school for young ladies on the Uptown Plain in Norwich. This proved so successful that the following year they transferred their schoolroom to a building in the business part of the town,-in Chelsea, near the Landing. Here, as one of the pupils has written, were passed dove-like days. The mornings were devoted to the useful, the afternoons to the ornamental branches. "There was the supervision of fancy-work," Mrs. Sigourney recalls, "the brilliant filigree from its first inception; the countless shades of embroidery; the movements of pencil and paintbrush, from the simplest flowers to the landscape, the group and the human face divine; the nameless varieties of wrought muslin; and also the elaborate construction of fine linen shirts with their appendant ruffles."

But as the severity of successive winters was felt the school was closed. Then, impelled by pure love of teaching, Lydia Huntley formed classes in the neighborhood of her home, a favorite being of colored children. These were discontinued, at the suggestion of Mr. Daniel Wadsworth of Hartford, the earliest and most influential of her patrons, who advised that she should come to his larger and more closely settled town. So in 1814, when she was about twenty-three, Lydia Huntley opened her Hartford school. This was carried on with a romantic enthusiasm for the next five years. At the time of writing "Letters of Life," in 1864, Mrs. Sigourney mentions with quiet pride the forty-fifth reunion of her pupils,

with their children, which had occurred within the year. It is pleasant, too, from so keen a critic as President Dwight, to read these words of commendation (The New Englander, 1866), "She was, as we think she fully proves herself by her story, a valuable, inspiring, interesting, self-sacrificing and loving instructor."

In 1819 she married a Hartford merchant, Mr. Charles Sigourney, a widower with three children, ai! under twelve. The location of the Sigourney house was then regarded as on the outskirts of the town, and combined convenience with elegance in a remarkable degree; in its lofty ceilings, marble mantelpieces, folding-doors and windows reaching to the floor Mrs. Sigourney took an innocent delight. Now, alas, the patrician aspect of its tall columns and broad gable is quite lost behind high bill-boards, and the extensive lawn is cut by the tracks of the steam railroad.

Eight years after her marriage a daughter, Mary, was born; and two years later a son, Andrew. Soon after this Mrs. Sigourney's father and mother left the Norwich farmhouse to live with their daughter, and to receive her care. Of her devotion to them we learn from others, that she placed her parents in one of the best apartments of her elegant home, and that, while to outsiders the aged couple seemed plain, simple folk, she required the most punctilious deference as their due from all. About six years later Mrs. Huntley died, aged sixty-three; soon after the two Misses Sigourney married and left the home their

stepmother had made for them; and a few years later her father died, aged eighty-seven. Owing to business troubles, after eighteen years' residence in this house, the Sigourneys moved to a smaller one, nearer the centre of the town, on High Street, where they soon were comfortably settled. This house has since been torn down.

In 1840, about two years after this change, Mrs. Sigourney, urged by a physician, made the grand tour of her life, to Europe. Since her first memorable journey, when a child of fourteen, she had travelled by stage. coach from Norwich to Hartford, she had been for the most part, as she expresses it, stationary. True, she had visited Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and had even got as far south as Jamestown, Virginia. and had journeyed with friends to

more interesting parts of England, Scotland and France,-as recorded in "Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands" (1842). It is gratifying to find that Mrs. Sigourney, to whom the amenities of life meant so much, was, by the consent of all, at home or abroad, a conspicuous object of attention and honor. In England she visited the families of Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie, the poet Rogers and Miss Edgeworth. She was presented at Court. In France she was received with marked courtesies by the La Fayette family and at the Court of Louis Philippe. At her departure the Queen of the French gave her a diamond bracelet.

She returned to take up the quiet, busy routine of her life, marked, like every woman's, with so little that can be told of to the world, and yet with so much that is noble and pure, and quite as essential to the world's happiness as any of the more conspicuous works on which men pride, themselves. In 1849 perhaps the keenest grief of her life came to her in the death, at the age of nineteen, of her only son. Five years after his death her husband died. The death of her stepson, which followed soon, rendered her yet more desolate; and the marriage of her daughter left her quite alone.

Her remaining years, about ten in number, she spent alone. Within these she prepared at least six of her fifty-six books; and no one knows how many of the two thousand and more short articles which she found time and inclination to write in a life which, the pursuit of literature entirely omitted, would seem sufficiently full. Yet those who knew.

her tell us that she was never hurried or perturbed in manner. Hers was ever a gracious presence, whether in her vine-covered cottage, dispensing simple, graceful hospitality to guests, who still remember the little suppers, where her bees furnished the honey and her garden the flowers; or performing the literary tasks which, although it is difficult to conceive of her as a business woman, contributed to her support during the latter part of her life.

Her literary career, she repeats often, was a happy one. "I ought to speak with more emphasis of the encouragement kindlly addressed to me since first, as a timid waif, I ventured into regions then seldom traversed by the female foot." Letters of appreciation reached her from the King of Prussia, the Empress of Russia and the Queen of France. Her books were widely read both in England and in the United States. All New Englanders seem to have been familiar with them, although it was to the states of New York and Pennsylvania that she was mainly indebted for the remuneration of intellectual toil. But the opinion of her native town outweighed in her judgment the dicta of all outlying regions; and it was always a grief to Mrs. Sigourney that Norwich, "beautiful Norwich, whose varied scenery reveals sometimes the Caledonian wilderness, and at others the tender softness of the vale of Tempe," kept silence, when "I would fain have laid my honors at her feet." It is indeed to be regretted that the tribute to so gentle a soul should not have come in her

lifetime. To-day her bust stands in one of the buildings of the academy, at whose anniversary her song was rejected, and an autograph letter is carefully preserved. "I have no other claim," she said, with wistful humor, "to the title of prophet, save the absence of honor in my own country."

But it was not only through her literary labors that Mrs. Sigourney was known. Always a tithe at least of her income was devoted to charities. In "Traits of the Aborigines of America" (1822), a poem in blank verse, of five cantos, the "Advertisement" reads, "The avails of this work are devoted exclusively to religious charities." Indeed, all her books written, as they are, "with the hope of disseminating some cheering thought or hallowed principle," might be regarded as among her charities. Her whole life was one of active and earnest philanthropy. The poor, the sick, the deaf-mute, the blind, the idiot, the slave and the convict were objects of her constant care and benefaction. During her married life she economized in her wardrobe and personal luxuries that she might be able to relieve the needy. A Hartford physician of the time has said that he found Mrs. Sigourney's cups and baskets in all directions and oftener than from any other hand. "What object of benevolence is at present the most interesting to you?" she writes to a friend, serene in the conviction that every woman is as charitably inclined as herself. Still another offshoot from the root of benevolence was her habit of expressing appreciation and good-will toward all who

approached her. Testimony is borne. that even as she was more demonstrative than was the custom concerning her affections, so was she reticent concerning her dislikes. As she quaintly phrases it in "The Daily Counsellor":

"Speak well of all; 'twill be a medicine Unto thine own frail heart.

Think well of all:

Nor let thy friendship at the foibles start
That appertain to our humanity—
True Love hath in itself the principle
Of patience unto death."

She died on June 10, 1865, at the age of seventy-four, loving and loved by all in the town which had been her home for more than fifty years. The bell tolled for an hour at sunset on the day of her death, while multitudes thronged the house, that they might look once more upon her face.

"Such was her work," President Dwight has said, "one that was so faithfully and well accomplished, that it deserves to be spoken of with all honor by those who read her recorded history." "Few persons liv ing," Peter Parley says in his "Recollections," "have exerted a wider influence than Mrs. Sigourney; no one that I now know can look back upon a long and earnest career of such unblemished beneficence."

Every work of her life is so directly inspired by what one of her reviewers terms domestic piety, that to separate what might be termed literary works from those which fall under other headings is an ungrateful task. Also, for many of us, the row of her books, on glass-screened, mahogany-cased shelves, has hoarded within their faded, dun-colored

covers associations so tender that the volumes seem of quite another order than that submitted to literary criticism. There still clings to them the atmosphere of gentle dignity surrounding a teacher of the old school; so that for the second generation following her pupils to hold independent opinion concerning these productions is little less than an impertinence. There seems an implied discourtesy in considering the work of such an authoress in a purely impersonal manner. The attitude of a contemporary commentator, who suggests that to compare her earlier with her later work might not be indelicate, seems much. more decorous. So intimately, also, is her literary work associated with her personality, that criticism upon the one might seem to involve the other, as if in admitting Mrs. Sigourney's diction artificial were finding fault with her household management. With many a gentlewoman who has undertaken, as Mrs. Sigourney phrases it, the book business, this complete disassociation seems well-nigh impossible. and yet the first obvious merit of Mrs. Sigourney's books is that they stand the test of being regarded as contributions to literature. Taken from their setting they still have interest. Thus the highest tribute which we can render her is to offer a serious consideration of her work, "with that frankness of criticism," to quote her words, "by which we lady writers have too seldom an opportunity of profiting."

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She lived and wrote in a signifi cant period of our literary history. About 1760 there was an æsthetical

thaw. There had been no such word as play in the dictionary of New Englanders. They had worked hard on their stony soil and read hard in their stony books of doctrine. To peruse works of the imagination. was considered an idle waste of time, indeed as partaking somewhat of the nature of sin. But the growing taste of Connecticut was no longer satisfied with Dr. Watts's moral lyrics. Milton and Dryden, Thomson and Pope, were read and admired; The Spectator was quoted as the standard of style and of good manners. In Mr. Stedman's "American Literature" we find that "It was not until peace for a second time (1812) became a a habit, that the imagination of the young people, assured of nationality, slowly found. expression upon the printed page. The earliest promise of an American school may be said to begin with the second quarter of the nineteenth century." The first of Mrs. Sigourney's books, "Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse," was published in 1815, or, as the advertisement reads, in the thirty-ninth year of the Independence of the United States of America. Thus she was one of the charter members, as it were, of this initial literary association.

Its members worked with a vigor that made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in discrimination. To the pursuit of letters the men seem to have transferred all the energy they would have used in ploughing a stony hillside field; the women ali the diligence with which they knitted and sewed and baked. Notably among them all, Mrs. Sigourney, in the words of M. Vapereau's "Diction