naire Universel des Contemporains," produisait avec une facilité peut-être exuberante. That she wrote too much is to obvious to need comment; but that she was able to accomplish such tremendous results may well be a matter of wonder. Doubtless it was due to her habit of industry, hereditary and cultivated; but much more to the serenity of soul for which she always strove, and which, in So marvellous a measure, she attained. Thus, among "Detached Thoughts," in her earliest book, she says, "If you yield to difficulties, you encourage weakness of mind and prepare yourself to be often overcome and held in bondage. If you were an inhabitant of Russia or Lapland, would you say, 'I cannot go out to my usual occupations because the snow falls or the ice has covered the streets?'. . . Disagreeable circumstances will meet us in the passage of human life, and we must be prepared to sacrifice to them neither our self-possession nor our inward repose." And in "Letters to Young Ladies," "Calmness and equanimity are excellent virtues in our sex

in the routine of domestic life. Our business is among trifles. But... suffer not the heart to be fixed on trifles."

To her, as to her companion workers, writing seemed merely a new occupation closely akin both in method and in kind to the other occupations which filled their days. The Muse she tells,

In

"So, singing along, with a buoyant tread, I drew out a line as I drew out a thread,"

and in a biographical chapter, "How to obtain time to appease editorial

appetites and not neglect my housekeeping tactics was a study. I found the employment of knitting congenial to the contemplation and treatment of the slight themes. that were desired. This habit of writing currente calamo is fatal to literary ambition. It prevents the labor of thought by which intellectual eminence is acquired. If there is any kitchen in Parnassus, my Muse has surely officiated there as a woman of all work and an aproned waiter." Yet to atone for this disadvantage, Mrs. Sigourney seems to find ample compensation in the words of one who embodied the traits of nature and of feeling in a vehicle of the most enchanting simplicity, Miss Edgeworth. "Mrs. Sigourney appears to have the power of writing extempore on passing events. . . . Addison could not. Gray could not. Mrs. Sigourney's friends will doubtless be ready to bear testimony that she can. . . . Certainly as regards poetic gifts, they who give promptly give twice."

In the London Athenæum of 1839 is one of the most fair-minded and appreciative of any of her contemporary notices : "The American writers think too lightly of poetry. Instinct and genius and spirit are all very well. . . . Mrs. Sigourney is not without spirit. She can be eloquent at times. . . . If she would give us a page yearly instead of a column, and take the time for writing it when she feels most in the mood, she might do herself justice." But fancy a person with Mrs. Sigourney's traditions acting upon this kindly advice and waiting for a mood! Or fancy how poorly the

a

Surely, the watchword of the times. was Industry; and nothing could rouse greater scepticism concerning the truth of familiar maxims about genius and perseverance than study of the fruits of their labors. At the time, and for years later, criticism seems to have been based upon the amount rather than upon the quality of the production. Lamentable proof of this is found in forms of anthologies of poetesses; for example, in the "Literary Women of England," by Jane Williams (1861), of the ninety-three names in all, twenty-five are born after 1750. In "The Female Poets of America," by T. B. Read (1855), there are eighty-six names, the earliest being born after 1760. In looking back, through the perspective of the many intervening years, these poetesses appear in so solid a phalanx that it is difficult to realize that they were in fact widely scattered both as to time and place. But Mrs. Sigourney's view of the situation, "I adventured on what was in those times and in that part of the country a novel enterprise for a female," is shared by others not personally concerned. The

editors of "The National Portrait Gallery" (1839), wherein her portrait appears between between John W. Francis, M. D., and Winfield Scott, major general U. S. A., say, "At that time there were few attempts at authorship among Americans. Rarely had a female. writer trusted any evidence of her literary taste to the press." On this point President Dwight, too, has said: "She was among the first of American women to venture within the poetic field; and while she has led the way, she deserves not only the praise awarded to a pioneer, but the praise of a fair measure of success." But best of all is Whittier's quatrain, on the tablet in Christ Church, Hartford:

"She sang alone, e'er womanhood had known

The gift of song, which fills the air to day.

Tender and sweet, a music all her own, May fitly linger where she knelt to pray."

In the early years of the nineteenth century the closest approach to a literary standard in the United States seems to have been the imitation of the literary fashions then prevailing in England. Thus the favorite method of complimenting Mrs. Sigourney was to rank her with some popular English writer, with Mrs. Steele or Mrs. Barbauld. The Christian Register (1845) praises her Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands as having all the charms which characterize the works of William Howitt, and her sobriquet of The American Hemans, with Blackwood's Magazine of 1834 as authority, "in that she is the best of all the American

upon her success. In The Pictorial Calendar (1843), by Dr. John Aikin, "the commencement of the gnat's life of buoyancy" is described. But Mrs. Sigourney tells us of a family horse, "whose mild temper and obesity were never disturbed by ambition of precedence!" In the Life of Addison (1854) Miss Lucy Aiken remarks that "Steele must have been destitute of patrimony"; but Mrs. Sigourney offers as her motive for teaching, "Though my parents' mode of life was in their apprehension entirely consistent with comfort, I desired that they might feel free to indulge in a larger expenditure."

It was upon a literary wilderness that Mrs. Sigourney entered. No precepts of the time served as guides. No straight pathways, hedged in by prejudices in favor of the English of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible, or of respect for the Eternal Verities, lay before her untrained feet. Untrained, indeed, for it must be remembered that her very varied school education stopped when she was a child of thirteen, and that her own literary tastes were both as restricted and as catholic as those of the time. "There were literally no children's books attainable by me. Young, with his sententious 'Night Thoughts,' initiated me into the poetry of my native language; Addison's 'Spectator' and Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield' were the most amusing volumes in the library. Harvey's 'Reflections Among the Tombs,' and Gesner's 'Death of Abel,' supplied the imagination with pleasant food." "That our native tongue well expresses force and energy we see in the writings of Johnson, Young and Milton; that it

can move with ease, gracefulness and beauty, Addison, Beattie and Blair have taught us." What wonder then that Mrs. Sigourney's literary course seems to have followed one of her childhood's joys, in "chasing meteors o'er the lea."

It is as a poetess that Mrs. Sigourney is chiefly known, although of her fifty-six books the majority are in prose. But at the time her verse seems to have been much more popular, or at least to have been considered more of an achievement. To us there seems little originality in any of it. Its merit seems dependent rather upon that of the poem upon which Mrs. Sigourney, for the time being, modelled her style. These models were chosen from what lay convenient to her hand, even as a good housewife makes a cake from what she has in the house. Thus Mrs. Sigourney's "Friendship with Nature" suggests Bryant's "Thanatopsis"; "Bell of the Wreck," Cowper's "Loss of the Royal George”; George"; "Grasmere and Rydal Water" is after the manner of Wordsworth's "Excursion"; "Thoughts at the Grave of Sir Walter Scott" is in his favorite ballad metres; "The Elm Trees" reminds one of Hood's "I Remember, I Remember"; and "Connecticut River," of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village." Her pure taste, delicate imagination, piety, and what, in our opinion, is an indispensable attribute of a true poet, her good sense, Won esteem. This commendable common-sense had a way of cropping out, now and then, like ledges of New England granite, in her most flowery passages. Thus in "Gossip with a Spring Bouquet," in "The Voice of Flowers" (1845), she says,—

"Narcissus pale!

Had you a mother, child, who kept you close

Over your needle or your music books? And never bade you sweep a room, or make

A pudding in the kitchen?"

It is apparently in the same utilitarian spirit that her innumerable obituary pieces, whatever their theme, are cast in verse form; notable among these is her tribute to Mary Lyon, true rather than poetical:

"'Twas not thine

To train the butterflies who sport and flaunt,

In gaudy joyaunce 'mid the summer flowers,

And when the Frost King cometh, shrink away

And disappear. It was not thine to train For silken indolence, or proud display, The talkers and not doers. Thou didst make

Thy life the exponent of thy creed, and show

The feasibility of theory,
By eloquent example."*

Many chapters of her books are part poetry, part prose. Thus in "Scenes in My Native Land," the verse on Niagara, which is generally chosen, by the way, by critics of the time, to illustrate her loftiest style.

leads off,

"Oh! full of glory and of majesty, With all thy terrible apparel on, High Priest of Nature, who within the veil,

Mysterious, unapproachable dost dwell, With smoke of incense ever streaming

up.

And round thy breast, the folded bow of heaven,

Few are our words before thee."

This outburst is balanced by,

*From manuscript in possession of Connecticut Histori

"Transfixed by his emotions, the casual visitant . . . scarcely recollects that the tributaries of this river or strait cover a surface of 150,000 miles."

Plainly enough, poetry is not her native element.

Of her prose, the examples 'quoted here and there illustrate the style which she considered suitable for ears

polite, which is so full of absurd af

fectations that it is a dialect rather than the English language. And did her work stop here, with imitative verse and artificial prose, we should consider Mrs. Sigourney interesting as an author of her time, and for it, but without a link to bind her in comradeship with those who have written for all time; even as a quaintly fashioned garment has charm as epitomizing the manners and costume of a bygone day, but cannot be regarded as a pattern. But the interesting part of Mrs. Sigourney's writings lies in the fact that, although broken in upon by "graceful and elegant expressions"; cut short to make for flowery platitudes; fragmentary at the best,-there are evidences that she had latent capabilities which, if but properly exercised, could

room

have rendered her work as free from the popular affectations of her time as though published yesterday.

In the first place, I venture to assert that Mrs. Sigourney, when not impressed by the dignity of her vocation, had a mild sense of humor. True, at her door must be laid "To a Shred of Linen," with the fatal. phrase,

"Methinks I scan

Some idiosyncrasy, that marks thee out