James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

[75] 75 its forces and staggered up, and on. To this young life, “bought with a price,” this frail flower, born in anguish and nurtured with tears, Fanny Fern has since devoted herself with more than a mother's tender solicitude. In this work, as in household duties, she has been efficiently aided and supported by her sole remaining daughter.

Mrs. Parton has been from the first a most acceptable writer for children. Her motherhood, a true motherhood of the heart, has given her the clue to the most mysterious, angel-guarded labyrinths of a child's soul. She is the faithful interpreter of children, from the poor “tormented baby,” on its nurse's knee, trotted, and tickled, and rubbed, and smothered, and physicked,--all the way up through the perils, difficulties, and exceeding bitter sorrows of childhood, out of short flocks and roundabouts, into the rosy estate of young womanhood and the downy-lipped dignity of young manhood. Having a heart of perennial freshness, full of spontaneous sympathies and enthusiasms, she never gets so far away from her own youth that she cannot feel a thrill of kindred delight in looking on the pleasures of the young,--on their bright, glad, eager faces. Bulwer says, “Young girls are very charming creatures, except when they get together and fall a-giggling.” Now I will venture to say this is just the time when Fanny Fern likes them best,--unless, indeed, the giggling is ill-timed, and therefore ill-mannered. In a scene of festal light, bloom, and music, of glancing and dancing young figures, she would never stand aside in the gloom of dark shrubbery, hard and cold and solemnly envious, like the tomb in a certain landscape of Poussin, bearing the inscription, “I also once lived amid the delights of Arcadia.”

Yet, while ready to rejoice in the innocent mirth and exultant hopes of youth, this true woman can also feel a tender charity for its follies, and a yearning pity for its errors. No poor unfortunate in her utmost extremity of shame and mad