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

[95] needed in her work,--living to see her two step-daughters educated and settled in life, and their brother, at the age of forty-five, consigned to a consumptive's grave; to educate her own daughter and son, and then, just on the verge of a promising manhood, to follow him, too, to his grave; to care for both her own parents, until, in a good old age, she might tenderly hand them down to their last rest; to follow her beloved and honored husband to his grave; to give her own only daughter away in acceptable marriage; and then to settle herself down, joyful and trustful yet, in her own home, vacated indeed of her loved ones, but filled still with precious mementos of their love, until her own change should come. These forty-six years, between her marriage and her death, were mainly spent at her home in Hartford. Her travels were chiefly those of brief journeys through the Eastern and Middle States. Once she visited Virginia, and once crossed the Atlantic, visiting within the year the chief points of attraction in England, Scotland, and France. The rest of those forty-six years were most industriously employed in her own loved home, filled up with domestic duties or with literary and benevolent work; and it is safe to say that few women have ever worked to better account. She won universal respect and love. The poor and the rich, the ignorant and the educated, alike found in her that which delighted and charmed them; and so she came to occupy a place in their affections which they accorded to no other.

But, doubtless, it will be as a literary woman that she will be most widely known. And no estimate of her career which leaves out of the account the character and value of her writings can do justice to her memory. Beginning in 1815, and closing with her posthumous “Letters of life” in 1866, her published writings numbered fifty-seven volumes. Besides these, our newspaper and magazine literature must have furnished nearly as much more. Her correspondence,