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About thirty years ago, when
Andrew Jackson and
Martin Van Buren lived in the
White House; when questions of a national bank and a protective tariff interested without arousing the popular mind; when the great and glorious valley of the Mississippi still gave homes to the red man and haunts to wild beasts; when
Bryant was fresh from those native hills, broad, round, and green, where he dreamed the Thanatopsis; when visions of Absalom and Jephthah's daughter were floating fresh and sacred before the eyes of
Willis, --a traveller through Pompey, one of the youthful towns of western New York, might have turned in his saddle to take a second look at the lithe figure and the glowing face of a village romp.
Could such tourist have known that, in the bright-eyed school-girl with rustic dress and touseled hair, he saw one of the rising lights of the coming age; a letterwriter who should charm a million readers by the piquant dash and spicy flavor of her style; a delightful mugazinist; a peetess, the melody and ring of whose stanzas should remind us of the most famous lyres of the world; a woman who, standing calm, graceful, and self-poised before great audiences, and thrilling them by noble and earnest words spoken in the deep gloom of national disaster, should call up rich memories of the
Roman matron in her noblest form, or of the brightest figures that move on the storied page of -
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France,could he have foreseen all
that as in the future of this village beauty, the traveller would have done more than turn for a second look.
He would have halted, and talked with the young
Corinne; he would have lingered to hear her speak of wild flowers, and birds' nests, of rills and rocks and cascades; he might have gone with her to her father's door, and caught a glimpse of silvered hair and a noble forehead, and he would have observed upon that face lineaments that have for two hundred years been found in all the high places of American thought and character.
For the father of this little Sara was
Dr. Thaddeus Clarke, a grandson of
President Edwards.
Fortunate it is, and a blessing to the race, when a man so rarely and royally gifted as was this great theologian, with everything that makes a human character noble, is so wisely mated that he can transmit to the coming age, not only the most valuable thinking of his time, but a family of children, blessed with sound constitutions, developed by harmonious fireside influences, and endowed with vigorous understandings.
In doing
that,
Jonathan Edwards did more to stir thought than when he wrote the history of the Great Awakening; he did more to establish the grooves of religious and moral thinking, and to fix the model of fine character, than he could ever accomplish by his Treatise on the Will.
In mature life, the great-grand-daughter has shown many of the traits of the
Edwards family.
She has rejected the iron-hooped Calvinism of her ancestor, but she is indebted to him for an unflagging and ever-fresh interest in nature; for ceaseless mental fecundity, that finds no bottom to its cruse of oil, and for a toughness of intellectual fibre that fits her for a life of perpetual mental activity.
There was not a gayer or more active girl in
Onondaga County than
Sara Clarke.
The bright
Alfarata was not fonder of wild roving.
No young gipsy ever took more naturally to the fields.
She loved the forests, the open pastures,
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the strawberry-lots, and the spicy knolls, where the scarlet leaves of the wintergreen nestle under the dainty sprigs of ground pine and the breezy hill-sides, where the purple fingers and painted lips attest the joy of huckleberrying.
She says of herself that she was a mighty hunter of wild fruits.
At this early age, she developed a taste which, at a later age, gave her name a piquant flavor of romance; the taste for horseback riding, and the ability to manage with fearless grace the most spirited steeds.
Her figure was lithe and wiry, her step elastic, her eye cool, and her nerves firm.
At ten years of age she was given to escapades, in which she found few boys hardy and fearless enough to rival her. She would go into an open pasture with a nub of corn, call up a frolicsome young horse, halter him, and then jump on his back.
No saddle or bridle wants the little
Amazon.
She had seen bold riding at the circus, and in the retirement of the woods she could surpass it. So she would toss off her shoes, and stand upright on the creature's back, with a foot on each side of the spine.
At first she was content to let the animal walk with his spirited little burden; then she would venture into a gentle amble, and finally into full gallop.
As she grew older, the deep woods had a perpetual charm for her. She loved to wander afar into dim shades, and listen to the wild, sweet song of the wood-lark, and to watch the squirrels gambolling on the tops of beech-trees, or leaping from one oak to the other.
It is not possible to say how much she, and every other active and finely tempered genius, gains by such a childhood.
A love of nature and a habit of enjoying nature is thus rooted in the spirit, so deeply that no flush of city life can destroy it. The glare of palaces and the roar of paved streets seem, for a lifetime, tiresome and false; the world-weary spirit evermore longs for the music of the west wind blowing through the tree-tops, the melodies of the forest, the splash of waterfalls, the ring of
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the mower's steel, the swaying of the golden wheat fields, the songs of the whippoorwills, and the glancing of the fireflies.
Such a childhood gives a firmness of health, a vigor and a hardihood, a power of recovering from fatigue, and a capacity for constant labor without exhaustion, that are a greater blessing than the wealth of a Girard or a Stewart.
At the age of twelve
Sara Clarke went to
Rochester to attend school.
Her home was with an elder brother, and she entered with zeal and with success on the studies of a regular education.
Like many others who, in after life, have written that which the world will not willingly let die, she did not excel in mathematical studies.
The multiplication table was no labor of love.
The Rule of Three was a hopeless conundrum.
Interest had no interest for her. But whatever related to the graceful expression of fine thought, whatever unsealed the ancient fountains of song and of story, was easy, harmonious, and attractive; this was native air.
Nothing is harder than to say just what faculty or grouping of faculties makes the writer.
One may be witty, vivacious, charming in the parlor, or at the dinner-table, yet no writer.
Many have the faculty of expressing a valuable thought in appropriate language; but that does not endow one with the rights, the honors, and the fame of authorship.
Give
Edward Lytton Bulwer three hours of leisure daily, and in a year he will give the world three hundred and sixty-five chapters of unequalled story-telling, in a style that never grows dull, never palls upon the taste, that is perpetually fresh, clear-cut, and brilliant.
Charles Dickens will sit down by any window in
London, or lounge through any street in
London, and describe the characters that pass before him, in a way that will charm the reading public of two continents, in paragraphs for every one of which his publishers will gladly pay him a guinea before the ink is dry.
Sara Clarke was not three years in her teens
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before the Rochester papers were glad to get her compositions.
They were fresh, piquant, racy.
It was impossible to guess whether she had read either
Whately or
Blair, but it was clear that she had a rhetoric trimmed by no pedantic rules.
It was nature's own child talking of nature's charms, her pen, like a mountain rill, neither running between walls of chiselled stone, nor roofed with Roman arches, but wandering between clumps of willows, and meandering at its own sweet will through beds of daisies and fields of blooming clover.
There was nothing remarkable about her education.
When she left school in 1843, at the age of nineteen, she knew rather more
Italian and less algebra, more of English and French history, and less of differential and integral calculus, than some recent graduates of
Oberlin and
Vassar; but perhaps she was none the worse for that.
Indeed, austere, pale-faced Science would have chilled the blood of this free, bounding, elastic, glorious girl.
Meantime,
Dr. Clarke had removed from
Onondaga County to New Brighton, in
Western Pennsylvania.
This village is nestled between the hills among which the young
Ohio, fresh from the shaded springs and the stony brooks of
the Alleghanies, gathers up its bright waters for a long journey to the far-off Southern Gulf.
Not long after she went home, in 1845 and 1846, the literary world experienced a sensation.
A new writer was abroad.
A fresh pen was moving along the pages of the Monthlies.
Who might it be?
Did
Willis know?
Could
General Morris say?
Whittierwas in the secret; but he told no tales.
And her nom de plume, so appropriate and elegant!
This charming Grace
Greenwood, so natural, so chatty, so easy, chanting her wood-notes wild.
Ah me!
those were jocund days.
We
Americans were not then in such grim earnest as we are now. The inimitable, much imitated pen, that in the early part of the century had given us “
Knickerbocker” and the “Sketch book,” was still cheerfully busy at
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Sunny Side.
Willis, beginning with the sacred and nibbling at the profane, was in the middle of his genial, lounging, graceful career.
Poe's Raven was pouring out those weird, melodious croakings.
Ik Marvel was a dreaming bachelor, gliding about the picture-galleries of
Europe.
Bryant was a hard-working editor, but when he lifted up those poet eyes above the smoke of the great city, he saw the water-fowl, and addressed it in lines that our great-grandchildren will know by heart.
William Lloyd Garrison was sometimes pelted with bad eggs.
Horace Greeley had just started the “New York Tribune.”
Neither
Clay,
Calhoun, nor
Webster had grown tired of scheming forty years for the presidency.
That great thunder-cloud of civil war, that we have seen covering the whole heavens, was but a dark patch on the glowing sky of the
South.
In these times, and among these people, Grace
Greenwood now began to live and move, and have a part, and win a glowing fame.
For six or eight years her summer home was New Brighton.
In winter she was in
Philadelphia,
in Washington, in New York, writing for
White tier or for
Willis and
Morris, or for “
Neal's Gazette,” or for “
Godey.”
She was the most copious and brilliant lady correspondent of that day, wielding the gracefullest quill, giving the brightest and most attractive column.
It is impossible, without full extracts, to give the reader a full idea of these earlier writings of Grace
Greenwood.
They had the dew of youth, the purple light of love, the bloom of young desire.
As well think of culling a handful of moist clover-heads, in the hope of reproducing the sheen and fragrance, the luxuriance and the odor of a meadow, fresh bathed in the Paphilan wells of a June morning!
In 1850 many of these sketches and letters were collected and republished by
Ticknor & Fields, under the name of
Greenwood Leaves.
The contemporary estimate given to these writings by
Rev. Mr. Mayo is so just and so tasteful that no reader will regret its insertion here :--
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The authoress is the heroine of the book; not that she writes about herself always, or often, or in a way that can offend.
But her personality gets entangled with every word she utters, and her generous heart cannot be satisfied without a response to all its loves, and hopes, and misgivings, and aspirations.
There is extravagance in the rhetoric, yet the delicious extravagance in which a bounding spirit loves to vindicate its freedom from the rules laid down in the “Aids of composition,” and the “Polite letter writer.”
There is a delightful absurdity about her wit, into which only a genuine woman could fall.
And one page of her admiring criticism of books and men, with all its exaggerations, is worth a hundred volumes of the intellectual dissection of the critical professors.
Yet the most striking thing in her book is the spirit of joyous health that springs and frolics through it. Grace Greenwood is not the woman to be the president of a society for the suppression of men, and the elevation of female political rights.
She knows what her sisters need, as well as those who spoil their voices and temper in shrieking it into the ears of the world; but that knowledge does not cover the sun with a black cloud, or spoil her interest in her cousin's love affair, or make her sit on her horse as if she were riding to a public execution.
She can love as deeply as any daughter of Eve. Yet she would laugh in the face of a sentimental young gentleman till he wished her at the other side of the world.
She loves intensely, but not with that silent, brooding intensity which takes the color out of the cheeks and the joy out of the soul.
Hers is the effervescence, not the corrosion, of the heart.
And it is no small thing, this health of which I now speak.
In an age when to think is to run the risk of scepticism, and to feel is to invite sentimentalism, it is charming to meet a girl who is not ashamed to laugh and cry, and sold and joke, and love and worship, as her grandmother did before her.
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But this is not a review of Grace
Greenwood's writings.
Litera scripta manet. Those who wish to see the cream of our magazine writings from 1845 to 1852., will find it in “
Greenwood leaves,” first and second series.
About this time, her Poems were published.
To say that they are beautiful is not enough.
Though redolent of the open country, where most of them were written; though composed while doing housework, as was “
Ariadne;” or in the saddle, like the “Horseback ride,” --the best element in them is the frank, generous, cordial, winning personality which pervades them all. We find, too, evidences, that below the dashing and piquant exterior there was growing up an intense sympathy with the most earnest and strenuous spirits.
Already the mutterings of the distant thunder were heard, mellowed by distance, but clear enough to hush the chattering of the bobolinks, and the scream of the blue-jays.
Thus the lines “To one afar” close with the following admirable stanzas:--
Truth's earnest seeker thou, I fancy's rover;
Thy life is like a river, deep and wide;
I but the light-winged wild bird passing over,
One moment mirrored in the rushing tide.
Thus are we parted; thou still onward hasting,
Pouring the great flood of that life along;
While I on sunny slopes am careless, wasting
The little summer of my time of song.
But before this gay creature of the elements becomes a,, earnest woman, as we foresee she must, let us picture in outline the New Brighton life; let us see our heroine, not as a magazinist, or a correspondent, but in a character more admirable and charming than either,--as a fine, handsome, brilliant, fearless young lady.
No whit spoiled by a winter of adulation, by the gracefullest of letters from
Mr. Willis,
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by the warmest and the truest appreciation from
Whittier, by a colonnade of kindliest notices from the great dailies, the braider of
Greenwood chaplets has come back to her cottage-home amid the swelling hills, and beside the glancing river.
As plain
Sara Clarke, she had helped her mother through the morning work, sweeping, dusting, watering flowers, feeding chickens, sitting down for a few moments to read two stanzas to that white-haired father of hers, his head as clear and cool as ever it was, and as able to give his daughter the soundest judgments and the most valuable criticisms she ever enjoyed.
In the heat of midday she seeks her chamber, gazes for a few moments with the look of a lover upon the glorious landscape, then dashes off a column for the Home journal or the “National press.”
Now, as the shadows of the hills are beginning to stretch eastward, we hear a quick, elastic step on the stair, and the responsive neigh from the hitching-post in the yard tells us that the “Horseback ride” is to be rehearsed; and horse and heroine alike feel that
Nor the swift regatta, nor merry chase,
Nor rural dance on the moonlight shore,
Can the wild and thrilling joy exceed
Of a fearless leap on a fiery steed.
She must tell, as nobody else can, how quick and marvellous is the change, when she feels the bounding and exuberant animal life of the steed rejoicing in the burden; exulting in the free rein, devouring the long reach of the grassy lane with his gladsome leaps:--
As I spring to his back, as I seize the strong rein,
The strength to my spirit returneth again!
The bonds are all broken that fettered my mind,
And my cares borne away on the wings of the wind;
My pride lifts its head, for a season bowed down,
And the queen in my nature now puts on her crown.
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Now our gentle and poetic Penthesilea has gained the woodland cool and dim. On they press, horse and rider alike enthused, till they reach some retired valley, a sequestered nook, where no profane eyes may look.
Lady and pony are going to have a grand equestrian frolic.
Pony likes it as well as lady.
What prancing and pawing!
what rearing and backing!
Now a swift gallop, as if in the ring of some fairy circus.
But this is no vulgar horse-opera; no saw-dust or tan-bark here; nothing for show, since the bluejays have no eye for horse-flesh, nor can squirrels be made envious by such exploits.
At length pony acts as though the game had been carried as far as he cared to have it; and Grace leaps to the greensward and lets him breathe, and get a drink, and bite the sod. Will he not start for home?
Not he. His fetters are silken; but his mistress has that rare gift, unusual among men, and very uncommon with the softer sex, the faculty of controlling animals.
He obeys her word like a spaniel; goes and comes at her bidding; stands on his hind feet, if she tells him to; lies down; gets up again; follows her up the steps of the piazza.
In fact, if such a thing could be, he would carry out the nursery rhyme and go after her “upstairs, downstairs, in the lady's chamber.”
The ride home is somewhat more gentle; for, in the cool of the evening dusk, our heroine has turned poetess again, and is chiselling out
Pygmalion word by word, or indulging in such spirit-longings as this:--
I look upon life's glorious things,
The deathless themes of song,
The grand, the proud, the beautiful,
The wild, the free, the strong;
And wish that I might take a part
Of what to them belong.
After the evening meal, and an hour of quiet chat, while
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flecks of moonbeam dance on the gallery floor, we might suppose the day ended, and these hours of beautiful life would now be rounded by a sleep.
Not yet. This fearless and ardent lover of nature delights in every rich sensation that earth, or air, or water can impart.
She glides away across the pasture to have a glorious swim in
Yon lake of heavenly blue;
The long hair, unconfined,
Is flung, like some young Nereid's now
To tossing wave and wind.
This is no timid, frightened bather.
Had she been Hero on the shores of Hellespont, she would have plunged in and met
Leander half-way between the continents.
None but an assured swimmer could have written this stanza:--
And now when none are nigh to save,
While earth grows dim behind;
I lay my cheek to the kissing wave,
And laugh with the frolicsome wind.
On the billowy swell I lean my breast,
And he fondly beareth me;
I dash the foam from his sparkling crest,
In my wild and careless glee.
What a pity her bathing-place was not the fountain of perpetual youth!
No matter how ably a woman writes, or how eloquently she speaks,--and there are very few of her sex so able or so eloquent to-day as Grace
Greenwood,--we can but endorse this sentiment of one of her earliest admirers.
In a letter to
Morris, written when
Miss Clarke was living this life, and writing these lines, he says: “Save her from meriting the approbation of dignified critics.
Leave this fairest blossom on the rose-tree of woman for my worship,
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and the admiration of the few who, like me, can appreciate the value of an elegant uselessness, and perceive the fascination of splendid gayety and brilliant trifling.
Adieu, and send me more Grace Greenwoods.”
But no woman, with an acute brain and a warm heart, could live in such a land as ours, and in the nineteenth century, and remain long a writer of splendid gayeties.
The times called for earnest thinking and vigorous writing.
The age of rose-tinted album-leaves, covered with graceful impromptus, was past.
Willis, and his elegant “Home journal,” went into the mild oblivion of June roses.
Great questions agitated the public mind; and we heard hoarse voices and blasts of brazen trumpets on the slopes of
Parnassus.
Meantime
Miss Clarke went to
Europe.
This was in 1853.
She spent a little over a year abroad, which, in the dedication to her daughter of one of her juvenile books, she calls “the golden year of her life.”
Perhaps
America has never sent to the shores of the Old World a young lady traveller, who was a better specimen of what the New World can do in the way of producing a fine woman.
She was a flower from a virgin soil, and a new form of civilization; but rivalling, in the delicacy of its tints, and the richness of its perfume, anything from older and longer cultivated parterres.
With one of those felicitous memories that has its treasures ever at command, and can always remember the right thing at the right time and place; fully stored by wide readings in belles-lettres; with the spirit of an enthusiast for everything beautiful, or good, or famous; in the joyous overflow of unbroken health and unflagging spirits, the trip was to her one long gala-day., crowded with memorable sights, with sensations which enrich the whole of one's after-life.
Harriet Beecher Stowe has written as well in her
Sunny memories of other lands, but no lady tourist from
America has surpassed Grace
Greenwood in the warm tinting
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and gorgeous rhetoric of her descriptions, and in the vivacious interest which she felt herself, and which she conveys to others in her letters.
This correspondence was collected immediately after her return, and published under the title of “Haps and mishaps of a tour in
Europe.”
Nobody has described the marble wonders of the Vatican with finer appreciation than can be seen in the following passage :
Of all the antique statues I have yet seen, I have been by far the most impressed by the Apollo Belvidere, and the Dying Gladiator,--the one the striking embodiment of the pride, and fire, and power, and joy of life; the other of the mournful majesty, the proud resignation, the “ conquered agony” of death.
In all his triumphant beauty and rejoicing strength, the Apollo stands forth as a pure type of immortality — every inch a god.
There is an Olympian spring in the foot which seems to spurn the earth, a secure disdain of death in the very curve of his nostrils,--a sunborn light on his brow; while the absolute perfection of grace, the supernal majesty of the figure, now, as in the olden time, seem to lift it above the human and the perishing, into the region of the divine and the eternal.
Scarcely can it be said that the worship of this god has ceased.
The indestructible glory of the lost divinity lingers about him still; and the deep, almost solemn emotion, the sigh of unutterable admiration, with which the pilgrims of art behold him now, differ little, perhaps from the hushed adoration of his early worshippers.
I leave never seen any work of art which I had such difficulty to realize as a mere human creation, born in an artist's struggling brain, moulded in dull clay, and from thence transferred, by the usual slow and laborious process, to marble.
Nor can I ever think of it as having according to old poetic fancy, pre-existed in the stone, till the divinely directed
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chisel of the sculptor cut down to it. Ah, so methinks, the very marble must have groaned, in prescience of the god it held.
To me it rather seems a glowing, divine conception, struck instantly into stone.
It surely embodies the very soul and glory of the ancient mythology, and, with kindred works, forms, if not a fair justification of, at least a noble apology for, a religion which revelled in ideas of beauty and grace, which had ever something lofty and pure even in its refined sensuality; and for the splendid arrogance of that genius which boldly chiselled out its own grand conceptions, and named them gods.
The Apollo I should like to see every day of my life.
I would have it near me; and every morning, as the darkness is lifted before the sun, and the miracle of creation is renewed, I would wish to lift a curtain, and gaze on that transcendent image of life and light,--to receive into my own being somewhat of the energy and joy of existence with which it so abounds,--to catch some gleams of the glory of the fresh and golden morning of poetry and art yet raying from its brow.
One could drink in strength, as from a fountain, from gazing on that attitude of pride and grace, so light, yet firm, and renew one's wasted vigor by the mere sight of that exulting and effortless action.
What a gem of description we have here at the end of a letter, written from
Naples on the 18th of April:--
We drove to Naples this morning over a road, which, for its varied scenery and picturesque views, seems to me only comparable with the Cornice leading to Genoa.
It was with heartfelt reluctance that we left Sorrento, which must ever seem to me one of the loveliest places on earth.
O pride and darling of this delicious shore,--like a young festive queen, rose-crowned, sitting in the shade of oranges and myrtles, watched
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over with visible tenderness by the olive-clad hills, gently caressed and sung to by the capricious sea,--bright, balmy, bewitching Sorrento, adieu!
But the finest piece of writing in the volume is a bravura on the
Roman Catholic Religion.
It occurs in a long and splendid description of High Mass, at
St. Peter's on Christmas morning:--
To my eyes, the beauty and gorgeousness of the scene grew most fitting and holy; with the incense floating to me from the altar, I seemed to breathe in a subtle, subduing spirit; and to that music my heart hushed itself in my breast, my very pulses grew still, and my brain swam in a new, half-sensuous, half-spiritual emotion.
For a moment I believe I understood the faith of the Roman Catholic,--for a moment I seemed to taste the ecstasy of the mystic, to burn with the fervor of the devotee, and felt in wonder, and in fear, all the poetry, mystery, and power of the Church.
Suddenly rose before my mind vivid wayside and seaside scenes,--pictures of humblest Judean life, when the “meek and lowly” Author of our faith walked, ministering, and teaching, and comforting among the people,humblest among the humble, poorest among the poor, most sorrowful among the sorrowful, preaching peace, good-will, purity, humility, and freedom,--and then, all this magnificent mockery of the divine truths he taught, this armed and arrogant spiritual despotism, in the place of the peace and liberty of the gospel, faded from before my disenchanted eyes, and even my ear grew dull to that pomp of sound, swelling up as though to charm his ear against the sighs of the poor, and the groanings of the captive.
O Cleopatra of religions, throned in power, glowing and gorgeous in all imaginable splendors and luxuries,--proud
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victor of victors,--in the “infinite variety” of thy resources and enchantments more attractive than glory, resistless as fate; now terrible in the dusky splendors of thy imperious beauty; now softening and subtile as moonlight, and music, and poet dreams; insolent and humble, stormy though tender!
alluring tyranny, beautiful falsehood, fair and fatal enchantress, sovereign sorceress of the world I the end is not yet, and the day may not be far distant when thou shalt lay the asp to thine own bosom, and die.
Since her marriage to
Leander K. Lippincott, Grace
Greenwood's pen has been employed chiefly in writings for the young.
She edits the “Little Pilgrim,” a monthly devoted to the amusement, the instruction, and the well-being of little folks.
Its best articles are her contributions.
These have been collected from time to time, and published by
Ticknor & Fields, and make a juvenile library, numbering nearly a dozen volumes.
Though intended for children, none of these books but will charm older readers, with the elegance and freshness of their style, their abounding vivacity and harmless wit, and the hopeful and sunny spirit which they breathe.
They are remarkable for the felicitous manner in which they convey historical information.
No child can fail to be drawn on to wider readings of the storied past, and to know more of old heroes, ancient cities, and famous lands.
Soon after its establishment,
Mrs. Lippincott became a contributor to the “Independent,” and during the war a lecturer to soldiers and at sanitary fairs.
Her last book is made up from articles in the “Independent,” and passages from lectures.
It shows the fire of her youthful zeal, and the glowing rhetoric of twenty-five no whit abated.
On the contrary, there are evidences in her later productions of a full grasping of the significance of the heroic and stormy times in which we live.
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There appear in the writings of Grace
Greenwood three phases of development, three epochs of a literary career.
The first lasted from the days of the boarding-school till marriage,--from the first merry chit-chat and fragrant
Greenwood Leaves beyond
the Alleghanies, to the full-rounded, mellow, golden prime, as displayed in the letters from
Europe.
Then follows a decade, during which story-writing for children has principally occupied her pen. With the war commences the third period,--years “vexed with the drums and tramplings,” the storms and dust-clouds of middle life; a great republic convulsed by a giant struggle; woman gliding from the sanctity of the fireside, going out to do, to dare, and to suffer at the side of her war-worn brother, attacking social wrongs, doing all that woman can do to cheer, to adorn, to raise the downfallen, to proclaim liberty to the captive, to open the prison to those that are bound.
Up to the full summit level of such a time her spirit rises.
She brings to the requirements of this epoch faculties polished by long and diligent culture; a heart throbbing with every fine sensibility, and every generous emotion; a large, warm, exuberant nature; a ripe and glorious womanhood.
For such a character in such a wondrous mother age, there lies open a long career of strenuous exertion, worthy achievement, and lasting fame.
