A Group of Brief Biographies BY SETH CURTIS BEACH Essay Index Reprint Series BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC. FREEPORT, NEW YORK First published 1905 Reprinted 1967...

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Miss Sedgwick would doubtless have been considered the queen of American letters, but, in the opinion of her friends, the beauty of her character surpassed the merit of her books. In 1871, Miss Mary E. Dewey, her life-long neighbor, edited a volume of Miss Sedgwick's letters, mostly to members of her family, in compliance with the desire of those who knew and loved her, "that some printed memorial should exist of a life so beautiful and delightful

Of all the saints in the calendar of the Church there is no name more worthy of the honor than that of Mary Lovell Ware. The college of cardinals, which confers the degree of sainthood for the veneration of faithful Catholics, will never recognize her merits and encircle her head with a halo, but when the list of Protestant saints is made up, the name of Mary L. Ware will be in it, and among the first half dozen on the scroll. The writer was a student in the Divinity School at Cambridge when a c

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, few names in American literature were more conspicuous than that of Lydia Maria Child, and among those few, if we except that of Miss Sedgwick, there was certainly no woman's name. Speaking with that studied reserve which became its dignity, the North American Review said of her: "We are not sure that any woman of our country could outrank Mrs. Child. This lady has been before the public as an author with much success. And she well deserves it, fo

The career of Dorothy Dix is a romance of philanthropy which the world can ill afford to forget. It has been said of her, and it is still said, that she was "the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced." It is the opinion of Mr. Tiffany, her biographer, that as the founder of institutions of mercy, she "has simply no peer in the annals of Protestantism." To find her parallel one must go to the calendar of the Catholic saints,—St. Theresa, of Spain, or Santa Chiara, of Assisi

At Cambridge, it is still possible to pick up interesting reminiscences of Longfellow and Lowell from old neighbors or townsmen, proud even to have seen these celebrities as familiar objects upon the street. "And Margaret Fuller," you suggest, further to tap the memory of your venerable friend. He smiles gently and says, Margaret Fuller was before his time; he remembers the table-talk of his youth. He remembers, when she was a girl at dancing-school, Papanti stopped his class and said, "Mees Ful

"Is this the little woman who made this great war!" exclaimed President Lincoln when, in 1862, Mrs. Stowe was introduced to him. There was but one woman in America to whom this could have been said without absurdity. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was so conspicuous a factor in bringing on the war which abolished American slavery that to credit these results to Mrs. Stowe was not fulsome flattery but graceful compliment. There are two excellent biographies of Mrs. Stowe, one published in 1889, by her son,

Miss Alcott has been called, perhaps truly, the most popular story-teller for children, in her generation. Like those elect souls whom the apostle saw arrayed in white robes, she came up through great tribulation, paying dearly in labor and privation for her successes, but one must pronounce her life happy and fortunate, since she lived to enjoy her fame and fortune twenty years, to witness the sale of a million volumes of her writings, to receive more than two hundred thousand dollars from her