm inlet of the Shore. 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUtf& 643 
 
 " Jerusalem the Golden } 
 There all our birds that flew, 
 Our flowers but half-unfolden, 
 Our pearls that turned td dew I " 
 
 Our birds, that fled from frost and bitter skied ; 
 
 Our buds that perished on the stalk ; 
 Dew-pearls, that slid between our careful hands, 
 
 And wasted on Life s dusty walk ! 
 We weep, by day, the priceless, scattered gems, 
 
 In deathless love, our withered .flowers, 
 And for the vanished songsters of our homes, 
 
 Mourn sore in midnight s silent hours. 
 
 11 Jerusalem the Golden I 
 I toil on, day by day. 
 Heart-sore each night with longing 
 I stretch my hands and pray 
 That midst thy leaves of healing 
 My soul may find her nest 
 Where the wicked cease from troubling, 
 The weary are at rest /" 
 
 How long ? how long, O Healer ? Thou dost know 
 
 It is not in me to " hold still " ; 
 In meekness, like Thy saintly ones, to wait 
 
 Th unfolding of Thy gracious will. 
 Yet, weak and restless, with blurred eyes 1 gazd 
 
 Upward to Thine, and kiss the rod 
 Which shows my chastened sdul the steps that lead 
 
 O er heights Thy blessed feet have trod. 
 
 Still swings the girl mid scarlet maple-leaves^ 
 
 And chants her sunset prophecy. 
 Sun-gleam and blossom, tree and singing-bird, 
 
 Rapture to her, and soothing unto me. 
 Down steadfast lines of light, set ladder-wise, 
 
 To both, God s viewless angels come; 
 " Jerusalem the Golden ! " still she sings, 
 
 And I " Jerusalem my Home I " 
 
 Three years since Mrs. Terhllne published a little book 
 entitled " Our Daughters: What Shall we Do with Them?" 
 which was a " Talk with Mothers, " a fitting prelude to her 
 
644 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 more elaborate work, "Eve s Daughters," which consists of 
 plain talks with the daughters themselves. Both are full of 
 good advice which, if followed, would bring forward the 
 millennium in this country. But advice is the only vice that 
 we don t take to easily. As some one said on hearing that all 
 things that were lost went to the moon : " Bless me ! what a 
 lot of good advice there must be up there ! " "Experience, 
 like the stern-lights of a ship, only illumines the path over 
 which we have passed." 
 
 Mrs. Terhune believes in marriage, and home, and the old- 
 fashioned mother, and plenty of healthy, happy, rosy babies in 
 the home nest. She believes that babies have their rights, 
 especially " the right of babies to have mothers, "and despises 
 the present woful deficiency of maternal instinct. " We do 
 not, as a class, appreciate the dignity I use the word 
 advisedly the dignity and privilege of maternity. In this 
 respect our English sisters are far ahead of us. The Hebrew 
 women under the Theocracy understood it better still, when 
 Rachel pined in her quiet tent for the murmur of baby-voices 
 and the touch of baby-fingers, and Hannah knelt in the court 
 of the temple to supplicate, with strong crying and tears, 
 that the holy fountains of motherly love within her heart 
 might flow out upon offspring of her own. In those days it 
 was the childless wife, and not she who had borne many sons 
 and daughters, who besought that her reproach might be taken 
 away ; that she might be accounted worthy to be intrusted 
 with the high duty of rearing children to swell the ranks of 
 the Lord s chosen people." 
 
 I give the following to show her genuine love for the little 
 folks : 
 
 " Never deny the babies their Christmas ! It is the shining 
 seal set upon a year of happiness. If the preparations for it 
 the delicious mystery with which these are invested; the 
 solemn parade of clean, whole stockings in the chimney- 
 corner ; or the tree, decked in secret, to be revealed in glad 
 pomp upon the festal day if these and many other features 
 of the anniversary are tedious and contemptible in your sight, 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. G45 
 
 you are an object of pity ; but do not defraud your children 
 of joys which are their right, merely because you have never 
 tasted them. Let them believe in Santa Claus, or St. Nicho 
 las, or Kriss Kringle, or whatever name the jolly Dutch saint 
 bears in your region. Some latter-day zealots, more puritani 
 cal than wise, havp felt themselves called upon, in schools, 
 and before other juvenile audiences, to deny the claims of the 
 patron of merry Christmas to popular love and gratitude. 
 Theirs is a thankless office, both parents and children feeling 
 themselves to be aggrieved by the gratuitous disclosure ; and 
 this is as it should be. If it be wicked to encourage such a 
 delusion in infant minds, it must be a transgression that leans 
 very far indeed to virtue s side. 
 
 " All honor and love to dear old Santa Claus ! May his 
 stay in our land be long, and his pack grow every year 
 more plethoric ! And when, throughout the broad earth, he 
 shall find on Christmas night an entrance into every home, 
 and every heart throbbing with joyful gratitude at the 
 return of the blessed day that gave the Christ-child to 
 a sinful world, the reign of the Prince of Peace will 
 have begun below; everywhere there will be rendered, 
 Glory to God in the highest ; and Good-will to men 
 will be the universal law. We shall all have become as 
 little children." 
 
 It is a grand thing to grow; to write with more maturity, 
 thought, and power, as one goes on. This Mrs. Terhune has 
 done most noticeably. Her short stories, collected under 
 the title of "Handicapped," are a decided advance in the 
 story-telling line. Sad, all of them, as life is sad, but show 
 ing a deeper knowledge of character, and more skill in 
 depicting it. " Eve s Daughters " is the best of all her books. 
 Each chapter is crammed with truth, and the whole book is 
 written in such a clear, straightforward style that no one can 
 fail to profit by it. 
 
 Marion Harland has a genuine love for girls, and honestly 
 desires to help them. She appreciates their position, its 
 delights, and its dangers ; and with infinite tact and purity 
 
646 MARY tiR(*ItflA 
 
 she has told them what to do and what to avoid doing in 
 order to secure health, and the best and highest development 
 in brain and body. A few extracts will show the general 
 tenor of the work : 
 
 " What is the remedy for the nerve- waste, the abhor mal or 
 violent metamorphosis of tissue that comes of worry ; ^ 
 from the fearful looking-forward of impatient womankind? I 
 answer first, self-control learned most easily in youth. 
 Hold imagination in check, and compel yourself, while you 
 work, to think only of the business in hand* the appointed 
 tale of bricks for the day. Enjoy, in like singleness of mind, 
 the pleasures belonging to each hour and season. Cultivate 
 an eye for lights rather than for shadows. Do not despise 
 the small fruits of spring-time in longing for peaches and 
 nectarines. That you are alive and moderately comfortable 
 this day is an earnest of sufficient grace for the next, for this 
 is the dreaded to-morrow of yesterday. Make the best of the 
 present. The poet bids you Enjoy it. It is thine. It, at 
 least* will never return to be righted or to be delighted in. 
 That time and care are thrown away that are spent on a 
 future that may never be. 
 
 " Next to the faculty of concentrating and guiding thought, 
 I rank in value among soul-powers the ability to control the 
 nerves, to equalize and rightly to distribute the crude fordes 
 whose zeal is not according to knowledge, and instruct them 
 by rigid discipline to obey Will rather than feeling. In 
 more direct language, keep feeling out of work as much as 
 possible. Make resolution and industry to depend upon con 
 science* The ability to do this argues excellent mental 
 training, and is not incompatible with a hearty enjoyment of 
 work for its own sake. On the other hand, feeling, heart, 
 all that is loosely generalized under the head of the emotions, 
 is too apt, if pressed into a service for which it is not 
 fitted, to lose morale, like other injudiciously-applied agen 
 cies, and to degenerate into morbid sentimentality. If you 
 would test the truth of this assertion, ask yourself how many 
 of your mates are depressed Into misery by the anticipated 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TEfcllUtfE. 647 
 
 loss of a place in class, and cry over discouraging lessons ; 
 how many older women break down over ft Vexatious piece 
 of work, or the disarrangement caused by an accident, and 
 Weep as for the loss of father or brother. 
 
 " It sounds well to say that she throws her whole heart 
 into whatever she undertakes, be it a great or small matter. 
 In effect, it is senseless trifling with a delicate and precious 
 thing. Except when royalty goes through the pretty farce 
 of laying the corner-stone of public buildings, silver trowels 
 are not used for spreading mortar. It is as proper to take up 
 ashes with a gold spoon as to excite feeling to hysterical 
 vehemence in conning a lesson in trigonometiy* If you 
 would prove your brain to be sexless, divorce it from the 
 heart. In this respect, at any rate, require it to do a man s 
 work in a man s way. And do not fear that the process will 
 make of your womanly self an intellectual abstraction. 
 The body is the handmaid of the mind. Never forget that, 
 nor that the mistress toils at a fearful disadvantage who is 
 constantly obliged to make allowances for the weakness, or 
 to supplement the incompetency of her servant. Also, that 
 in a well-balanced household, mistress and maid have, each, 
 her separate task, and that the most obliging subordinate will 
 weary and turn surly if called off too often from her appointed 
 business to lend a hand to what her employer has under 
 taken to perform. She didn t hire for that kind of work, 
 she informs you. Your nervous system tells you the same 
 thing, and as positively, many times a day, but since the pro 
 test is not coupled with a month s or week s notice to quit, 
 you pay no heed to the warning voice. 
 
 " Be just to your mind in bestowing upon it the proper 
 nutriment. Be merciful to it in giving it enough of this to 
 sustain its powers. I wish that I could make you understand 
 now, before you make the experiment on your own account, 
 how the frivolities of the stereotyped girl-life, the hours 
 appropriated to dress, and the shams of etiquette ; the froth 
 of chit-chat that passes for conversation ; the so much 
 worse than froth of gossip about one s neighbors and friends, 
 
648 MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 in brief, the refined do-nothingism of society lower 
 mental and moral tone and belittle the whole being. Avoid 
 this latter evil, belittling and narrowing, almost as sedu 
 lously as you would impurity. Stand, firmly upon the higher 
 plane won by familiar intercourse with master-minds. Know 
 and maintain for yourself that life has nobler aims than the 
 fascination, for vanity s sake, of so many gallants per season. 
 Kcject the temptation to terminate the unworthy trillings ; to 
 curb the waywardness of your fancy ; to gratify your prudent 
 well-wishers, and essay the novelties of an untried estate by 
 entering upon a marriage which, however eligible in the eyes 
 of others, is not, as you own in your secret soul, what you 
 would have chosen of your unbiassed will. 
 
 "So far from Ihe election and study of professions by women 
 acting unfavorably upon domestic life, I believe firmly, after a 
 tolerably thorough examination of arguments and examples 
 on both sides of the question, that the highest and purest 
 interests of the home are promoted by these. She who need 
 not marry unless won to the adoption of the state of wife by 
 pure love for him who seeks her, is likely to make a more 
 deliberate and a wiser choice of a husband than she who has 
 done little since she put off long-clothes but dream, and long, 
 and angle for her other half. 
 
 " Men make very merry over the episodes of early married 
 life. I cannot, any more than I can amuse myself with 
 the real but baseless terrors of a weeping child. Marriage Is 
 such a momentous affair, such a portentous All to us that we 
 tremble at the remotest menace of peril which may wreck 
 hope and heart. The folly of your fears consists in exagger 
 ation of their cause. The wine of your husband s happi 
 ness settles sooner upon its lees than does yours. Accus 
 tomed to contemplate the actualities of life, with critical 
 note of their value ; to keep the emotional part of his nature 
 out of sight of the associates of business-hours, in adjusting 
 the machinery of the day into the old running order, he 
 fashions his demeanor accordingly, with never a dream that 
 you object to the resumption of his former routine. If he 
 
MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 649 
 
 does not spend hours in swearing how dearly he loves you, 
 and how willingly he would die for you, he proves both on 
 that mighty silent side of his nature by redoubled dili 
 gence in the calling that is to bring comfort and beauty into 
 your sheltered nest, to make that shelter sure. Do not be 
 guilty of the frightful mistake of being jealous of his devo 
 tion to business ; the business for which you care so little, 
 but which stands with him for respectability, honor, wealth, 
 
 the happiness of wife and children. Regard it, instead, as 
 
 the chance the Father has given him to do a man s work in 
 the world, and help him to do it to the utmost of your ability. 
 " Study his profession or craft in general principle and in 
 detail, until you can converse intelligently with him of the 
 schemes that engage his brain and hands. Encourage him to 
 talk out his cares and worries before you try to soothe 
 them. Extract the splinter before applying the salve. When 
 the heart of your husband can safely trust in you in this sense 
 no less than in the keeping of his honor, you have bound him 
 to you by ties that will outlast beauty and sprightliness. 
 Better lose his affection than his respect. 
 
 " I want you to re-read that sentence and study its mean 
 ing. If more wives acted upon the pregnant lesson it conveys 
 we should have fewer careless husbands, careless in talk of 
 women and in the practice of domestic virtues. 
 
 "As you are your husband s standard of wifely fidelity, be 
 also his criterion of purity of language and thought. Elevate, 
 not commonize, his estimate of womanhood. Show, by silent 
 gravity, that whatever approximates ribald talk distresses 
 you. In becoming your mate in the nearest and tenderest 
 relation of the human species he should be more, not less, 
 the gentleman than when, as a gallant, he was the pink of 
 courtesy. From the day your Lares and Penates are in 
 stalled let the gospel of conventionalities be established like 
 wise as the rule of your household. Dress, talk, and keep 
 the house for him as carefully and tactfully as for a stranger. 
 Do not make him boorish or awkward by reserving the 
 gentler forms of address, the fine linen, .and best china for 
 
650 MARY VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 
 
 visitors. Unless he is exceptionally au fait to traditional by 
 laws of social usage you are better informed on such subjects 
 than he. Initiate him into these minor graces of polite society 
 gradually and ingeniously, with no appearance of schooling or 
 dictation. This is an undertaking requiring much wis 
 dom, or rather finesse. If John has not been reared in 
 the house with his mother and sisters he will be rough in 
 seeming to your finer perceptions. He will probably have 
 ways. " 
 
 Mrs. Tcrhune is up to the present moment as busy as ever. 
 I see her love-stories, and articles on homely themes, as dish 
 washing and " left-overs," her poems, and talks on hygiene, 
 widely scattered through our best papers. She is continually 
 implored by editors and publishers to do more than would be 
 possible for any ten women to accomplish. And of course 
 she commands fancy prices. 
 
 The critic says with usual profundity, "O, yes ! What 
 does she know that is new about washing dishes ? My old 
 cook Betsey could give us the same information. But 
 Marion HarlandV name is up, so it carries all before it, 
 and no matter what she writes it will be printed. Lots of 
 humbug about that sort of thing ! " Yes, dear sir, or madam, 
 but did you ever realize what it means to have won a name 
 that carries such prestige with it? Suppose you write an 
 article on w left-overs," it will doubtless be true to its title. 
 There must be a long struggle, a weary up-hill climb before 
 one reaches the heights ; and you sit in your easy chair way 
 down in the valley and find fault. 
 
 I have no doubt that Mrs. Terhune has some plan for a new 
 book on a new theme in her fertile brain. I know she hopes 
 to do still better work in the future. 
 
 I have written so many sketches of famous women long 
 since dead and gone, and the killing them off gracefully has 
 been such a relief at the end of a long lecture, that with a 
 dear and living friend I actually feel awkward in closing 
 without any close, just at the meridian height of life, success, 
 and endeavor. 
 
MART VIRGINIA TERHUNE. 051 
 
 Women seldom do know when to stop. They can t stop 
 short. Some witty man affirms that a woman could never be 
 a military commander because she could never say halt! 
 but, " Now, men, I want you all, every one of you, to keep 
 perfectly still, when 1 say" etc., etc., etc. 
 
 What a libel ! I disprove it. 
 
 Long live " Marion Harland 1 " 
 
CHAPTER XXYIII. 
 MKS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE. 
 
 The Influence of Good Literature in the Formation of Character Mrs. 
 A. D. T. Whitney Fler Childhood Early Life and Surroundings 
 Memories of Good O!d Days Education and Religious Training 
 Marriage Faculty for Portraying Domestic Life Why She Excels 
 in Painting Perfect Homes Books She has Written Selections 
 from her Poems Sympathy with Young People Gaining an In 
 sight into Practical Questions The Sparkle and Humor of Her Writings 
 The Soundness of their Teachings Their Great Influence for Good 
 Comparison between Her Books and Miss Edgeworth s Extracts Illus 
 trating their Religious Tendencies. 
 
 HERE was once a careful mother who was bring 
 ing up a bright young daughter, with a young 
 girl s eager fondness for story-books. In her 
 thirteenth year the mother presented this child 
 with a complete set of the stories of Maria 
 Edgeworth, and gave her unlimited permission 
 to read them. The result was twofold : first, 
 the girl was preserved from reading a great deal 
 of ordinary trash, and secondly, she insensibly 
 had her mind and character and tastes very materi 
 ally formed and guided by their influence, so that trashy writ 
 ing became distasteful to her. 
 
 We have in New England a lady writer who for our times 
 and manners has done very much the work for young people 
 that Miss Edgeworth did in hers; while her writings, are 
 spicy and amusing, they have a decided influence upon the 
 character, an influence any parent might be thankful for. 
 
 This writer, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, was the daughter of 
 Enoch Train, who with his cousin, Samuel Train of Med- 
 ford, did an extensive mercantile business, owning vessels, 
 and trading to Russia and South America ; Mr. Enoch Train 
 
 652 
 
MllS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 653 
 
 ill later years establishing his line of packet ships between 
 Boston and Liverpool, since known as the "Warren Line"; 
 Mr. Warren having been connected with the Liverpool house 
 of Train & Co., and ultimately succeeding to the business. 
 
 In the story of " The Gay worthys " Mrs. Whitney has 
 enlisted much of what came under her notice in early life, in 
 visiting ships, and listening to the talk of voyages and the 
 incidents of sea-life. She says : " None of the characters in 
 that book were portraits, though the scenes and minor incidents 
 are chiefly gathered from old days, when we lived in Boston, 
 but had our summer vacation in journeys to Hillsborough by 
 carriage, my father driving, and stopping in the old-fashioned, 
 delightful way, for meals and sleep. Then there were the 
 never-forgotten visits to my grandmother s old farm among 
 the hills, in company with young aunts and cousins, visitors 
 like ourselves. I have gone to school in the country with 
 aunts and uncles, with dinner-pails deliciously filled have 
 rested under old apple-trees on the half-way rock, sat on the 
 hard benches, watched the classes made up of all the country 
 folk, from the little barefoot boys to the pretty and well- 
 dressed young girls of the more important families. I have 
 been to church in the meeting-house on the hill, with square- 
 railed pews, and seats that were lifted in prayer-time and let 
 down at the amen with a bang ; have studied the grave 
 stones in the old graveyard. I thought a great deal of the 
 things that were preached about from pulpits and graveyards 
 in those days of a childhood quite unlike the childhood of 
 to-day." 
 
 The circumstances of Mrs. Whitney s more mature educa 
 tion were all mostly Bostonian. She was mainly the outcome 
 of the culture, intellectual and moral, of that city. 
 
 In the church and Sunday school of Dr. Lyman Beecher, 
 and his successor, Mr. Hubbard Winslow, she received her 
 first religious impressions. Afterwards, on her father s sec 
 ond marriage with a lady who belonged to the Unitarian 
 church, the family changed their connection to the West 
 church, under the care of Dr. Lowell. " Here," she says, " I 
 40 
 
654 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 found a somewhat different, though not antagonistic teaching 
 for those were the early days when there was still a simple 
 faith, even among those who had unbound it from the Puritan 
 rigidity. To Dr. Lowell, Dr. Bartol, and Mrs. Bartol, who 
 as Miss Howard, was my Sunday-school teacher, I owe the 
 beginning of my most earnest thinking." 
 
 Like many other Boston girls, Mrs. Whitney was educated 
 in the school of Mr. George B. Emerson, entering in her 
 thirteenth year and remaining till her eighteenth, with the 
 exception of one year spent at Northampton, under the care 
 of Miss Margarette Dwight. Mr. G. B. Emerson was a Uni 
 tarian, Miss Dwight a Calvinist. In those days there was an 
 excited controversial division between the Unitarian and the 
 Orthodox, but Mrs. Whitney had the art of drawing only 
 what is best from both sides. Of the final results of this 
 eclecticism, she thus speaks in a recent letter to the writer : 
 
 " After what has been said, incidentally, concerning alter 
 nating religious training and influences, I may suitably say 
 that the result of all has been that I have recently connected 
 myself with the church of the Apostles Creed, finding 
 there the germ and foundation of all that has either broad 
 ened or narrowed from it ; and am content to rest in that 
 body which recognizes f the blessed company of all faithful 
 people, claiming the right to interpret those words with all 
 the liberalism which they imply." 
 
 Mrs. Whitney s is not the only case where souls of great 
 earnestness who wish to unite definite faith with wide charity, 
 have found what, they sought in the Episcopal church. Her 
 beautiful, ancient, devout liturgy expresses feelings and emo 
 tions in which differing intellectual beliefs can unite, since 
 the diversities among Christian believers are far more in rela 
 tion to definition and abstract dogmas than in the emotions 
 of the heart or the practical aims of life. 
 
 To continue our narrative, we record that in November, 
 1843, Miss Train was married to Mr. Seth D. Whitney of 
 Milton, Mass., being then in her nineteenth year, and from 
 that time, whether as wife and mother or authoress, Mrs. 
 

 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 657 
 
 Whitney s sphere has been home and domestic life. She excels 
 in painting simple, lovely, perfect homes, and nice, agreeable, 
 natural young people. She has been the mother of three 
 daughters and a son. One daughter died in infancy ; another 
 married Major Suter, a United States army officer, stationed 
 at St. Paul, Minn., and died after little more than a year. 
 The other daughter married Mr. James. A. Field, of Beloit, 
 Wisconsin. Mrs. Whitney s son has been for fourteen years in 
 the Western country, engaged in the work on the great rivers 
 which has been in charge of Major Suter, stationed at St. Louis. 
 Recently he has removed to Lakewood, New Jersey, where 
 his sister and her husband were already established. Mrs. 
 Whitney has, in the two families, five boys who call her, or 
 will grow to call her, grandmother. These particulars are 
 given to show how appropriately she has been in her stories 
 an illustrator and teacher of domestic life. 
 
 Mrs. Whitney first began authorship in the " Religious Mag 
 azine," published by Dr., afterward Bishop Huntington. In 
 the winter of 1859 Rudd & Carleton published for her 
 "Mother Goose for Grown Folks," a little "jeu <F esprit" 
 for Christmas. In 1801 she wrote "Boys at Chequasset," 
 for which, doubtless, her own boy, in his ornithological re 
 searches, furnished material. They were then residing in 
 Milton, where they had the full benefit of country surround 
 ings. In June, 1862, came out "Faith Gartney s Girlhood." 
 Both these books were issued by Loring in Boston, and had 
 an immediate success. In 1864 came out under the same 
 publisher "The Gayworthys," this was published simul 
 taneously in England, by Sampson, Low, Son & Co. 
 
 In 1866 she issued as a serial in "Our Young Folks" " A 
 Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite s Life." This was published 
 the same year by Fields, Osgood & Co. 
 
 In the space from 1868 to 1870 she wrote as a serial in 
 the " Christian Register," " Patience Strong s Outings," which 
 was published by Loring. She also furnished a serial 
 called "We Girls" to "Our Young Folks," which was 
 published in book form by Fields, Osgood & Co. 
 
658 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 In 1869 she published "Hitherto," which appeared simul 
 taneously in England, Mrs. Whitney securing copyright by 
 being in Montreal at the time of publication. 
 
 To these followed " Real Folks," and "The Other Girls," 
 published by Osgood & Co., in 1 872-73. After this followed 
 " Sights and Insights," detailing the experiences of a party 
 travelling in Europe. In the winter of 1877 Mrs. Whitney 
 compiled a cook-book entitled " Just How," and in the spring 
 of 1879 she published her story entitled " Odd or Even " with 
 the firm of Osgood & Co. 
 
 After the issue of "Odd or Even," Messrs. Hough ton & 
 Osgood, having previously purchased of Loring the plates of 
 all Mrs. Whitney s other books, prepared a uniform edition 
 of all her works. 
 
 From time to time Mrs. Whitney has published in the 
 " Atlantic Monthly," or other papers, poems of no mean order. 
 These have been collected in a little volume called " Pansies," 
 published by Osgood & Co. in 1872. 
 
 There is a breadth and depth of feeling in these poems, a 
 delicacy of spiritual insight that makes one wish that she had 
 written more of them. We cite for one example a poem 
 written during the late war, when the sons and hopes of so 
 many homes were going into that desperate struggle : 
 
 "UNDER THE CLOUD AND IN THE SEA. 
 
 " So moved they when false Pharaoh s legions pressed, 
 
 Chariots and horsemen following furiously, 
 Sons of old Israel, at their God s behest, 
 
 Under the cloud and through the swelling sea. 
 
 " So passed they fearless, where the parted wave 
 
 With cloven crest uprearing from the sand, 
 A solemn aisle before, behind a grave 
 Rolled to the beckoning of Jehovah s hand. 
 
 "So led He them in desert marches grand, 
 
 By toils sublime, with test of long delay, 
 On to the borders of that Promised Land, 
 Wherein their heritage of glory lay. 
 
MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 659 
 
 " And Jordan raged along his rocky bed, 
 
 And Amorite spears flashed keen and angrily; 
 Still the same pathway must their footsteps tread, 
 Under the cloud and through the threatening sea. 
 
 "God works no otherwise. No mighty birth, 
 
 But conies by throes of mortal agony ; 
 No man-child among nations of the earth, 
 But findeth baptism in a stormy sea. 
 
 " Sons of the saints who faced their Jordan flood 
 
 In fierce Atlantic s unretreating wave ; 
 "Who by the Red Sea of their glorious blood, 
 
 Reached to the freedom that your blood must save ; 
 
 " O countrymen ! God s day is not yet done 1 
 
 He leaveth not his people utterly ; 
 Count it a covenant, that He leads us on, 
 
 Under the cloud and through the crimson sea ! " 
 
 We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of citing here 
 another most characteristic poem of hers. It is written in 
 another and tenderer vein : 
 
 " EASTER. 
 
 "Do Saints keep holiday in heavenly places? 
 Does the old joy shine new in angel faces ? 
 Are hymns still sung the night when Christ was born, 
 And anthems on the Resurrection morn ? 
 
 " Because our little year of earth is run, 
 Do they keep record there beyond the sun ? 
 And in their homes of light so far away, 
 Mark with us the sweet coming of this day? 
 
 " What is their Easter ? For they have no graves, 
 No shadow there the holy sunrise craves, 
 Deep in the heart of noontide marvellous, 
 Whose breaking glory reaches down to us. 
 
 "How did our Lord keep Easter? With his own! 
 Back to meet Mary where she grieved alone, 
 With face and mien all tenderly the same, 
 Unto the very sepulchre he came. 
 
6GO MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 " Ah ! the dear message that He gave her then, 
 Said for the sake of all bruised hearts of men, 
 Go tell those friends who have believed in me, 
 I go before you into Galilee ! 
 
 " Into that life so poor, and hard, and plain, 
 That for a while they must take up again ; 
 My presence passes ! Where their feet toil slow, 
 Mine, shining swift with love, still foremost go. 
 
 " Say, Mary, I will meet them by the way, 
 To walk a little with them ; where they stay 
 To bring my peace. Watch, for ye do not know 
 The day or hour when I may find you so ! 
 
 "And I do think, as Christ came back to her, 
 The many mansions may be all astir 
 With tender steps that hasten on their way, 
 Seeking their own upon this Easter day. 
 
 " Parting the veil that hideth them about, 
 I think they do come, softly wistful, out 
 From homes of heaven that only seem so far, 
 To walk in gardens where the new tombs are ! " 
 
 In the Apostles Creed, on which Mrs. Whitney has found 
 rest, is the article " I believe in the communion of saints," 
 and Mrs. Whitney in this poem has beautifully expressed the 
 idea of the primitive church, of a living, unbroken sympathy 
 between their departed friends and themselves. They believed 
 that in the services of the church their beloved ones once 
 more drew near to them, and as in family prayers the whole 
 family in heaven and on earth united. So, they understood 
 the passage in the communion service, " Wherefore with 
 angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven we 
 praise Thy glorious name." If this view conld enter into our 
 lives as a reality of faith it would soothe the bitterness of 
 many a bereavement ; and as good food prevents morbid crav 
 ing, so this blessed truth would keep the soul from running 
 into the wild vagaries of modern spiritualism. There is 
 " communion of saints," but it is to be sought not by juggling 
 
MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 661 
 
 with spirit-rappings, but in those higher exercises of the 
 church that enable the human soul to rise to the heights 
 where the blessed ones ever dwell. 
 
 The most suggestive and comprehensive of Mrs. Whitney s 
 stories in our view is " The Other Girls." In her other stories 
 she has given us amiable, sprightly, interesting young people, 
 growing up under circumstances of ease and comfort, with 
 means for a free, unembarrassed development. But in " The 
 Other Girls " we have life questions as they present them 
 selves to those to whom life is a perplexity and a battle, and 
 in this field Mrs. Whitney has the great advantage of a heart 
 full of motherly sympathy. There is no innocent natural 
 feeling of the young female heart for which she has not kindly 
 comprehension and tolerance. 
 
 After the recent great Boston fire, which threw multitudes 
 of working-girls into distress, a relief committee of ladies 
 was organized, and upon this committee Mrs. Whitney served 
 for three months, and thus gained an insight into many prac 
 tical questions which she uses to excellent purpose in her 
 story. We recollect hearing a noble-minded and excellent 
 woman who served on that same committee lamenting the 
 hard, unsympathetic, professional way in which some of these 
 good ladies conducted their inquiries and dispensed their 
 charities in particular how stern and severe they were upon 
 any small attempts at personal adornment, which the poor 
 applicants still retained. There are some who think them 
 selves Christians who seem to be of opinion that even the 
 desire for personal adornment and refinements of dress in 
 girls who have their own living to get ought to be met with 
 stern reprobation. Now, even the good old Bible, on which 
 they found their faith, says : " Can a maid forget her orna 
 ments " as if it were one of the recognized impossibilities 
 of woman s nature. 
 
 But in Mrs. Whitney s story we find the tendcrcst motherly 
 sympathy for this natural feeling of the young girl s heart. 
 Some of the prettiest pages of " The Other Girls " are given 
 to a description of the raptures and tremors of the beautiful 
 
662 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 young country girl, Bel Bree, when acting as a lay figure in 
 trying on an exquisite dress which she and her old auntie were 
 making up for a customer. The dress is described as only 
 Mrs. Whitney can describe. " There was a certain silk 
 evening dress of singular and indescribably lovely tint a 
 tea-rose pink, just the color of the blush and creaminess that 
 mingle in that exquisite flower. It looked fragrant. It con 
 veyed a subtle sense of flavor ; it fed and provoked every 
 perceptive sense." When the business-like old auntie says, 
 "I shall want you by-and-by for a figure to try this on." 
 M May I have it all on?" says Bel, eagerly. " Do, auntie ; I 
 should like to be in such a dress once just a minute ! " 
 
 " I don t see any reason why not. You couldn t do any 
 hurt to it, if twas made for a queen," responded Aunt Blin. 
 Then, after describing the pretty girl dressing and arranging 
 her golden hair, she comes to the climax thus : 
 
 "Now! 
 
 " The wonderful, glistening, aurora-like robe goes over her 
 head ; she stands in the midst with the tender glowing color 
 sweeping out from her on the white sheet pinned down on the 
 carpet. The bare neck and dimpled arms showed from among 
 the creamy pink tints like the high white* lights upon the 
 rose ! " 
 
 Then there is a suggestion of an admiring spectator of the 
 other sex, lodging in the same house, who catches through 
 the half-open door a glimpse of all this loveliness. So far 
 there has been only sympathy with young girlhood, but Avhen 
 the story goes on to show how this same admirer, Morris 
 Hewland, captivated by the girl s loveliness, yet unwilling to 
 offend his aristocratic relations, offers her protection and sup 
 port without marriage, Mrs. Whitney makes Bel Bree show 
 the brave and Christian resistance that a good girl ought to 
 show. She goes to Aunt Blin s great Bible for guidance, and 
 when her suitor comes for his answer, points him to the pas 
 sage, "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother and 
 
 O 
 
 cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. Where 
 fore they are no more two, but one. What* therefore, God 
 
MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 663 
 
 hath joined together let not man put asunder." "Is that the 
 way you will make a home and give it to me before them 
 all ? " she said ; and when she sees in his silent confusion that 
 this is not what he means, the story goes on : 
 
 " Her young face grow paler and became stern. She looked 
 steadfastly at him for one instant, and then she shut the book 
 and turned away, delivering him from the condemning light 
 of her presence. No ; I will not go to that little home with 
 you, she said, with grief and scorn mingling in her voice, as 
 they might have been in the voice of an angel. When she 
 looked around again he was gone. Their ways had parted." 
 
 This shows that with all her tenderness, Mrs. Whitney s 
 atmosphere is a bracing and wholesome one for that too much 
 tried and tempted class on whom comes early the burden of 
 self-support. There is no dallying with temptation no 
 stopping to deliberate before sin and dishonor speciously pre 
 sented. No shop-girl will ever be the worse for a book of 
 Mrs. Whitney s. This is all the better, because her books are 
 in no sense prosy or " preach j r ." They sparkle with humor, and 
 sometimes overflow with sympathy with the fun and frolic of 
 young people. For a bit of charming humor we can think of 
 nothing better than the description of Aunt Blin and Bel Bree 
 going to housekeeping, together with a venerable old cat on 
 the auntie s part, and a frisky young canary-bird on Bel s. 
 The scene in which Aunt Blin becomes convinced, in regard 
 to the animal creation, that the millennium is not yet arrived, 
 is well worth reading, and may prove a wholesome warning 
 to all who are too credulously confiding in cat virtues. 
 
 In treating of the chances, mischances, fortunes, and mis 
 fortunes of " The Other Girls," Mrs. Whitney, of course, 
 strikes directly across the much-mooted " woman question " 
 of our day, and here she takes her stand firmly on the ground 
 that family life and the creation of home and its influences is 
 the first duty and the greatest glory of woman. She has 
 nothing to say, of course, against those women evidently 
 called by exceptional talent and exceptional circumstances 
 out of the common walks of womanhood, but she gives a 
 
6G4 MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 strong weight of influence against a general drift of woman 
 kind in this direction. 
 
 She gives the instance of a young girl who, on the strength 
 of her youthful prettiness, and a lesson or two in elocution, 
 chooses to try the life of a platform reader, and shows the 
 dangers that beset such a course : its interference with 
 womanly duties and family ties, and the slightness of the 
 advantages it brings compared with those which are sacrificed. 
 In contrast come ever so many pretty scenes, as, for instance, 
 when Bel Bree and Kate Senserbo go to live as "help" in i\ 
 charming young family, where there is mutual appreciative- 
 ness and mutual care on the part both of employer and em 
 ployed. No mother and housekeeper can read that charming 
 chapter of "The Other Girls," entitled "Living In," without 
 feeling what a blessing to the world would be such arrange 
 ments as are there described. 
 
 When some of this young housekeeper s skeptical friends 
 remark that "it s all very lovely, but not to be counted upon 
 or expected generally," the pretty Asenath responds : 
 
 ff Bad things have lasted long enough ; I don t see why good 
 ones should not last, now they have begun." She adds after- 
 . wards, " everything begins with exceptions, and happens first 
 in spots. I shouldn t Avonder if it were an excellent way to 
 make life as exceptional as you can in all unexceptionable 
 directions." 
 
 So when this exceptional young mistress discovers that 
 Bel Bree has a pretty turn for versification, she sends her 
 clever verses to a magazine, and presents to her a publisher s 
 check for fifteen dollars, adding, 
 
 " You see I m very unselfish, Bel I m going to work the 
 very way to lose you. When you can write verses like this 
 I should not expect to keep you in my kitchen." 
 
 " Why, I might never do it again in all my life," sen 
 sible Bel replied, "and I hope you will keep me." And 
 so Bel remains, a comfort in the family, satisfied to be ap 
 preciated and treated as a friend. The writer of this 
 sketch knows from actual experience and observation that 
 
MRS A. D. T. WHITNEY. 665 
 
 just such cases as this of Bel Bree have actually happened in 
 real life. 
 
 We began by comparing Mrs. Whitndy to Miss Edge worth. 
 But Miss Edgeworth, with all her keen, practical sense and 
 high principle, had no spiritual element in her writings, and 
 never alluded to religion as help or motive. 
 
 Mrs. Whitney is intensely spiritual. All her sympathies 
 and judgments are baptized with the spirit of Christianity, 
 and we cannot imagine any one reading her works without 
 being made purer and better. 
 
 There is a peculiar quality to her religious thinking ; as she 
 says of one of her maiden saints, Miss Euphemia Kirkbright, 
 " She was a Swedenborgian, not after Swedenborg, but by 
 the living gift itself." Mrs. Whitney has perceived that 
 divine arrangement by which all the surroundings and cir 
 cumstances of our earthly life are capable of being made illus 
 trations of the higher and future life ; how human fatherhood 
 illustrates God s paternity ; human homes, with their love, 
 their peace and rest, image the heavenly home, and the house 
 itself becomes a sacred image of "the house not made with 
 hands, eternal in the heavens." 
 
 The thinking religious mind of New England has in many 
 directions received precious helps from the mind of Sweden 
 borg, and whoever has learned to see this spiritual teaching in 
 the events of this present life has gained a key that unlocks 
 many a mystery and opens many a treasury of consolation 
 and hope. 
 
 The religious teachings of Mrs. Whitney s books have no 
 cant phraseology, but they sho.w how the spirit of Christ may 
 be brought into actual life. There are in "The Other Girls" 
 suggestions full of practical helpfulness to those who wish to 
 carry on the work that Christ began, of helping the weak, 
 comforting the sorrowful, guiding the perplexed, and shielding 
 the tempted ; and we rejoice to think that such good works 
 as she describes actually abound in our day. 
 
 Some of Mrs. Whitney s religious teachings are so well ex 
 pressed and full of comfort and hope that we cannot better 
 
666 MttS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. 
 
 close our article than by a citation of some of these as we 
 marked them in reading "The Other Girls." 
 
 One of her characters who had been recently reduced from 
 affluence to poverty by the sudden death of a father, leaving 
 her in charge of a delicate, helpless mother, says to Miss 
 Kirkbright (one of the saints) : " All that comes hard to me is 
 the changing ; the not staying of anything anywhere. My 
 life seems all broken and mixed up, Miss Kirkbright. Noth 
 ing goes right on as if it belonged." " Lo, it is I, be not 
 afraid," repeats Miss Kirkbright, softly, "when things work 
 against us and change in spite of us wo may know it is the 
 Lord working. That is the comfort, the certainty." 
 
 " Real work disposes and qualifies a man to believe in a 
 real destiny a real God. A carpenter can see that nails 
 are never driven for nothing. It is, perhaps, the sham work 
 of our day that shakes forth its purpose and unity. 
 
 " The sense of accomplishment is the Sunday feeling. It is 
 the very feeling in which God himself rested, and out of His 
 own joy bade all His sons rest likewise in their turn every 
 time they should end a six-days toil. 
 
 " Prayers and special providences ! Are these thrust out of 
 the scheme, because there is a scheme, and a steadfastness 
 of administration in God s laws? Is there no use in praying 
 for rain, or the calming of a storm, or a blessing on the 
 medicine we give the sick ? AVhen it was all set going was 
 not pray er provided for? It was answered a million years 
 ago in the heart of God, who put it into your heart and 
 nature to pray. The more law you have the more all things 
 come under its foresight." 
 
 "God let his Christ die suffer for the whole world. 
 Christ lets those whom he counts worthy suffer die for 
 their world. The Lamb is forever slain ; the sacrifice of the 
 holy is forever making. It is thus that they come at last to 
 
MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY. G67 
 
 walk in white with Him, because they have washed their 
 robes in His blood partaken of His sacrifice." 
 
 A daughter suffering the late remorse of love for a mother 
 for whom she did not do enough while living, says : " I want 
 to love and do for her what I did not do here. Can I ever 
 have my chances given me back again?" 
 
 Her minister answers, " Y,ou have them now go and do 
 something for the least of these that is how we can work 
 for our friends that have been lifted up. Do their errands, 
 enter into their work, be a link yourself in the divine chain, 
 and feel the joy and the life of it. The moment you give 
 yourself, you will feel all that you shall know that you 
 are joined to them. You need not wait to go to heaven ; 
 you can be in heaven now." 
 
 This is high teaching but not too high. 
 
 We rejoice that Mrs. Whitney s works have attained such 
 popularity, and heartily wish them even more readers in the 
 future than in the past. 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 BY MARY A. LIVERMORE. 
 
 Anne Whitney s Girlhood Schooldays Testimony of One of Her Teachers 
 
 Her Literary Talents Book of Poems The Circumstance that turned 
 Her Thoughts to Art An Interesting Incident Beginning Her Work in 
 Sculpture First Attempts Marvellous Skill Her Statue of "Godiva" 
 
 Attention it attracted " Africa" " The Lotus-Eater" Studies 
 and Travels Abroad "Roma" i A Thinking Statue" Commission 
 from the State of Massachusetts Statue of Samuel Adams Miss Whit 
 ney s Studio Devotion to Her Art Work that will endure. 
 
 EARS ago I was permitted free access to the studio 
 of an artist, while he was painting the por- 
 trait of a hidy of whose grace and beauty I had 
 heard, but whom I had never met. I watched 
 i the growth of the picture with great interest ; 
 but when, at last, it was completed, and looked 
 forth from the canvas as a living reality, it was 
 to me a vision of impossible loveliness. " It is 
 not a portrait," I said ; " it is an almost ideal 
 conception." 
 
 One day the lady herself entered the studio. On the 
 instant, the picture seemed to suffer loss. It was as ex 
 quisite in color as before, and its fineness suggested the 
 spiritual elevation which characterized the original. But the 
 portrait wore always the same expression, while the radiant 
 woman whom it copied changed with every passing thought. 
 Hers was a many-sided personality, which defied transcrip 
 tion. "No artist can do justice to such a woman in a pic 
 ture," was now my criticism. "Those who have never seen 
 608 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 009 
 
 her will call your portrait an exaggeration ; to her friends it 
 will he a failure." 
 
 I Imvo romomborotl this experience whilo attempting n 
 
 brief sketch of the woman artist whose name stands at the 
 head of this page. For it is not possible, in the limited 
 space at command, to make othor than an incomplete pen- 
 picturo of one who, as woman, friend, poet, and sculptor, has 
 won the* highest place in the esteem of all who know her, 
 through her worth and her work. To sketch her as she is 
 revealed to her friends would bo considered the. partial 
 utterance of uncritical affection. The word painting would 
 be regarded an exaggeration. 
 
 To present her faithfully as a poet, gifted with exceptional 
 poetic instinct beyond most writers of modern times as a 
 sculptor, whose work takes rank with that of artists at home 
 and abroad, who have won world-wide reputation from their 
 skill in evoking life and beauty from the shapeless marble 
 this calls for an elaboration and detail not compatible with 
 the space allotted. In the imperfect sketch that follows, the 
 materials for which have been gathered from the personal 
 friends of Miss Whitney, and from artists familiar with her 
 work, there is given little more than the outlines of a diligent, 
 earnest, well-rounded life and character. To the imagination 
 of the reader must be left the filling in of details. 
 
 Fortunate in her parentage, and in her early training, Anne 
 Whitney passed through childhood and youth into woman 
 hood under most favorable conditions. Never was there any 
 lack in the wise and kind intentions of her parents. From 
 them she has inherited the fine physique which has enabled 
 her, without peril, to overcome the manual difficulties of her 
 art. The simplicity and nobleness of nature which strongly 
 marked the parents are traits in the daughter, as are their 
 individualism, their strength of character, their loftiness of 
 moral tone. She has also inherited an interest in public 
 affairs and in reform, an unconquerable aversion to any and 
 every form of injustice, and a vital belief in human better 
 ment. 
 
670 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 As a child she was bright and joyous, overflowing with 
 animal spirits, the object of an encompassing tenderness to 
 brothers and sisters, of whom she was youngest. Never was 
 a child more tenderly loved or more wisely cared for. The 
 best schools and the best teachers were provided her ; and to 
 these she bore a receptive spirit and a facile nature. 
 
 "Never did she enter the school-room," says one of her 
 teachers, " that my eyes and my heart did not go forth to 
 welcome her. She always brought in with her such a sense 
 of freshness and purity that, instinctively, I thought of the 
 coming in of the morning. Every teacher in the school 
 observed her, and all rejoiced in her. In all that she said or 
 did she manifested character. When she read or recited, it 
 was in the low tone that needs " to rise half a note to catch 
 attention." But the raising of her voice was never necessary, 
 as the hum of the school-room died instantly, in the desire of 
 her mates to enjoy her always intelligent, distinct enunciation, 
 which brought out the full meaning of the text. A gentle 
 gravity, a sweet intelligence of infrequent speech, and a per 
 vasive kindliness of manner marked her intercourse with her 
 fellow-students, it being always apparent that she was with, 
 but not of them." 
 
 As the girlhood of Anne "Whitney merged into womanhood, 
 it was impossible that she should escape the pain and suffer 
 ing that come to all gifted natures. Death made a sad gap 
 in the family circle, when, for the first time, she felt the 
 
 "Dreadful odds twixt live and dead, 
 That make us part as those at Babel did 
 Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue." 
 
 " For a long time after, everything smelt of the grave," she 
 once said. 
 
 A high order of imaginative power was hers, and M the 
 sorrowful great gift, conferred on poets, of a twofold life 
 as if one were not enough for pain." Keenly alive to the 
 beautiful in all things, she was perplexed by the pettiness and 
 meanness, the wrong and injustice, that so largely enter into 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. G71 
 
 and deform human life. Thrilling to the joyousness of 
 nnture, with a soul attuned to its subtlest harmonies, she was 
 smitten with soro puin as she looked out on the conflict and 
 turmoil of life, with its doing and undoing, its sinning and 
 repenting, its loving and grieving, its incompleteness and 
 unrest. Glowing with divine aspiration to climb " the altar 
 stairs that slope through darkness up to God," she measured 
 the vast distance that must stretch forever between her 
 highest ideal and her attainment of it. 
 
 " Capacity for pain " is not unfrequently " a mark of rank 
 in nature." It is not possible for one to speak nobly who 
 does not feel profoundly, and nature has so blended suffering 
 with power, that it sometimes has the relation of cause to 
 effect. The outcome of this time of early perplexity and 
 suffering, of profound feeling and thinking, was a book of 
 poems, as original as they are vigorous. Their quality is 
 remarkable. They are mostly expressed in stateliness of 
 rhythm, and there is not a morbid line in them. Largeness 
 of thought and greatness of feeling inspire them, and they 
 palpitate Avith earnestness, strength, and courage. 
 
 The ablest reviewers of the time pronounced them " un 
 excelled in modern times." One of the ablest critics of the 
 day, Samuel Johnson, thus sums up his estimate of them : 
 " They descend into the deeper and sadder experiences of 
 life, and deal with the highest problems and mysteries, while 
 they are yet full of cheer and health. They send the repose 
 of absolute truth and spiritual intuition through the aspira 
 tions and conflicts of life, and give us its poetry and highest 
 philosophy. The author will have the deepest thanks of 
 many, who will not know how to express the enjoyment and 
 the good they find in them." 
 
 It is evident that the poet has come off conqueror in 
 whatever mental conflict she has struggled ; that she has 
 learned the mission of suffering, has attained to that patience 
 which is power, to that peace which is diviner than hap 
 piness. For, as she soars far up into the blue, she sings 
 exultingly : 
 
 41 
 
672 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 "Thou sett fit me above Time s annoy: 
 I found delight, and it was pain : 
 Thou gavest pain, and it was joy, 
 Token of unaccomplished growth, 
 Stern pledge of immortality. 
 Through all the earth s perplexed domain, 
 Just God ! I would that there should be 
 No living thing that should not suffer PAIN." 
 
 That our poet has divined the secret of noble living is also 
 manifest, for she writes : 
 
 "All that he has or is, who gives, 
 With whom no earth-born wish survives 
 To hoard his little grief or bliss, 
 God his great debtor surely is, 
 And pays infinity. Who meet 
 The coming fate half-way, and fling 
 Their blessed treasures at her feet, 
 Shall feel through all her clamoring, 
 Her hard eye quail. She knows " twere vain 
 To empty what God brims ayain" 
 
 Writing while the country was in the throes of the anti- 
 slavery agitation, it was not possible for Miss Whitney to 
 ignore the nation s sin and shame ; for there is reformatory 
 blood in her veins, and her love of justice rendered her hate 
 of slavery peculiarly strong. Such of her poems as touch the 
 national evil read as though the heart s hot blood were cours 
 ing through the lines. 
 
 Conspicuous for the spirit of beauty which glows within 
 them, are "Five Sonnets relating to Beauty." Two of these 
 are given, not as the best that could be quoted, but because 
 they seem to foreshadow the career of the author in which 
 love of beauty and love of form were to be united, and on 
 which she presently entered : 
 
 " Largess from sevenfold heavens, I pray, descend 
 On all who toil for Beauty ! Never feet 
 Grow weary that have done her bidding sweet 
 About the careless world ! For she is friend 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 673 
 
 And darling of the universe ; and day by day, 
 She comes and goes, but never dies, 
 So precious is she in the eternal eyes. 
 Oh, dost thou scorn her, seeing what fine way 
 She doth avenge ? For heaven, because of her, 
 Shall one day find thee fitter. How old hours 
 Of star-rapt night about thy heart had curled, 
 And thou hadst felt the morning s golden stir, 
 And the appealing loveliness of flowers, 
 Yea, all the saving beauty of the world." 
 
 " And for that thou art Beauty, and thy name 
 Transcends all praise of thee, and doth but leave 
 Thyself for thy true rendering, I grieve 
 O er idle words. Oh, never dost thou blame, 
 But seekest to inspire me all the same, 
 With thine immortal freshness! Through the night 
 The moon comes large and slow, winging with light 
 The joyous sea ; while sunset s last red flame, 
 Baring the heavens for glories to succeed, 
 Goes softly out, with endless farewell gleams, 
 Ebbing along the yellow marge of day ; 
 Glides slow, with backward gaze ; sadly, indeed, 
 And slow, as from the heart which new love claims, 
 An older memory doth steal away." 
 
 Miss Whitney s book of poems was so warmly welcomed 
 that it was hoped she would devote her life to poetry ; and it 
 seemed certain, at one time, that she would choose literature 
 as the field for the exercise of her talents. A seemingly 
 slight circumstance gave a different bent to her genius. She 
 had been modelling for some time, for her own pleasure, and 
 with no definite purpose, sometimes using snow, sometimes 
 wet sand, clay, or any other convenient plastic material. 
 One day, having overturned a pot of sand in the green-bouse, 
 which, from its dampness, readily took impressions, she 
 began to model it, keeping at the work for hours, and return 
 ing to it next day with zest, till she had wrought out her 
 idea. Her thought bad taken visible form ; and it gave her 
 such satisfaction that she then and there decided to make sculpt- 
 
674 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 lire the pursuit of her life, and began to work immediately and 
 in earnest. For a long time she modelled in a studio in the 
 garden of her country home, for the mere pleasure of the 
 work, not caring for a wider theatre of effort. 
 
 The change from poetry to sculpture is very great. To 
 the largest success in either art the very highest power of 
 imagination is necessary. There can be no power in art 
 without it, no grand work. But poetry is a vague, indefi 
 nite, fluent mode of expressing ideas ; while sculpture 
 compels a close defining of them, that they may be given 
 expression within certain fixed limits. This change in her 
 methods of expression wrought a corresponding change in 
 Anne Whitney ; and those who .watched her progress saw 
 that her conceptions, embodied no longer in verse, but in 
 plaster and marble, took on diviner grace and beauty, with 
 intenser strength and power. 
 
 If we accept the latest scientific teaching, we must believe 
 that great power in art manifestation can only come from a 
 high level of art attainment in the community. But facts, 
 brought from near and remote times, do not seem to sustain 
 this inference. Not to go back to other lands and distant 
 centuries in search of greater names, it is enough to recall 
 the fact that our two most eminent painters, Allston and 
 Stuart, sprang from the unlikely soil of puritan New England. 
 The art idea had not then dawned as an inspiration on the 
 minds of the few, or been taken up as a superficial catch 
 word on the lips of the many. When Anne Whitney first 
 began to dream of the possibility of embodying in form the 
 thoughts that, heretofore, she had expressed in verse, tnere 
 were not more than a dozen persons in New England who 
 were known as w r orking in the same direction. There were 
 no teachers ; there was no interest in sculpture as having 
 anything to do with to-day, except in the way of parlor- 
 mantel ornamentation, or plaster reproductions of the antique, 
 no intelligent sympathy anywhere. Criticism was poor, 
 always from the point, as is much of what is called criti 
 cism to-day, and praise was poorer. 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 675 
 
 On such times she fell. She pursued her way, guided by 
 what is called genius ; and certainly one cannot but perceive 
 in her that instinctive feeling of the requirements of art that 
 guided her in its pursuit. She did not felicitate herself on 
 this state of things. She has always felt as if her birthright 
 had been squandered ; that she might have been saved the 
 severe drill to which she subjected herself, by the experience 
 of others, and that the long results of time should have 
 been poured into her lap. To be sure, drill will not make 
 an artist, however courtesy may dispense titles, any more 
 than the study of prosody will make a poet. Seeing and 
 feeling are indispensable to any real knowing, and all other 
 knowledge is only chaff. On the other hand, whoever has 
 the " vision " knows better than any other how the " faculty " 
 is strengthened and enlarged by early habit and training, and 
 that the present is better and richer for all of the past that 
 can be poured into it. At one period Anne Whitney thought 
 she had found a teacher, but this proved an illusion. Her 
 native force saved her in this emergency. 
 
 As to the motives that ruled her, she once said, in a letter 
 to a friend : " I hold that art, at its best, is only an expres 
 sion of the life of the people, in infinite adaptation, and 
 that its scope is correspondingly broad and varied. I hate the 
 pedantry of prescriptions. Whoever prescribes limits to this 
 expression, and labels his article, " Art for art s sake only," 
 or, " Beauty is the sole end of art," or, " No art without 
 a moral purpose," I hold to bo a weak brother, deserving 
 commiseration." 
 
 Anno Whitney began her work in sculpture by making 
 portrait busts of her father and mother and friends, which 
 were full of life and spirit, working in a studio in tho garden 
 of her homo. These proved that she had not mistaken her 
 vocation. She then attempted her first ideal work, modelling 
 and putting into marble her beautiful conception of " Lady 
 Godiva," which occupied her a year. Tho moment of tho 
 legend, of which this statue is the graceful embodiment, was 
 most happily chosen. As Tennyson gives us the tale, in his 
 
G7G ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 matchless poem, " Godiva, wife to that grim Earl," who 
 overtaxed his people till they starved, entreated him to remit 
 the tax. To his scornful reply that she " would not let her 
 little linger ache for such as they," she made the woman s 
 answer, " But I would die ! Prove me what it is I would not 
 do !" "Ride you naked through the town, and I repeal the 
 tax ! " was his rough answer. 
 
 Moved by pity she accepted the hard condition. The 
 artist has seized the moment when divine compassion has 
 triumphed over a protracted conflict of passion and feeling. 
 The heroic spirit which dares so much to redeem an over 
 burdened people looks out from the marble upturned face, 
 seeking resolution from the skies, and the graceful woman s 
 figure seems to dilate with the lofty purpose which sways her 
 soul. One hand has unclasped the " wedded eagles " of her 
 girdle, the other sweeps off the half-fallen mantle. The 
 beautiful feminine figure is instinct with a grand impulse ; and 
 one feels the tenderness and modesty, as well as the strength 
 and will, that almost breathe from the marble. 
 
 The " Godiva " was exhibited in the old art-gallery of 
 Messrs. Childs & Jenks, Boston. A few months later, Miss 
 Whitney added to her growing fame by placing at its side her 
 "Africa," a colossal statue of another type, the expression 
 of a grander and broader thought. Her deep interest in the 
 slaves of the South, her ability to forecast the inevitable 
 sequence of the heroic events that hastened, one on the heels 
 of the other, for it w r as during the war, uplifted her to 
 the summit of prophecy, and she saw in the near future the 
 deliverance of a race from imbruting bondage, and, later, 
 the illumination of the dark continent from which it sprang. 
 This grand and mighty conception she sought to embody in 
 form. If the attempt savored of audacity, undertaken at 
 that early stage of Miss Whitney s art career, she was justi 
 fied, not only by the blood of the reformer that thrilled in 
 her veins, but by her remarkable success. 
 
 The symbolization is that of a colossal Ethiopian woman, 
 in a half recumbent position. The immense proportions of 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 677 
 
 the statue express the teeming luxuriance of the tropics in 
 which she had her birth. She has been sleeping for ages in 
 the glowing sands of the desert, out of which she is lifting 
 herself. The measured tramp of armies, marching for her 
 deliverance, the thunder of artillery, the shock and roar of 
 battle, have awakened her. Half rising, with sleep yet heavy 
 on her eyelids, she supports herself on the left hand and arm, 
 while she listens with fear and wonder to the sound of broken 
 chains and shackles falling around her. The glory of a new 
 day shines full upon her, and with her right hand she shades 
 her eyes from the painful light. Doubt, fear, wonder, hope, 
 pain, are all marvellously blended in the half-awakened face. 
 
 The base of the statue bore the inscription, " And Ethiopia 
 shall soon stretch out her hands to God." It was a masterly 
 desigr, wrought out in a most triumphant manner. It im 
 itated no model, followed no tradition, copied no antique, but 
 was a fresh, original masterpiece of genius, contributed to 
 the art and history of the time. 
 
 Its reception by the public was most gratifying. Not only 
 in Boston, but in New York, where it was exhibited with the 
 " Godiva," it attracted attention to the artist, who was de 
 clared " not merely high among female artists, but high in art 
 itself, that knows no sex." The African race was then the 
 subject of absorbing interest. All the air was astir with 
 nobler interpretations of liberty than had been dreamed of 
 before, and on all lips thrilled the inquiry, " What is to be 
 the future of this newly-freed people ? " The throngs that 
 visited the gigantic " Africa " stood dumb before her. So 
 legible and well-expressed was the sentiment of the artist, 
 that even the un instructed in art throbbed in sympathy with 
 it. It received much intelligent and some extravagant praise, 
 as did the " Godiva," and also much criticism, which its 
 author welcomed. For no one can criticise her work more 
 severely than herself, her ideal being very high, and her 
 character unblemished by weak egotism. 
 
 It is to be regretted that Miss Whitney has had no oppor 
 tunity to put this statue into enduring bronze. Not only the 
 
678 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 nobleness of the conception, but the fact that it was inspired 
 by one of the grandest incidents of American history, should 
 confer on it the immortality of bronze or marble. To future 
 generations it would take high rank as a historic statue, keep 
 ing green the memory of the time when, on the top wave of 
 a nation s righteous wrath with slavery, four million of slaves 
 were lifted to the level of freemen. 
 
 Miss Whitney s next work was a translation into form of 
 the old fable of the ancients, which Tennyson has reproduced 
 in his poem, " The Lotus-Eater." This was, in some respects, 
 a more ambitious work than any of its predecessors. For it 
 was an undraped figure, and there were difficulties to be over 
 come that she had not met in her other works. Her success 
 ful treatment of them indicated a yet farther advance in her 
 art. She represented the " Lotus-Eater " as a youth n the 
 early flush of manhood. He has eaten of the seductive fruit 
 " whereof who tastes forgets his native country," and loses all 
 desire to return to it, but ever after gives himself to pleasure- 
 seeking. With half-shut eyes that " seem falling asleep in a 
 half dream," muscles relaxed in purposeless idleness, senses 
 steeped in delicious languor, he leans against the trunk of a 
 palm-tree, the head, splendidly set on the shoulders, being 
 supported by the upraised right arm. 
 
 And now came the time so long anticipated, so dear to the 
 artist, when, accompanied by her inseparable friend, herself a 
 worker in another domain of art, whose tastes are akin to her 
 own, and whose life is united with hers in a beautiful friend 
 ship, Miss Wliitney went abroad. Here she spent five years, 
 chiefly in Rome, but pursuing her work also in Florence, 
 Munich, and Paris, studying, drawing and modelling, as she 
 had opportunity. "The study of ancient sculpture," she 
 says, " was my greatest help." With drawing in the galleries, 
 and practice and study from life in her studio, the time went 
 on. She secluded herself from general society, never going 
 into large companies, as is her habit, for the most part, at 
 home. When expostulated with because of this seclusion, 
 and assured that it would be injurious to her health, and her 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 679 
 
 popularity as well, she answered, "You must consider my 
 limitations. I really have the power to do but one of two 
 things. Choose." 
 
 What benefit was to be derived from the criticism of artists 
 and friends, she eagerly availed herself of, especially of the 
 clear intelligence, and native and instructed feeling for art, of 
 the friend who accompanied her. She sought after a better 
 and completer technique, that she might more adequately ex 
 press her ideal, not differing in this respect from other artists. 
 But while all artists believe that art is only a mode of ex 
 pression, Miss Whitney bore with her to Europe, along with 
 the ideals of half a lifetime, a keen sensitiveness to real 
 tilings, as distinguished from the superficial motives that pre 
 sent themselves in what may be new or picturesque. She 
 enjoyed and appreciated the studies of her brother-artists in 
 Italy. But however great her admiration of their flights into 
 the realms of fancy, their translation of Greek myths, and 
 representation of marble modern gods, her own bent was 
 always grave ; and if her work was not representative of 
 something in the depths of her own being, she had little 
 satisfaction in it. 
 
 While abroad she made many sketches, and modelled sev 
 eral fine statues. One of these was a male figure, the "Chal 
 dean Astronomer," standing reverently in the midnight, 
 intently studying the silent stars, and measuring " celestial 
 spaces " with parted fingers. She moulded a charming group 
 of three baby-figures, rounded and dimpled, perfectly indic 
 ative of the infantile innocence and unconsciousness which 
 she sought to copy . They were exquisite in their sweetness 
 of expression and truthfulness to nature. 
 
 Miss Whitney s strong feeling against slavery once more 
 uttered itself in a work of art. The subject of her next 
 sketch was one of the most remarkable men of the last gen 
 eration, the great St. Domingo chief, statesman, and gov 
 ernor, Toussaint L Ouverture, an unmixed negro, born a 
 slave, with no drop of white blood in his veins. He was 
 the hero of Harriet Martineau s thrilling book, "The Hour 
 
680 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 and the Man." Wendell Phillips made him the subject of ft 
 superb lecture, delivered hundreds of times during the anti- 
 slavery struggle of our country, in the leading towns and 
 cities of the North. 
 
 Gathering the materials for Toussaint s biography from the 
 lips of his enemies, he graphically recounted the royal career 
 of the man, from day to day, when, in 1791, St. Domingo 
 was convulsed by a war of races, and a war of nations, 
 " the white race against the mulatto and black, the black 
 against both ; the Frenchman against the English and Span 
 iard, the Spaniard against both." Step by step he led his 
 audiences down the years in which Toussaint, a Metternich 
 and a Washington united, calmed the insurrection, created an 
 invincible army out of negroes demoralized by two centuries 
 of slavery, hurled them like a thunderbolt against both 
 Frenchmen and Spaniards, conquering both, " sent the Eng 
 lish skulking home to Jamaica," and restored to the negro the 
 liberty God gave him. 
 
 Then with " peace restored to every household on the 
 island, the valleys laughing with fertility, culture climbing the 
 mountains, the commerce of the world anchoring in its har 
 bors," order reigning unbroken through all its highways and 
 by-ways, Toussaint made the only mistake of his life. He 
 disbanded his army, and, loyal to the French government, he 
 trusted in the perfidious first Napoleon, and yielded to him the 
 government of St. Domingo. Ordered to Paris, the self- 
 made Emperor flung him into jail, and then honored still fur 
 ther the confidence of the black hero, by incarcerating him 
 in a stone dungeon of a castle in Switzerland, and leaving 
 him "a sunny child of the tropics " to die of cold and 
 starvation. 
 
 " Fifty years hence," says Wendell Phillips, in the sublime 
 peroration of his marvellous lecture, " when truth gets a hear 
 ing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and 
 Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, and Fayette for 
 France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower 
 of our earlier civilization, and John Brown as the ripe fruit 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 681 
 
 of our noonday, and then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, 
 will write in the clear blue above them all, the name of the 
 soldier, the statesman, the martyr Toussaint L Ouverture." 
 
 It was this noble Haytien, whom the world would proudly 
 remember in immortal marble but for his unpardonable crime 
 of wearing a black skin over his white soul, that Anne Whit 
 ney chose for her next sketch. Could she have selected a 
 worthier subject? The event of his life which she has em 
 bodied in her representation, is his imprisonment by Napo 
 leon. He sits alone in his stony dungeon, nude, save for a 
 rude covering about the waist. With tropical blood in his 
 veins, there is ice on his floor in winter, and water in sum 
 mer. He writes to his Emperor : " Sire, I am a French citi 
 zen. I never broke a law. By the grace of God, I saved for 
 you the best island of your realm. Sire, of your mercy, 
 grant me justice ! " No answer is returned. He is scorned, 
 betrayed, ignored, doomed he must die. Above the lust 
 of gold, pure in private life, generous in the use of power, 
 always obedient to law, he is yet to die, ignominiously, 
 starved, like a rat in his hole. He comprehends it all. 
 
 But not a line of his face betrays weakness or fear, not a 
 shade of bitterness or hate darkens it. Instead of this, it is 
 noble in its expression of endurance and heroism. Intensely 
 serious and sad, he leans forward, looking you straight in the 
 face, while his right hand indicates the inscription he has traced 
 on the floor, " Dieu se charge!" Forsaken by all, justice 
 denied him, and a dishonored grave awaiting him, he is yet 
 brave and strong ; for a just God is in the heavens. With 
 Him he rests his case. The lines of the figure are admira 
 ble ; and, while the face and form are full of force and 
 character, there is great simplicity in Miss Whitney s treat 
 ment of the subject. The technique of the sketch is so 
 completely subordinated to the grand idea, that one forgets 
 to observe the methods by which it has been wrought, 
 and looks beyond to the hero whom it commemorates, with a 
 heart full of sympathy for his hard fate, and eyes dim with 
 tears, for his unrecognized greatness. 
 
682 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 It was while she was in Rome that Miss Whitney conceived 
 the idea of a statue that must rank with the best sculpture of 
 modern times, and which took such hold of her imagination 
 that she wrought it out in a wonderfully forcible and impres 
 sive manner. Her " Roma," like her " Africa," is grand in 
 conception. It has been fitly called a "thinking statue." 
 Only an artist of the highest power could have designed it. 
 It is the Rome of Pio Nono s time that is represented, 
 
 " Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe." 
 
 Miss Whitney has personified Rome as a Roman beggar, 
 whose aged and wrinkled face shows traces of early, majestic 
 beauty. She sits on a broken Corinthian capital, with her 
 head thrown forward in a profound revery. She is looking 
 back mournfully into the past, and memories of her glorious 
 history defile before her. Her robes flow about her in simple, 
 classic folds, her gown revealing something of its former 
 magnificence ; for it is bordered with medallions of her antique 
 sculptures, the precious art treasures of the world, which it is 
 an art education to see and to study. She who wears it was 
 once the mistress of the world, although now its fringes arc 
 rent, its hem is tattered, its glory and beauty are tarnished. 
 
 Her left hand, resting loosely at her side, barely holds the 
 badge which the beggars of that day were compelled to wear, 
 a medal, on which is stamped, " Questvante in Roma" 
 licensed to beg in Rome, with the number of the license on 
 it. Her right hand lies listlessly in her lap, and from her 
 nerveless fingers the coins, grudgingly given her, drop 
 unheeded ; for her thoughts are far away, and she recks not 
 now of gifts or givers. " But for the awful fame of Michael 
 Ano-olo," writes an art critic, " one would almost dare to 
 
 C 1 
 
 match her face with that of the Cumrcan sybil, it is so lined 
 and scarred with traces of her marvellous experience of joy 
 and sorrow." 
 
 Of what is she thinking? Of the glory of her past, when 
 all the world paid tribute to her, and she was the leader of 
 its highest civilization? Of the provinces she conquered, 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 683 
 
 which enriched her with their art, and skill, and learning, and 
 fresh, untainted blood? Of the roads she built, and the 
 bridges with which she spanned the rivers, over which 
 inarched the Roman legions to conquest? Of the legal code 
 she formulated, which has been the basis of the world s 
 jurisprudence from that day to the present? Of the advent 
 of a new, simple, pure religion, when Christianity opened to 
 her the possibilities of a glorious future, until its priests 
 prostituted it to the basest purposes, and it became the ally 
 of ignorance, the nurse of superstition, and the strong arm of 
 tyranny and injustice? Possibly. For at her left side, there 
 is half concealed the triple papal mitre, symbolic of the cause 
 of her pauperism, ignorance, and woe. 
 
 It is impossible to fitly describe this statue, so as to give 
 an idea of the impression it makes on the beholder, or the 
 vastness of its meaning, the more thoroughly it is studied. 
 It is not strange that it caused a great sensation in Rome, 
 where its meaning was fully understood. To the Italians, it 
 dilated with significance, which angered or thrilled them, 
 according as they were the friends of the church and the 
 government, or aspired to that better day, which has since 
 dawned, when Rome should be free from the temporal rule 
 of the pope, and dismembered Italy be unified, under a free, 
 wise, strong, liberal government. Its power was so deeply 
 felt in Rome, as showing the world s enthralling city in all 
 the w r oe of her decadence, that it was thought necessary for 
 its safety to send it to Florence, where it was welcomed to 
 the house of the American Minister, and kept till it was sent 
 to America. Although this remarkable work has been put 
 into marble, it should be duplicated in bronze, when it would 
 be enduring, and, like Miss Whitney s "Africa." would take 
 rank with the historic statues of the world, telling the story 
 of the past more forcibly than can the printed page. 
 
 Returning home with a completer technical skill, with 
 enlarged conceptions of art, and the inspiration born of years 
 of contact and communion with the great masterpieces of 
 the world, Miss Whitney resumed her diligent work in the 
 
r>84 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 studio, and continued to design and to model. She executed 
 several commissions for portrait busts, which gave entire 
 satisfaction to the large constituencies interested, and evoked 
 almost unqualified praise from art critics. One was a bust, 
 in marble, of President Stearns, made for Amherst College. 
 Another, a bust in bronze of President Walker of Harvard 
 College, was designed for the cloisters at Memorial Hall. 
 She has since duplicated it in marble for the church of which 
 President Walker was formerly the minister. Both are re 
 markable for their strong grasp of character, for the impres 
 sive dignity of the expression, and for their admirable likeness, 
 which is acknowledged by all familiar with Dr. Walker s face. 
 
 A bust in marble of William Lloyd Garrison is an excellent 
 characterization of this eminent man, who was so widely 
 known, and who has so recently left us, that his face and 
 figure are fresh in all memories. The easy pose of the head, 
 the kindliness of the wise smile, and the benignity and noble 
 ness of the face are finely wrought out in an almost perfect 
 representation. Miss Whitney also made a marble head of 
 Keats, which is exquisite in beauty and grace. It is modelled 
 from an authentic cast, from accurate portraits, from a 
 knowledge of the man derived from a study of his poems, 
 and from first sources. It gives one the satisfaction of a 
 perfect work, and the more thoroughly it is studied, the 
 keener is one s delight in it. It is alive with intellect, 
 sensibility and grace, and appeals eloquently to the heart by 
 its tender delicacy, which suggests the broken life of the 
 poet, who mourned that his " name was writ in water." 
 
 But of all Miss Whitney s heads in marble, that of her 
 inseparable friend and home companion is most charming. It 
 is the head of a beautiful woman, as simple and unaffected as 
 a flower, with no artificial posing, no straining after effect, no 
 hint of self-consciousness. No lovelier portrait of young 
 womanhood could be made, nor one more suggestive of the 
 finest feminine qualities. 
 
 It became necessary for Miss Whitney to make a second 
 visit to Europe. She received from the state of Massachu- 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. 685 
 
 setts a commission to make a statue, in marble, of Samuel 
 Adams, the Revolutionary patriot, to be placed in the national 
 gallery of the Capitol, in Washington. The committee de 
 sired that the work should be done in Italy. 
 
 Samuel Adams was a leader of the Revolution, an orator, 
 whose fiery speech kindled the latent patriotism of the colo 
 nists to flame, a man of unflinching courage, who never 
 quailed before a menace, or in the presence of a danger, a 
 man of prompt, decisive action, a lover of freedom, a hater 
 of tyranny ; modest, self-sacrificing, to whom country was 
 everything and all else secondary. Miss Whitney has been 
 singularly successful in her conception of the early patriot, 
 treating the subject with severe simplicity. Following the 
 plain citizen s dress of the time, she has subdued it to grace 
 and dignity. You see in her Adams a man of character, erect 
 and strong, with a noble bearing and a fine good face, both 
 face and figure instinct with energy, power, and thought. 
 
 He stands in perfect repose, with one leg slightly ad 
 vanced. His arms are folded ; his head elevated ; there is 
 fiery earnestness in his manner. He demands of Governor 
 Hutchinson the immediate withdrawal of the British troops, 
 which have been stationed in the town of Boston for the last 
 eighteen months, a steady menace to its peace. His authority 
 is the vote of the town-meeting, which he holds, and which 
 is couched in indignant and peremptory language. Defiant, 
 he awaits the answer of the quailing official. 
 
 It is told of Michael Angelo, that, gazing long in admira 
 tion at the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, at the 
 Roman Capitol, he exclaimed at last, " Cammina !" "Step 
 on ! " A lesser critic of our day, standing long in admiration 
 before Miss Whitney s statue of Adams, said, He will obtain 
 his demand presently ; then he will step down and walk away ! " 
 This almost breathing statue, full of resolve and fire, has 
 been reproduced in bronze, and stands in Dock Square, Bos 
 ton, where it receives the silent greeting of the mighty 
 throngs that daily pass it, on the way from the railway sta 
 tions in the northern part of the city. 
 
686 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 It was proposed to erect in Boston a statue to Charles 
 Sumner, and designs for a sitting statue were solicited by a 
 committee of gentlemen, of whom, contrary to European 
 custom, not one was an artist. Neither was there a woman 
 on the committee, although many American women, through 
 their genius and culture, and by their years of art study 
 abroad in the studios of the masters, and in the great gal 
 leries, are better fitted to serve on art committees than are 
 some of the men elected to them, who are necessarily ab 
 sorbed in business and politics. 
 
 Miss Whitney made a model for a sitting statue of Sumner, 
 which she sent to the competitive exhibition. It was the only 
 competition of her art career. The model was itself a Avork 
 of uncommon excellence, and suggested a statue of higher 
 merit than Americans are accustomed to see in their public 
 places. Mr. Sumner is represented seated, and the blazon 
 of the arms of the United States on the back of the chair 
 indicates the locality as the Senate Chamber. 
 
 The costume is such as Mr. Sumner was accustomed to 
 Avear ; but the genius of the artist has subordinated the un 
 graceful garments of the day to the refined, scholarly, strong 
 man who wears them, and the figure is clothed with dignity. 
 The character of the great statesman permeates and glorifies 
 the whole, the serene thoughtfulness of the face being recog 
 nized as the habitual expression of the man, who had seen the 
 great cause with which he was identified carried to a grand 
 success. Around the pedestal, in high relief, is a procession 
 of figures symbolizing the emancipation of the American 
 slaves, classical in beauty, and typical of the great work of 
 Sumner s life. This model was exhibited to the public, not 
 only in Boston, but in New York, at the Union League Club, 
 from whose doors a colored regiment had marched to the war. 
 George William Curtis, whose opinion, both as a man of artistic 
 taste and culture and as a warm personal friend of Sumner, is 
 worthy of consideration, said of it in " Harper s Weekly " : 
 
 " In the sketch Mr. Sumner is represented sitting, and the 
 expression of his face and person is perfectly reproduced in 
 
ANNE WHITNEY. G87 
 
 a free, graceful, and forcible manner, so that to all who knew 
 him personally, and to those who knew him only as a public 
 man, identified with a great cause, it is an admirable and most 
 satisfactory work." 
 
 Nevertheless, Miss Whitney, to the great disappointment 
 of all competent art judges, did not receive the award of the 
 committee. But as there is but one statue of Charles Sumner 
 in existence, and that not satisfactory, nor famed for excel 
 lence, others are sure to be made. And the day is quite 
 certain to come when her statue, with increased beauty and 
 strength, will adorn some one of the public places of the 
 land, perpetuating his great memory, who "lent to the dumb 
 his voice," who gave to their darkness his light, and exchanged 
 his ease and restfulness for their life-long pain. 
 
 Miss Whitney spent a year in France during her second 
 journey abroad, familiarizing herself with the superior skill 
 of the French artists, and their wonderful knowledge of the 
 human figure. She passed two months in a peasant village, 
 some twenty or thirty miles from Paris, modelling and study 
 ing. Here she made three heads one, the head of a beau 
 tiful girl, full of wild, free beauty, untrained and undevel 
 oped. Another was the head of a peasant child, a frolicsome, 
 roguish little elf, with merriment lurking in every feature of 
 her face. The third was the head of an old woman, coiflcd 
 with the marmotte, the ancient head-dress of the peasant 
 woman. The old woman was a model sent Miss Whitney on 
 application. But she came with the damaged reputation of 
 falling asleep the moment she seated herself in the studio, 
 and consequently of being worthless as a model. Finding it 
 impossible to keep her awake, a sudden impulse seized Miss 
 Whitney to model her asleep, which she proceeded to do, 
 carrying her effort to a triumphant conclusion in a work of 
 realistic art. 
 
 This " delightfully ugly head," as some one calls it, abounds 
 in character. The French artists were delighted with the 
 
 o 
 
 quick wit of their transatlantic contemporary, who had seized 
 on a peculiarity which had thrown them into despair, and so 
 
 42 
 
688 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 treated it as to make it illustrative of her versatile power. 
 These three differing heads received the high commendation 
 of French artists. When Miss Whitney applied to them for 
 instruction, wishing to work with one of them in the studio, 
 he replied : " Why do you want to study with French artists ? 
 You have nothing to learn from them." 
 
 Miss Whitney has put the head of the sleeping peasant 
 woman into bronze, so that perpetuity will be given to this 
 excellent work of realistic art. "If that peasant s head had 
 been dug up somewhere in Italy," says an artist friend, it 
 would be regarded as an undoubted antique, it has such direct 
 truth to nature, such perfect simplicity, and is so free from 
 the affectation of modern sculpture." Whatever the idea of 
 the artist, this bronze head filly symbolizes France, broken 
 by revolutions, worn out by war, overcome by domestic 
 violence, degraded by submission to a despotism under the 
 name of a republic desiring only rest. 
 
 The latest great work of art which has occupied Miss Whit 
 ney is a sitting statue of Harriet Martineau, a grand English 
 woman of the last generation, whose long life of seventy-four 
 years was one of untiring industry, and of immense accom 
 plishment. To all lovers of freedom, to all advocates of 
 justice, to all who believe in human progress, to all women 
 with a high ideal of womanhood, who rebel against the 
 infringement of their rights, and demand for women large 
 opportunity and complete justice, the memory of Harriet 
 Martineau is unspeakably dear. There are hundreds of 
 women, both in the old world and the new, many of them 
 in the afternoon of life, whose pulses beat at the mention of 
 her name. 
 
 The statue of Miss Martineau represents her in her prime, 
 sitting in a garden chair, on her terrace, as she was accus 
 tomed, when in thought or study. A manuscript lies in her 
 lap, which she has been reading, and the beautiful hands are 
 folded over it. A shawl has dropped from her shoulders, 
 and partially drapes the figure. The hair falls softly about 
 the broad forehead, and is gathered in a simple coil low in 
 
AKNTE WHITNEY. 689 
 
 the nock. A Ince head-dress, habitual to her in life, falls 
 gracefully on either side the head, and softens the features. 
 The head is lifted, and the eyes look out into space with a 
 far-reaching gaze, as if she were in deep thought, and felt a 
 reverential sense of something above her apprehension, 
 something above and beyond her. The attitude, the expres 
 sion, the pose of the noble head, the face, instinct with grand 
 thoughts, the dignified repose of the figure, with a certain 
 sense of reserved power in the tout ensemble of the statue, all 
 grow upon you the longer it is studied. It is now being 
 reproduced in marble, symbolic of the purity of her whom it 
 will commemorate. 
 
 From the highest story of her home on the western slope 
 of Beacon Hill, Anne Whitney s studio commands a pictu 
 resque landward view of her chosen city, chosen, notwith 
 standing its perhaps undeserved reputation among sculptors, 
 of being unfriendly to their career. Few views of Boston 
 are more enchanting than this, whether it be seen by moon 
 or morning light. But, when beyond the Common and 
 the Public Garden, the towers and spires relieved above 
 the wide horizon line, "the perfect day shuts softly in," 
 the view is unequalled. Here passes her diligent and de 
 voted life, and here are clustered many of her loveliest 
 sketches; for her studio is peopled with "the beings of her 
 mind. 
 
 A model of Garrison, soon to be put in bronze, sitting 
 easily in his chair, confronts you. He leans forward slightly, 
 one hand upon his knee, the kindly eyes, the parted lips, and 
 earnest face testifying to his interest in the question he is 
 discussing with a friendly guest. 
 
 Turn a little to one side, for another sketch invites your 
 attention, that of an equestrian statue. You recognize im 
 mediately the thoughful face of the noble young officer, sitting 
 his horse firmly, to whom an important command has been 
 entrusted. Farewell, brave, unsullied young hero ! you are 
 riding away to death on the battlefield. To-night you will 
 lie cold and still among the brave dead of your command ; 
 
690 ANNE WHITNEY. 
 
 to-morrow History will write your name in letters of living 
 light, for you die that a race may live ! 
 
 Across the room stands out a sketch of a different order. 
 It palpitates with life, as its vis-a-vis is shaded with coming 
 death. It is a model of Lief, the young Norseman, the dar 
 ing son of Eric, who, nearly nine centuries ago, discovered 
 America, and knew it not. Sailing from his native Norway, 
 skirting Iceland and Greenland, and coasting southward from 
 
 o o 
 
 Labrador, he sailed into Massachusetts Bay, and discovered 
 the New World, which he called "Vineland." Clad in his 
 corslet, he has landed, and, raising himself to his full height, 
 gazes far out before him with eager expectancy. On his face 
 is wonder and a look of inquiry. He shades his eyes, for 
 the morning sun blinds him ; the morning air plays with his 
 clustering locks ; it is the morning of his young life, and he 
 is full of hope ; there is morning in his soul, for he has dis 
 covered a world. How grandly would his eager, expectant 
 figure stand out against the blue, cut in colossal marble, and 
 surmounting a lofty column. 
 
 These, and other sketches, for mere mention of which space 
 is lacking, hold their places in her studio. Here also are 
 reminiscences of foreign travel, in bits of sculpture, antique 
 casts, photographs of Rome, and gems of the great art col 
 lections. Here, until death stills the busy brain, and robs 
 the hand of its cunning, will Anne Whitney continue her 
 career ; for her art is her life, and she is wedded to it in a 
 marriao-e that will never know divorce. Here will she con- 
 
 o 
 
 tinue to embody her beautiful conceptions, which, sometimes 
 faulty in detail, and sometimes in graces of finish, some 
 times daring to audacity, and sometimes, as she herself 
 declares, needing severe critical judgment, are yet moulded 
 by feeling under the lead of thought, manifesting that high 
 ideal quality which marks the artist as distinguished from 
 the artisan. 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 BY KATE SANBORN. 
 
 An After-dinner Speech An Amusing Incident A Southern Clergyman s 
 Opinion Miss VVillard s Ancestry Memories of Childhood s Days 
 Scenes from the Past Amusing Extract from Her Diary Her Keen 
 Sense of Humor Climbing the Pyramids "Genteel" Gymnastics 
 "Paul Tucker, of New York, Aged 181" Miss Willard s Life-work 
 
 Delivering Her First Lecture A Genuine Sensation Enlisting in the 
 Temperance Work Liberality and Sense of Justice Religious Nature 
 
 Specimen of Her Oratory Marvellous Command of Language Ex 
 periences in the South A Southern Welcome How She is Appreciated 
 at Home Universally Loved, Honored, and Respected. 
 
 live so fust nowadays that it is becoming 
 the custom to publish biographies of our 
 notables while they are yet with us. Emer 
 son, Whittier, and Lowell have all been 
 served up by eager admirers. If you are at 
 all distinguished in any direction from poli 
 tics to pugilism, literature or leather ; if you vc 
 made an effort to perch on the North Pole or 
 1 cross the Atlantic in a row-boat ; if you do 
 nothing in particular, but live on to an unconscion 
 able period, you may be sure that in many a snug 
 pigeon-hole several paragraphs are filed away which will tell 
 the public at the earliest moment after your demise every 
 important event in your career from cradle to grave. 
 
 If Queen Victoria hurts her knee, or Bismarck has an 
 unusual twinge of sciatica, or President Arthur labors under 
 a spring siege with catarrh, or a stray shot through a carriage 
 long after a prominent statesman has left it, gives rise to a 
 report of "attempted assassination," then the elaborate obit 
 uary notices are taken out, revised, and brought down to 
 latest date. 
 
692 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 I used to marvel at the celerity and exactness of these 
 mortuary tributes ; now they strike me as very much like 
 that famous impromptu of Sheridan s, which startled England 
 by its brilliancy, but which was found in a desk after his 
 death, written in many forms, labored over, touched and 
 retouched, polished until it shone a perfect gem. 
 
 Harriet Martineau, always prudent and provident, wrote her 
 own obituary for the London " daily " with which she had 
 corresponded for years, a very good idea. I only hope 
 Miss Willard may not have a suppressed wish to write mine 
 after reading the closing pages of this book, for I have 
 promised to "do" that noble woman, and as the various 
 sketches are to be arranged alphabetically, I am sure W is the 
 last letter that can boast of being the initial letter of any 
 famous American name. It was Gail Hamilton, I think, 
 who said with wit and truth that there was a strong tendencv 
 
 o ** 
 
 among American women to sit down on the curbstone and 
 
 O 
 
 write each others lives. I feel the awkwardness of the situa 
 tion, and would like to run away, as I once did after listening 
 to the heroine of my story. May I tell you about it ? 
 
 It was two years ago, at the anniversary dinner of 
 " Sorosis," in New York, and I had half promised the persua 
 sive president (Jennie June), that I would say " something." 
 The possibility of being called up for an after-dinner speech ! 
 Something brief, terse, sparkling, original, satisfactory oh, 
 you know the agony ! I had nothing in particular to say ; 
 wanted to be quiet and enjoy the treat. But between each 
 course, from oysters to black coffee, I tried hard, while appar 
 ently listening to my neighbor, to think up something " neat and 
 appropriate." To those who have not the gift of ready, grace 
 ful, off-hand utterance before a crowd, this coming martyrdom, 
 which increases in horror as you advance with deceptive gayety 
 from roast to game, and game to ices, is really one of the 
 severest trials of social life. Miss Willard happened to be 
 one of the honored guests that day, and was called on first. 
 I had previously indulged in an ignorant and extremely fool 
 ish horror of those crusading temperance fanatics. 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 695 
 
 When Miss "VYillard rose and began to speak T felt 
 instantly that she had something to say ; something that she 
 felt it was important we should hear, and how beauti 
 fully, how impressively, how simply it was said ! not a 
 thought of self, not one instant s hesitation for a thought or 
 word. Every eye was drawn to her earnest face ; every 
 heart was touched. As she sat down I rose, leaving the 
 room rather rapidly, and when my name was called, and my 
 little speech was expected, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, 
 thinking about her and her grand work. The whole thing 
 was a revelation to me. I had never met such a woman. No 
 affectation, nor pedantry, nor mannishness to mar the effect. 
 Of course it was the humiliating contrast between her soul- 
 stirring words and my miserable little society effort, that 
 drove me from the place, but all petty egotism vanished 
 before the wish to be of real use to others with which her 
 earnestness had inspired me. This is the effect she produces, 
 this the influence she exerts. 
 
 Do you remember one of the poems in the second volume 
 of "Hymns of the Ages," beginning, 
 
 " Late to our town there came a maid, 
 
 A noble woman, true and pure, 
 Who, in the little while she stayed, 
 Wrought works that shall endure." 
 
 O 
 
 The last lines of this verse express the blessed results of 
 her daily efforts. 
 
 A clergyman who came in late on the occasion of her 
 lecture in Charleston, said: "I expected to find a cropped- 
 haircd, masculine-looking individual, with hands in pocket 
 and voice keyed up to high C, and could scarcely believe my 
 eyes when I saw a graceful, beautiful woman, simply and yet 
 tastefully dressed, standing modestly in front of the pulpit, 
 and in soft, sweet tones, pleading for those who could not 
 plead for themselves. I had not listened two minutes before 
 I surrendered, and I could now no more doubt her call to the 
 work she is engaged in than I could question my own call to 
 the ministry." 
 
096 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 If you ask why Miss Willard took up the work to which 
 she is devoting her life, I should answer as I firmly believe, 
 she was called of God. Let me run over rapidly the princi 
 pal events of her life, that most of the space allotted be given 
 to her own words. Blood tells, and you will always find 
 that a strong man or women has good "stock" to draw from. 
 It would take too long to name all the famous ancestry, for 
 the line goes back to the Conquest ; and I agree with Charles 
 Lamb, who thought that dwelling with too much pride 
 on one s genealogy made one too much like a potato 
 all that was bevst of you under the ground. Suffice it to 
 state that one of the Willards was president of Harvard 
 College, and another figured as vice-president ; still another 
 was pastor of the veritable "Old South," another was the 
 architect of Bunker Hill Monument, another helped to 
 found Concord, Mass. That is a record to satisfy the bluest 
 blood of Boston ! 
 
 Frances was born in Churchville, New York, but her parents 
 removed to Oberlin, Ohio, when she was but three years of age. 
 They had both been teachers and were now anxious to pursue 
 their studies further. The father was soon a leader at the 
 West in politics, agriculture, education, and finance ; the 
 mother, God bless her! a woman far in advance of her age, 
 and determined to give her daughters every possible advan 
 tage. " She held that nature s standard ought to be restored ; 
 and that woman s influence and enfranchisement are the foun 
 tains of healing for the majority of ills in civil service. Her 
 ideal was that if our disabilities were removed it would brimj 
 
 o 
 about the summum bonum of human desire and aspiration, 
 
 and argued that the going forth of the two halves of hu 
 manity would help solve the problem that so puzzles the 
 thinking part of the world, viz. : " Why are the balance of 
 soul-forces so hopelessly out of plumb? " 
 
 With her only brother Oliver, and her darling sister Mary, 
 Frances now spent thirteen years on a large farm near Jancs- 
 ville, Wisconsin. Oh, the good times they had! the merry 
 romps and ingenious games and imitations of mature life ; and 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. G97 
 
 who can doubt that this constant communion with nature had 
 its effect? 
 
 The little folks got up an infinite variety of amusements. 
 They organized a board of public works, laid out towns and 
 villages, dabbled with clay in their "Art Club," and you may 
 be sure that literature was not forgotten. Frances not only 
 edited a newspaper, but wrote a long novel, poured forth her 
 soul in rhyme and kept a journal. She read what books 
 she could find, but the library was extremely limited, and an 
 occasional newspaper brought home in the father s pocket was 
 a rare treat. What a pretty word-picture she gives of the 
 home : 
 
 "You ask for my memories of those young years. Were 
 I a poet I might sing of them so that vistas in the woods, the 
 murmur of streams, the odor of moss and violets, and the 
 taste of nuts and berries should come to your imagination as 
 you heard me. O Nature ! glorious mirror of Divinity ! 
 What constant students were we of thy myriad forms and 
 mysteries all through those years of childhood ! 
 
 " As I write, separated by hundreds of miles from the dear 
 old home, past scenes rise before me, sounds once familiar 
 are in my ears. Away in the pasture the cow-bell s mellow 
 tinkle is heard, bringing suggestions of cool and shady places, 
 of odors moist and sweet. The drowsy, dreamy feeling 
 comes again, the same which the music of the bells brought 
 with it long ago. Again the wind is making that endless, 
 breathing sound among the tree-tops ; again the liquid notes 
 of the blackbirds join in chorus, in the poplar grove down 
 by the river; again the complaint of the mourning dove, 
 sweetest and saddest of songs, c omes from the lonely depths 
 of the woods. And so the spell is upon me, and I will 
 picture a few scenes from the past. 
 
 " A queer old cottage with rambling roof, gables, dormer- 
 windows, and little porches, crannies, and out-of-the-way 
 nooks scattered here and there, was our home. The bluffs, 
 so characteristic of Wisconsin, rose about it on the right and 
 left. The beautiful Eock River flowed at the west side ; to 
 
098 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 the east a prairie stretched away to meet the horizon, yellow 
 with grain in summer, fleecy with snow in the winter of the 
 year. Groves of oak and hickory are on either hand ; a 
 miniature forest of evergreens almost conceals the cottage 
 from the view of passers-by; a vine the Virginia creeper 
 twines at will around the pillars of the piazza and over the 
 parlor windows, while its rival, the Michigan rose, clambers 
 over trellis and balustrade to the roof. Tlie air is laden with 
 the perfume of flowers. Through the thick and luxuriant 
 growth of shrubbery paths stray off aimlessly, tempting the 
 feet of the curious down their mysterious aisles." 
 
 Bits from her diary at sixteen show how perfectly natural 
 and girlish she was at an age when young ladies are now fitted 
 for college : 
 
 " Caught a blue-jay in my trap out in the hazel thicket. I 
 knew that he wasn t game, and let him go. The school-house 
 in our district is just finished. I shall attend regularly, visit 
 ing my traps on the way." Later, " Sister and I got up long 
 before light to prepare for the first day at school. Put all 
 our books in mother s satchel. Had a nice tin pail full of 
 dinner. Study arithmetic, geography, grammar, reading, and 
 spelling, which takes up every minute of my time. Stood 
 next to Pat O Donahue in spelling, and Pat stood at the 
 head." 
 
 "This is my seventeenth birthday and the oath of my 
 martyrdom. Mother insists that I shall have my hair done 
 up woman fashion, and my dress made to trail like hers. 
 She says she shall never forgive herself for letting me run 
 wild so long. We had a great time over it all, and here I sit 
 like another Sampson shorn of my strength. That figure 
 wont do though, for the greatest trouble with me is I shall 
 never be shorn again ; my back-hair is twisted up like a 
 corkscrew. I carry eighteen hairpins ; my head aches ; my 
 feet are entangled in the skirt of my new gown. I can never 
 jump over a fence again so long as I live. As for chasing the 
 sheep down in the shady pasture it s out of the question, and 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 699 
 
 to climb to my eagle s-nest seat in the big burr-oak would 
 ruin this new frock beyond repair. Altogether, I recognize 
 the fact that my occupation s gone." 
 
 This was indeed her last glimpse of perfect freedom. Soon 
 came a term of study with Miss Catherine Beecher, then a 
 year at a ladies seminary, from which she graduated with 
 honor, having attended school in all but thirty-six months. 
 
 Of course, the next question was, "What shall I do?" 
 and in her readiness for work she taught school in a little red 
 hovel a regular " deestrict " school. And from that she 
 went on and up until she was preceptress of the Genesee 
 Wesleyan Seminary at Seneca, N. Y. It was about this time 
 that she wrote a touching tribute to her sister Mary, who had 
 been taken from the happy circle. In "Nineteen Beautiful 
 Years " their childhood and home life is perfectly reproduced. 
 
 Next came two years and more in Europe with a friend, 
 Miss Willard, studying and observing as she travelled, 
 writing home her experiences for various papers. 
 
 From her lecture on " The Pyramids " I give an extract to 
 show her power of graphic portraiture and her keen sense of 
 humor : 
 
 " We cross the limits of the belt of green, which is old 
 father Nile s perpetual gift to Egypt ; the desert s golden edge 
 comes nearer, and at last, our white-robed Arab checks his 
 steed at the foot of Cheops pyramid, where shade of 
 great Pharaoh, forgive prosaic Yankees ! the Cheops 
 restaurant treats us all to Smyrna dates and Turkish coffee. 
 A banditti of Bedouins, fierce-eyed and unsavory, surrounds 
 us as we emerge from our retreat, and clamor for their priv 
 ilege of pulling and pushing, twisting and hallooing us up 
 the saw-tooth side of the monster pyramid. We get speed 
 ily to windward, assure them that, as for us, we ve " not the 
 least idea of going up" (at least not now), and turn aside to 
 visit the tomb-pits at the left, hoping to shake off the odious 
 crew. But you might just as well try to dismiss the plague 
 by a dancing-room bow ; the old lady Fates by raising your 
 hat ; or the neighborhood bore by a glance at your chro- 
 
700 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 nomcter. They career before us, a tatterdemalion throng ; 
 they lag behind us, they dance about us, they grin, they 
 groan, they lay their hands upon their hearts and point with 
 melodramatic finger to the serene heights they would gladly 
 help us climb ; while the one refrain from which, for two con 
 secutive breaths, they are utterly incapable of refraining, is, 
 "Goin up, mister mtidame 1 Yankee Doodle, goin up! 
 Ver good, thankee. Yankee Doodle go up ebery time ! " 
 
 And her description of the "getting up-stairs " when fairly 
 started, is capital, but too long to quote. She says : 
 
 " Just try, some day, in the solitude of your apartment, to 
 step genteelly from floor to mantlepiece, or on top of the 
 bureau ; do this one hundred times in fourteen minutes, and 
 see if the achievement is nt a feat. 
 
 " Above the solemn doorway of the King s tomb, in letters 
 several feet long, done in black paint, we had the mortifica 
 tion of seeing this inscription : 
 
 PAUL TUCKER, OF NEW YORK. 
 
 " All the way up the Nile, even to Philfc, we had found this 
 same epitaph of American refinement. But on a tablet so 
 tempting as the front angle of the Big Pyramid, the con 
 fiding Paul had vouchsafed a bit of personal history, else 
 where withheld. Beneath his name he had printed in strag 
 gling capitals, this time not more than a foot apiece in 
 altitude 
 
 AGED 18J. 
 
 " It was a pleasant and consoling thing to know how tender 
 were his years." 
 
 During her stay abroad her attention was drawn to the dis 
 tressing condition of women in the East, and indeed in the 
 greater part of Europe, and she was led to ask, " What can 
 be done to make the world a wider place for women?" But 
 she has never been in the least an extremist on the " woman 
 question." It is the "human" question that thrills every 
 fibre of her heart, " believing that Avhatever dwarfs woman 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 701 
 
 dwarfs man, and that her low estate has been the check on civil 
 ization." She is a true lover of woman, a woman s woman. 
 
 On her return she was appointed Dean of the Woman s Col 
 lege at Evanston, Illinois, where she labored faithfully and 
 with marked success for three years. Says Miss Gordon : 
 " Were one to ask the salient features of her work as a 
 teacher, the reply would be, the development of individual 
 character along intellectual and moral lines, the revelation to 
 her pupils of their special powers and vocation as workers, 
 her constantly recurring question being not only " What are 
 you going to be in the world? " but " What are you going to 
 do?" So that after six months under her tuition each of her 
 scholars had a definite idea of a life-work. 
 
 In a series of " Talks to Girls," written for the " Chicago 
 
 o 
 
 Post," she says, " Let me now, for a brief space, coming 
 freshly from the field of active service, where the banners 
 wave and squadrons wheel, try to talk to you of the condi 
 tions of success in this wonderful battle of life. First of all 
 I would say, keep to your specialty to the doing of the 
 thing you accomplish with most satisfaction to yourself and 
 most benefit to those around you. Keep to this, whether it 
 is raising turnips or tunes, painting screens or battle-pieces ; 
 studying political economy or domestic receipts." 
 
 She had wonderful power over the girls under her charge, 
 and the system of self-government which she instituted at 
 Evanston, in order to develop womanly self-respect and dig 
 nity of character, was a success while she presided over the 
 large household, her " unwritten laws " and her personal influ 
 ence being a stronger control for good than any amount of 
 strict and humiliating regulations. Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, 
 was her ideal teacher, and she was as grand in her place as 
 he in his. 
 
 Fully two thousand pupils have been under her influence 
 and instruction, and I venture to affirm that not one of all 
 that number but was led at least to think of ihe nobility of a 
 steadfast Christian life, and to wish to be something better 
 and nobler through her words and daily deeds. Even the 
 
702 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 unconscious influence of such a life has power beyond ex 
 pression. 
 
 Just about this time she addressed a woman s missionary 
 meeting in Chicago, and a gentleman who was present was so 
 much struck by her fitness for a public speaker that he called 
 on her the next day and urged that she develop this gift, add 
 ing, "If you will within three weeks prepare a lecture on 
 any subject you choose, I will present you with as fine an 
 audience as can be got together in Chicago." With this he 
 gave her fifty dollars as prepayment. Said Miss Willard : 
 " The proposition quite took my breath away, but I went at 
 once and laid it before mother; she replied, By all means, 
 my child, accept enter every open door, and so I sat down 
 and wrote a lecture on The New Chivalry, the substance of 
 which was that the chivalry of the nineteenth century is not 
 that of knights and troubadors, but the plain, practical chiv 
 alry of justice, which gives to woman a fair chance to be all 
 that God gave her power to be. In it I stated that my bro 
 ther had just entered a theological course just what his sis 
 ter would have done if the world had not said No. " This 
 maiden eflbrt Avas a pathetic protest against the hindrances in 
 woman s way of advancement. " The lecture was ready," 
 continued Miss Willard, " at the expiration of three weeks, 
 and with no manuscript visible I appeared before an elegant 
 audience in Centenary Church. The manuscript was with me 
 in portfolio, ready for reference in case of failure ; but I 
 dicTntfail" 
 
 The lecture produced such a genuine sensation that within 
 two weeks she had nearly one hundred engagements to speak, 
 and her career as a public orator was fairly begun. 
 
 Up to the time of the " Woman s Crusade " in Ohio, her 
 attention had never been called particularly to the tempe 
 rance question, but with that solemn crisis there came to her 
 what she calls " an arrest of thought" on this subject, and as 
 a result she felt called to give up all her other interests and 
 devote herself, heart, brain, body, to the work of saving rnen 
 from the cruel temptations of the saloons. 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 703 
 
 There have been two occasions when for the sake of others 
 she has devoted herself to other work her labors in Boston 
 as an assistant of Mr. Moody during his revival meetings in 
 that city, and her brief editorship of the " Chicago Evening 
 Post," after the sudden death of her brother Oliver. 
 
 Miss Willard believes thoroughly in finding out what you 
 can do best, and working persistently at that one tiling. 
 Conscience alone must have decided her course in life, for her 
 genius and versatility would naturally lead her in various 
 directions. With her power as a writer, her marvellous com 
 mand of language, her keen literary judgments, and her fond 
 ness for books, it is evident that she could easily have dis 
 tinguished herself as a lecturer, literatcur, author, and 
 remained in the quiet of student life, which she so thoroughly 
 enjoyed. 
 
 There are various ways of looking at the temperance ques 
 tion. The cool-headed scientist regards all excitement over 
 the fact that " intemperance is yearly dragging a hundred 
 thousand of the men and women of our country down to the 
 grave," as " a gush of sloppy sympathy," and states seriously 
 that " intemperance, while doing some harm, as is usually the 
 case with natural agents, is also doing an immense amount of 
 good. By far the greater portion of those who succumb to 
 alcholization and to deadily practices that usually accompany 
 it, are thieves, thugs, prostitutes, gamblers, sharpers, ruf 
 fians, and other members of the criminal and quasi-criminal 
 classes, upon whom whiskey accommodatingly performs the 
 office of judge and executioner, cutting their careers off at an 
 average of five years, when without this interruption they 
 would be extended to possibly twenty or thirty. The cer 
 tainty and celerity with which it ferrets out and destroys these 
 classes recommends it strongly over the ordinary process of 
 justice." 
 
 Then there is the moderate view, which permits good wine 
 on the tables of the rich, but fights and legislates against the 
 poor and adulterated liquors of the grog-shops, which are 
 all the workingman can ever hope to enjoy, and brands as 
 
704 FRANCES E. W1LLARD. 
 
 fools and criminals the unfortunate wretches who from inher 
 ited tastes or lack of will-power, slip over the line from 
 moderate drinking into a drunkard s grave. 
 
 This is a pleasant way of quieting one s conscience, if it will 
 be stilled by such reasoning. We all pity or loathe the 
 drunkard. We all think that poor folks are better olF with 
 out any liquor, but AVC, in our comfortable homes do not 
 intend to give up our light wines or an occasional bottle of 
 champagne. Wine is a blessing if properly indulged in, like 
 any other good thing. There is nothing quite so satisfying 
 as a glass of Bass s ale or Milwaukee lager, with a little lunch 
 at noon ; and at night it brings the sweetest sleep. And in 
 case of a severe cold there is nothing like a hot whiskey 
 punch. Oh, no I Wine is an excellent thing, and a dinner is 
 never elegant without it. The old patriarchs beloved of God 
 used it freely, and it would be difficult to find much in the 
 Bible against the use of wine in moderation. 
 
 This seems to me the utterly selfish and look-out-for-the- 
 comfort-of-No.-l view. Extremely pleasant and easy. By 
 this convenient plan, a reverend servant of the Lord can hold 
 a sparkling glass of Pommery Sec in his hand at dinner, de 
 lighting in its stimulating, cheering, blessed influence, and 
 then sit down and argue eloquently that the number of rum- 
 holes be diminished and the poor be properly punished if 
 (hey indulge too freely in the strychnine and logwood, tannin 
 and prussic acids, for which they squander their hard earnings. 
 This, I regard as an extremely comfortable doctrine for the 
 well-to-do to practise, and I do not wonder at its popularity. 
 But such a letter as the following from my " Tribune " of to 
 day makes one wonder if this is exactly the most Christlike 
 course : 
 
 " I have just been reading a description of Dundee by the 
 American reporter. It is enough to make every Scottish 
 man blush for shame. It is not a bit exaggerated. It un 
 derstates the real condition of thousands of the people. It is 
 a desecration of the word home to call the abode of the 
 drunkard by that hallowed name. The women and the chil- 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 705 
 
 clren suffer wrongs in these dens equal in their horror to the 
 darkest deeds of the slave passage. They are crowded into 
 chambers without air or sunshine, they lie on beds of filth and 
 rags, they are without food .for days together, and they are 
 denied all that makes health, not to speak of comfort, pos 
 sible. Their life is one long tale of woe. In country vil 
 lages the abode of the drunkard is the same. The spring 
 returns ; the soft air stirs among bare but budding branches, 
 and the crocus and snowdrop proclaim that the winter is over 
 and gone. Amid scenes of surpassing beauty, beside our 
 noble river, below the green Law, by mountain, stream, and 
 hamlet, with roofs glittering in the sun, surrounded by all 
 that makes Scotland so fair and so beautiful, are scenes of 
 moral pollution which ought to startle and alarm us all. 
 
 " The evil is not known. Our church-goers in thousands 
 pass by on the other side and close their eyes to the misery 
 which is so near. They never see the worst. They wonder 
 at the zeal of those who have gone down and seen with their 
 own eyes the true condition of our people. The sufferings 
 of the children, especially of the little girls, may well goad 
 wise men into fury. Children with bright eyes never see 
 anything that is pure or lovely, their little ears are filled with 
 cursing. Every avenue to their soul is choked with unutter 
 able filth. More than five-and-twenty thousand people in 
 Dundee live in single rooms, with nearly four persons to the 
 room. Let that one fact be considered." 
 
 The guest at a dinner whence the hostess had banished 
 wine was met by practical logic when he petulantly mur 
 mured in the ear of his next neighbor, " At this rate it won t 
 be long till these fanatics will announce that we must dis 
 pense with mustard on our roast beef ! " And the lady 
 replied, " If taking too much mustard on roast beef had 
 saddled this country with taxes, disrupted its homes, dis 
 honored its manhood, agonized its women and children, 
 emptied its churches, and crowded its jails and poor-houses 
 to overflowing, I think I would be willing to take my roast 
 beef without the mustard to the end of time." 
 43 
 
706 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 There is a certain text in the Bible which bears rather hard 
 on the moderate drinker, and which has become the watch 
 word of those who are willing to deny themselves a positive 
 pleasure, that those who are not so strong may be strength 
 ened, and sheltered, and perhaps saved. " It is good neither 
 to eat flesh nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy 
 brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak." 
 
 Miss Willard is the last woman in the world to act from 
 any desire of notoriety. When the summons came to her to 
 go out and plead for others she was studying quietly in her 
 country home, and had never given serious thought to the 
 liquor traffic ; was accustomed to drink wine when abroad ; 
 " but her heart was so stirred by the simple story of women 
 who cared for the tragedy in other women s lives enough to 
 reach out a helping hand that the whole current of her life 
 was changed. Under a steady fire of opposition from friendly 
 ranks the blows that tell most she enlisted in the tempe 
 rance work." With what efficiency and pleasure her own 
 words will best tell. 
 
 She never forgets Christ, and his presence seems ever with 
 her. Her spirit will be seen in the following quotation : 
 
 My friend has implied in his kind words of introduction 
 that there is one important thing in this life, and that is, 
 Christ must be King. This is the one important truth of all. 
 Since I have been going about to and fro, talking to the 
 people, I find that there is nothing after all that I like so 
 well as to be in a place like this, among Christian women and 
 men and children, and talk to them of Christ. And when I 
 speak on the question of temperance, I do not like to set 
 aside those addicted to habits of intemperance as a peculiar 
 class of sinners, for though those who drink bear visible 
 scars, were the marks of other sins so apparent, how few 
 would escape ! " 
 
 Her beautiful liberality and sense of justice is seen in her 
 refusing to remain with Mr. Moody as his co-laborer in the 
 great meetings in Boston, because the good man in his zeal 
 for what was strictly " evangelical " forbade her to speak at 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 707 
 
 the same meetings with Mrs. Livermore, who is universally 
 regarded as a devoted Christian but belongs to the Universal- 
 ists. Miss Willard "could not but feel fellowship with every 
 honest and intelligent worker in the dear cause so close to 
 her heart." In this she proved herself far superior to her 
 leader. 
 
 Her decision in favor of total abstinence, which some con 
 sider narrow and unnecessarily rigid, springs from her broad 
 philanthrophy, her desire that every tempted man or woman 
 should have all the safeguards possible, and that none should 
 meet their doom in the homes of their friends. She says : 
 " There may be those here who think that a glass of wine now 
 and then doesn t make so much difference, after all, and call 
 me fanatical because I urge total abstinence who forget 
 that the influences of society wine-drinking are the hardest 
 we have to contend with. The drops of wine in the banquet 
 have their sequel in the salt tear-drops on somebody s cheek. 
 Let us not be content with looking out for ourselves. Let s 
 make society a kind of larger home. Let s rally around and 
 shield the tempted man. 
 
 " We temperance women of America believe in One who 
 shall yet be crowned King of Nations, and we are ready to 
 do and die for Him. O Christ ! it is not brute force that has 
 carried on the triumph of the cross, since the little proces 
 sion of fishermen and women started out along the hillside of 
 Judea. No, it has been one mightier far ; for love-force has 
 won the battles by which Thy cross grows regnant day by 
 day. Prayer-force is mighty to the pulling down of strong 
 holds. Prayer has been raising a citadel around our work 
 ers, high as the hope of a saint, deep as the depths of a 
 drunkard s despair. If prayer and womanly influence are 
 doing so much as forces for God by indirect methods, 
 how shall it be when that electric force is brought to bear 
 through the battery of the ballot-box, along the wires of 
 law ? " 
 
 And her steady push is seen in the closing words : " We 
 mean to go straight on. We mean to be as good-natured as 
 
708 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 sunshine, but as persistent as fate." And again : " Success 
 does nt f happen. It is organized, pre-empted, captured, by 
 consecrated common sense. 
 
 An extract from her speech on the " Prevention of the Sale 
 of Liquor to Minors" will give an idea of her more impas 
 sioned oratory. One lady tells me that after hearing her she 
 felt that she could go out and be a " praying band " all by 
 herself: 
 
 " My brothers, you will stand again before the ballot-box 
 to make this same decision. Oh, when you do so, listen to the 
 pleading voices of those you love the best the women who 
 pray and watch to see these streets made safer for the boys 
 who must soon go out to take their chances with the rest. 
 Hear the temperance workers of the land, whose ears are 
 weary with the moans of the heart-broken and the lost, as 
 they bid you gaze upon the panorama so often seen by them, 
 as they look out over the Republic in this hour of its struggle 
 and its humiliation. Look yonder at the pitiful procession 
 led off by hundreds of poor creatures, most of them young. 
 Note their wandering, uncertain footsteps, weak, aimless 
 hands, gibbering lips, vacant faces, and poor dim eyes, where 
 royal reason never was enthroned the idiots of Illinois 
 fifty per cent, of them made so by alcohol ; and following 
 these with rapid, random step, see this long line of maniacs 
 whose eyes gleam with a lurid light that tells of horrid and 
 distorted thoughts, whose manacled hands clank the chains 
 they evermore must wear, and remember, more than half of 
 these were made the wrecks they are by the beverage around 
 whose sale your ballot throws the guarantee and the safe 
 guards of the State. 
 
 " But do not vote yet ! Listen ! Yonder they come can 
 you not hear the shuffle of the prison-gang ? See the men 
 in striped garments, and with close-cropped hair, fully one- 
 half of them are young men, too, and think of all their in 
 dustry and skill might have achieved for the home and for 
 the State ; but your money helps to build living tombs for 
 them where between bolts and bars you pay also for their 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 709 
 
 board and clothes. But eighty per cent, of their crimes were 
 committed in the craze of the alcohol dream. 
 
 " But do not vote yet 1 Here inarches solemnly in sable 
 garments the heart-broken mothers who loved and cared for 
 these boys who are lost, the sisters who once were fond and 
 proud of them, and had been still except for drink. Shall 
 their tearful eyes and mournful voices appeal to you in vain? 
 
 " But do not vote yet ! See the long procession that now 
 follows the reformed men of Illinois with ribbons red and 
 blue. Remember that they have made a holy resolve against 
 a desperate appetite, and that in keeping that resolve they 
 have worked by the help of God. Then think about their daily 
 struggle. Think of the vow they have taken against a des 
 perate appetite ; think of their daily struggle in a snare your 
 vote shall help to tighten or to loosen ; see in each worn but 
 manly face, a plea for help from you, and then in God s sight, 
 friend, decide upon your duty. 
 
 " But do not vote yet ! For last of all and most significant, 
 I catch the pattering steps of the little soldiers, newly mus 
 tered in this army of temptation and of sin, the tender little 
 feet that walk the dusty road and choose where two paths 
 meet, the narrow or the broad. Oh, I plead with you to make 
 it safer on our streets for the feet of the ninety and nine that 
 went not astray before their unsuspecting steps shall cross its 
 threshold ; I pray you close that open door to shame and 
 death ! Duties are ours, events are God s ! Now vote, and 
 may God deal with you as you shall deal with these your 
 brothers and your sisters and with God s little ones." 
 
 As president of the Woman s Christian Temperance Union, 
 Miss Willard has shown an amount of tact, energy, and organ 
 izing ability that are extraordinary. She is constantly de 
 veloping methods of work and individual workers, and has 
 already created forty distinct departments in this grand army 
 of \vomen, who are working cheerfully and steadily under her 
 wise direction. " She is without doubt foremost of workers 
 among Christian women of America. Rare by endowment, 
 of superior education and high purpose, she has also entire 
 
710 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 freedom from conceit and other forms of selfishness, possess 
 ing fidelity, enthusiasm, simplicity, and sweetness of spirit. 
 It is enough to say that she has a great soul, and swiftly 
 recognizes greatness of soul in others. If any one has & 
 good trait, Frances Willard is sure to find it out. Such 
 qualities render her pre-eminent, and entitle her to 
 wear the crown of leadership. She is not a hobbyist, 
 nor a particle one-sided, but has consecrated unusual talent 
 to a noble cause, and works persistently and conscientiously 
 for it. 
 
 " She is the originator of the f Home Protection move 
 ment, i.e., the ballot in woman s hands as a weapon for the 
 protection of her home. 
 
 " In the early days she encountered great opposition because 
 of this, but now there is practical unanimity in the ranks, 
 and the phrase home protection is part and parcel of the 
 Independent Prohibition party." 
 
 When the petition, which contained the signatures of over 
 thirty thousand earnest men and women, was presented to the 
 House Committee on the Judiciary, Miss Willard made an 
 address which was remarkable for its logic, condensation, 
 eloquence, and bristling with facts that would convince any 
 but those who were determined for personal and political 
 reasons not to be convinced. She argued that women should 
 have the right of suffrage in order to regulate the traffic in 
 intoxicating liquors. 
 
 And at the close she said : " I thought I ought to have the 
 ballot when I paid the hard-earned taxes on my mother s 
 cottage home, but I never said as much for though I honor 
 those who speak in the name of justice, pure and simple, I 
 never had the bravery to work along that line. For my own 
 sake I had not courage, but for thy sake, dear native land, I 
 have. For love of the dear homes whose watch-fires are ae 
 beacon-lights of heaven, for love of you, heart-broken wives, 
 whose tremulous lips have blessed me ; for you sweet mothers, 
 who in the cradle s shadow kneel to-night beside your infant 
 sons ; and for you, sorrowful little children who, with faces 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 711 
 
 strangely old, listen to-night for him whose footsteps frighten 
 you, it is for love of you that I have dared to speak." 
 
 At another time she spoke of "the habit of stron^ drink, 
 
 o 
 
 which changes the human features and the human heart so 
 that even a man s mother would hardly know him, so that 
 even God would hardly know him. The fight for temperance 
 is a war in which the women should have a hand. Year by 
 year a long procession is passing through the drunkard s 
 door into a drunkard s eternity. The army is constantly 
 being recruited from the ranks of the boys of the land, who 
 are being led away to the drunkard s awful doom. The Bible 
 and the Gospel of Christ have no enemy so great and mighty 
 as the liquor traffic, and the Sermon on the Mount and the 
 Ten Commandments are voted up or voted down as the voters 
 at the ballot-boxes vote for or against prohibition. It is 
 curious that nobody s home can have any insurance on it, 
 although the grog-shops have the freedom of the place and 
 are licensed to do their deadly work if they will only pay the 
 money. Traps and gins to catch men are legalized and set in 
 the streets, and into them the heedless and unwary fall under the 
 protection of the laws. I hate the sin, but I love the sinner ; 
 I hate the liquor traffic, but I would do all within my power to 
 get the men engaged in it employed in some better business." 
 I can think of no surer proof of Miss Willard s pre-emi 
 nent fitness and qualifications for her mission than in the 
 reception that has been universally accorded her at the South. 
 She is a Northern temperance woman, and a woman who 
 addresses large audiences from platform and pulpit. This 
 was something decidedly heretical, but clergymen of the 
 most fastidious ideas, bishops who had hitherto agreed with 
 Paul about woman s keeping silence in churches, and culti 
 vated Southern ladies who had been strongly secession in 
 their sympathies during the war, all extended to Miss Willard 
 the most cordial greeting, and her visits to the South have 
 been one long ovation. No money was asked for, no collec 
 tions taken, but the people spontaneously anticipated all 
 expenses. The best room at hotels, the best seat in palace* 
 
712 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 car were generously given her. She says : " The people of 
 highest social and religious standing rally to the cause with a 
 gladness of heart which it is good to see. They have 
 received me as a sister, trusted and loved. Their hospitality 
 is boundless. I am showered with invitations, and there are 
 calls, flowers, dainties, and drives with no limit but time to 
 enjoy them. The Southern ladies take up these lines of 
 work with a zeal and intelligence which I have never seen 
 equalled." 
 
 A well-known Southern lady says of her : " From the sea 
 board to the old Palmetto State there is yet to be spoken the 
 first word of unfavorable criticism." 
 
 She was commended by press, pulpit, and people, and 
 organized fifty auxiliaries to the Temperance Union. 
 
 Paul H. Hayne, the invalid poet of the South, whose own 
 life is one of constant heroism, contributed a poem to the 
 National Temperance Union Meeting at Louisville in Novem 
 ber of 1882. 
 
 Temperance poetry as a rule seems to be painfully ground 
 out you always wish it hadn t been concocted. But Mr. 
 Hayne s verses show that the fault is not in the theme. 
 
 As a Southerner s welcome to Northern women it is ex 
 quisitely gracious, and while the honors of the deadly traffic 
 are painted forcibly, the music and rhythm of the poetry is 
 never lost. 
 
 " Thrice welcome, oh sisters ! we meet you, 
 
 Heaven s chosen, invincible bands ; 
 Thrice welcome, oh sisters ! we greet you 
 
 Brave spirits and resolute hands ! 
 We would stir a deep fountain of cleansing, 
 
 More fruitful of life-giving balms, 
 Than the far-haunted pool of Bethesda, 
 
 That starred the fair Valley of Palms. 
 
 " At the touch of your tenderness fervid 
 The pure tides of healing shall rise ; 
 So the blinded of soul gazing Godward, 
 With purged and beautified eyes; 
 
FRANCES E. WILLARD. 713 
 
 So the leprous of mind as of conscience 
 
 Receive the wave s kisses and thrill ; 
 As the hardened defilement melts slowly, 
 
 And the hot pulse of anguish grows still. 
 
 " Let us join hands and hearts for that Circe, 
 
 Whose charm of unsanctified spells 
 The strength, beauty, virtue of Ages 
 
 Hath lured to fierce, fathomless hells, 
 tlnquelled and unquenched in her passions, 
 
 Still merciless, maddens and mars, 
 Till the sunshine is sad where she passes 
 
 And her shadow throws gloom on the stars. 
 
 " Ah ! Christ ! the fair homes she has blasted 1 
 
 The young loves made arctic in spring ! 
 The eagle ambitious dragged earthward, 
 
 All palsied in purpose as wing. 
 Ah ! Christ ! her malign desolations, 
 
 Her doom to the midnight and mire, 
 The stern savage sweep of her scourges, 
 
 The hiss of her serpents of fire. 
 
 ^ So come from your streams of the northland, 
 
 Flashed down into cataract lights, 
 From the sheen of your mountains majestic, 
 
 Grown softer through multiplied heights. 
 Come southward, serene as the morning 
 
 Emerged from night s mystical cope, 
 Brave heralds of love as of warning, 
 
 Bright angels of rescue and hope." 
 
 This all sounds easy and charming, poems, orations popu 
 larity, but who can realize the anxieties, the fatigue, the 
 responsibilities of such a position ! No organization ever did 
 or ever will run without constant friction. Her family 
 motto, " Gaudet patientia duris" (patiences rejoices in hard 
 ships) lias been faithfully exemplified in her own life. But a 
 private letter from Miss Willard when she had been censured 
 and criticised after trying to do the best for all will show the 
 secret of her strength : 
 
714 FRANCES E. WILLARD. 
 
 " Am badgered to death and yet not worried a hair. What 
 do you make of that? I fancy the explanation is, that unless 
 I am an awfully deceived woman I am desirous of doing 
 God s will, and so the clamor on this little footstool of His 
 is like the humming of mosquitoes outside the curtain. It 
 rather lulls me into quiet." 
 
 We have seen how Miss Willard is regarded by the public, 
 but let me give a tribute paid her in her own home recently 
 by a life-long friend. It was said at a Union Missionary 
 meeting in Evanston, Illinois : " I am reminded just here 
 of what Frances E. Willard, my friend and yours, once said 
 to me in one of our quiet talks" : 
 
 " I ve given up much in literature and art, and things I 
 love, that seemed so necessary orrce, but now I think there 
 will be time enough in heaven. The world is waiting ; souls 
 must be redeemed. If I might digress a little, it would be 
 to thank God for this brave soul who has gone to be a 
 Deborah in the army of the Lord. Here, in her Evanston 
 home, my heart throbs a little quicker as I remember those 
 first days and months when she entered upon this new mis 
 sion, and set out upon her errand of love. The difficulties 
 and trials of those days, the weary journey ings since, the 
 efforts to raise the low, to cheer and stimulate the depressed, 
 to uplift the weak, the tempted, the fallen, these are known 
 only in the heart of the King. Stopping to-day among her 
 neighbors and friends, my heart is moved to a more loving 
 appreciation of this large-minded, tender-hearted Evanston 
 girl, and I rejoice that from your midst has gone out one of 
 the noblest representatives of American Christian woman 
 hood." 
 
 You must see by this time why Miss Willard is universally 
 loved, honored, and reverenced. "As an educator of women 
 in the wider sense, as an emancipator from conventionalities, 
 prejudices, narrowness, and as a representative on a spiritual 
 plane of the new age upon which we are entering, she takes 
 her place with the foremost women of her time." She says 
 herself: "It is good not to have been born earlier than the 
 
FRANCES E. W1LLARD. 715 
 
 nineteenth century ; and, for myself, I could have rested 
 content until the twenty-fifth, by which date I believe our 
 hopeful dawn of reason, liberty, and worship will have grown 
 to noonday. Oh! native land the world s hope, the gos 
 pel s triumph, the millennium s dawn, are all with thee. " 
 
 I must add that it was at Miss Willard s suggestion that 
 Haystack Mountain was christened Mount Garficld during 
 those dragging, anxious days of the President s illness. She 
 said : " Surely he is entitled, by the grandeur of his charac 
 ter, the height of his fortitude, and the depth of the people s 
 love for him, to the apotheosis of these everlasting hills." 
 
 That was just like Miss Willard, to think of the right thing 
 at the right time, and see that it was done. She needs no 
 mountain re-christened to perpetuate her name. If every 
 man and woman who have been influenced for good by her 
 life and aims (pure as the ice-capped peaks and higher than 
 any earthly measurement) could assemble in one place to give 
 her thanks, would it not be a blessed thing? May she meet 
 them all in the life beyond, towards which she ever looks 
 with firm confidence and hope. And of her, in closing, let 
 me give the Bible text which comes to my mind : " They that 
 be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament ; and 
 they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever 
 and ever." 
 

 
 
 
 
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