[In the following essay, Spofford, a friend of Cooke, discusses the fictional and autobiographical writings of the author.]

A quarter of a century ago, most of us can recall the joyous pride with which the birth of the Atlantic Monthly was hailed, and the eagerness with which each number was anticipated. Into what charming company it took us! There the Autocrat of the Breakfast-table held his genial sway; Motley fought over the “Battle of Lepanto”; Colonel Higginson led us into the woods of “April Days” and among the “Water-Lilies” of August in his series of wondrous out-door studies; Anne Whitney came with poems of a loftier reach and fuller grasp than any other woman has ever given the world; the “Minister's Wooing” took up its placid way; that brilliant tale, the “Queen of the Red Chessmen,” delighted the fancy and promised a new type of fiction; the “Man without a Country” deceived a wilderness of readers into tears; Emerson sang of “Brahma,” Longfellow of “Sandalphon,” and Whittier sang the “Swan-song of Parson Avery”; Frank Underwood stretched his kind hand to the unknown; and James Russell Lowell's genius welded the varying elements into a harmonious whole.

In this gracious company, too, came Rose Terry, with the leading story of the first number; and as story followed story, each better than the other, she kindled the ambition and had the felicitation of every other young woman who turned the pages throughout the country,—for most of us felt as if all girlhood were honored in her who carried her light before men with such proud strength and beauty.

We knew but little about her in those days, for personalities had not grown to rule us. We only knew that she lived in Connecticut, and had already published a story, in the palmy days of Putnam's Monthly, called “The Mormon's Wife,” which dealt powerfully with the leprosy of Mormonism, and wrung from the heart tears dried only by the heat of indignation. Any one who now reads that old story will be as much moved by it as its first readers were,—will comprehend that stronger yet more delicate argument was never made against the iniquity which would undermine that whole foundation of civilization, the family,—tearing the hearts of women and debasing the souls of men,—and must needs ask how so young a person knew the deep springs of feeling that play there, unless it is true that the experience of years teaches less than the intuitions of genius.

It is genius that informs every line Rose Terry has ever written,—a pure and lofty genius that burned with a white flame in such subtle metaphysical reveries as “My Tenants,” and “Did I?” and showed its many-colored light in brief bits of poetic romance, and in a succession of stories of New England life. One marvels how such a genius became the ultimate expression of generations of hard Puritan ancestry, as one marvels to see after silent flowerless years some dry and prickly cactus-stem burst out into its sudden flaming flower.

Rose Terry Cooke came of undoubted and undiluted Puritan blood, which is to be found nowhere bluer than in Connecticut. Her mother was Anne Wright Hurlbut, the daughter of John Hurlbut of Wethersfield, Connecticut, the first New England shipmaster who sailed round the world, and a man who subsequently lost his life caring for the sick during an epidemic. He left his daughter an orphan in her ninth year; and she grew up beautiful, tender, delicate, shrinking, undemonstrative from principle, and with a morbid conscience. She married Henry Wadsworth Terry, the son of Nathaniel Terry, president of a Hartford Bank, and for some time a member of Congress.

Henry Wadsworth Terry was a man of great information, a social favorite, sensitive, generous, and open-hearted. On his mother's side he belonged to the old Wadsworth stock, from which the poet Longfellow descended, his immediate ancestor in this country having been the Hon. William Wadsworth, dated at Cambridge, 1632, and at Hartford, 1636; and his uncle, several times removed, having been that Joseph Wadsworth who stole the Charter and ennobled the oak-tree for all time to come, and who had a descendant of his own spirit in General Terry of Fort Fisher and Pulaski fame, the cousin of Rose.

Rose was born on the 17th of February, 1827, on a farm, where her father and mother then lived, a half-dozen miles from Hartford, to which city, when the child had reached her sixth year, they removed, taking up their residence in a large brick mansion built in 1799 by Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth for his daughter, and at that time the best house in Hartford, except another just like it which he built for his son.

It is of the life and manners in this house that she speaks in a little sketch, faithful as a Flemish picture, in which she narrates to a child of the family the old-fashioned Thanksgiving doings in her grandmother's kitchen, with the green knotty glass of its window-panes through which she watched the pigeons and the cats, and with its immense fireplace:—

It was very wide indeed,—so wide you could sit in each corner and look up the chimney to the sky. The fire was in the middle, and was made of big logs piled up on great iron andirons. Over it was an iron thing called a crane, a flat, strong bar that swung off and on, so you could put on the kettles without burning your arms in the flame, and then swing them back to their place. They were hung on hooks, and those hooks put into short chains that had other hooks which held them on the crane, so the pot-hooks could be put in higher or lower, just as was needed. There was a bake-kettle stood in one corner of the chimney, and a charcoal furnace in the other, so that you could cook a great many things at once.

What fun we children did have at that fireplace when the cook was good-natured. We used to tie apples to strings, and then fasten the strings to the shelf above and see the apples twirl and roast and drip into saucers. We used to melt loaf-sugar into little wire-baskets tied to just such strings, and see it drop into buttered pans, making cakes of clear amber candy. We thawed frozen apples in the dish-kettle, and roasted ears of corn by leaning them against the andirons. We always begged the pigs' tails at ‘killing-time,’ and, rolling them in brown paper, baked them in the hot ashes. They never were good, nobody ever ate them; but we persisted in doing it year after year.

Then she tells us what Monday was in this great kitchen on the week in question, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, when,

if I was good, I was allowed to tuck myself into a corner, and look on, and run of errands. I went for nutmegs, for cinnamon, for pie-dishes; for more sugar, for milk, and spoons, and spices; but I was more than paid if I could only watch grandmother roll the thin crust out, lay it neatly over the dishes, shave off the edge close, and then, after filling it with the red, or yellow, or creamy mixture before her in big bowls, cut strips of paste with the dough-spur, and ornament their surfaces. What a work of skill it was to set those pies in the oven and never spill a drop or slop the broad edges of crust and leave a smear! How deliciously they smelt when they came out glazed and crisp and fit to melt in your mouth, like the cream-tarts of Bedredden Hassan!

It was here that Rose learned how to become the faultless housekeeper and accomplished cook that she is, and to practise an abounding hospitality in her own house.

Now the guests might come, and come they did,—some from the river-boat where they had spent a long dreary day; some from the stage that rattled and rumbled up to the door and unloaded there more bundles and babies than it ought to have held. And oh, what fun it was to hear the house ring with fresh voices; to see our dear handsome old grandfather welcoming them all so heartily; to hear fires crackle in the spare rooms and in the drawing-room; to see the tea-table with an extra leaf for extra guests; and see them all enjoy the bread and butter, the loaf-cake, the cookies, the dried beef, the pears and cream that nobody ever got so nice anywhere but at grandmother's house; and then there was the last delight of the day, to see mother, just as I was dropping off into sleep, standing close to the lamp to baste a bit of old lace into the throat of my green merino dress, and pin on the front her own little pin of rough Carolina gold.

But the next day is Thanksgiving. Grandfather is downstairs early, and has a big bright fire all ready; and there is sweet, gentle Aunt Clara with the last baby beside her knee, and a smile and a kiss for all of us; there are half a dozen cousins and five or six other aunts and uncles; and I get into a corner silent and shy. I love them all, but I could not say so, possibly. So I get out of sight all I can, swallow my breakfast and am happily at play under the table, with paper boats and handkerchief babies, and my dearest cousin Taf, the best boy in the world, I think, when mother comes for me to be washed and dressed and go to church. Taf is a big man now, and a general. He has taken forts, and conquered rebels, and been trailed about the world from pillar to post, and been praised in the newspapers and honored by the country;—but I asked him, not long ago, if he remembered how we played boats under the table, and he laughed and said he did.

I'm sorry to say I didn't like to be washed and dressed and go to church. My nose was always rubbed up, and soap got into my eyes, and my hair was braided in dreadfully tight pig-tails. I wanted to stay at home, and see the big turkey roasted in the roaster. I should have liked to baste him through the lid behind and turn him on the spit. I wanted to help stick cloves into the cold ham and score the mashed potato before it was put to brown in the reflector; but I had to go to church for all that, in my plum-colored pelisse and the pea-green silk hood lined with pink and edged with squirrel fur, that was made for us out of a piece of old Aunt Eunice's petticoat. She left two of them, one sky-blue and one pea-green, quilted in flowers and scrolls in the most elegant manner,—and they made beautiful hoods.

But then there was church. We sat in a square pew close by the pulpit, and when the long prayer came I always got up on the seat and knelt down and looked out of the window into the graveyard. There were two tombstones under the window, very small and brown, with a disagreeable cherub's head on each of them, and letters to tell about Mr. Joseph Hancox and two little sons, from New Hampshire, lying there. I used to wonder if they liked it to be buried there, and have burdocks grow over them. I never did like burdocks.

It seemed to me very hard that we had to go to church on a week-day. But I suppose they wanted us out of the way at home. For when we got back there was the long table all set out with silver, and glass, and china; the big bunch of celery in the middle in its sparkling glass vase; the moulds of crimson cranberry at the corners; decanters of bright wine at either end; the ham starred with cloves at one side, and a pair of cold tongues at the other; little dishes of pickled mushrooms, mangoes, and butternuts standing interspersed about; and on the sideboard such an array of pies, and jellies, and nuts, and apples, and almonds, and raisins, as might make four desserts to-day. But then people liked to eat and drink. They had open fires and rattling windows, and so plenty of fresh air.

There was grandfather in his knee-breeches and queer old-fashioned coat, with all the children clustering and clambering round him; there was grandmother, with her brown silk dress and best cap on, ruffles of soft thread-lace about her face and throat, the pretty young aunts dressed for the day, and the married aunts talking to each other about their children, and servants, and clothes, much as married aunts do still; and there were the uncles looking a little as if they wished the dinner would hurry. And last of all, there was one little table—for we children always had a table to ourselves—with a set of small pies on it. And sometimes I sat at the head, if Kate was not there, for she was older than I; but Quent always sat at the foot, being always there and the oldest of us all. What fun we had; and how hard it was to say what we would have to eat, for we could not eat everything. And by this time the table was loaded with turkey, and roast ducks, and chicken pie, and stewed salsify, and celery sauce, and gravies, besides all the cold meats; and I knew mother's beautiful dark eyes kept good watch over her little daughter's plate, for fear of next day's headache, for even then I had headaches.

This little transcript is valuable not only as giving scenes in the childhood of Rose, but as a picture that is nowhere else, that I am aware of, given so faithfully and vividly of the daily life of the period it treats, for there is much of it that I have not quoted.

How fond she is of those old places and people now long gone, and how she loves to delay and dally with them.

A garden full of all old-fashioned blooms lay about the wide front door and south of the side entrance. Old pear-trees, knotty and awkward, but veiled always in the spring with snowy blossoms, and hung thereafter with golden fruit, shaded a little the formal flower-beds where grew tulips, lifting scarlet and golden cups, or creamy chalices striped white, and pink, and purple, toward the sun; peonies round and flaunting; ragged robins; flowering almond that bloomed like Aaron's rod with myriads of tiny roses on a straight stick; fleur-de-lis with languid and royal banners of blue, white, or gold; flowering currant, its prim yellow blossoms breathing out spice to the first spring winds; snowdrops, original and graceful; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, narcissus, daffadowndillys; velvet and parti-colored roses, the rich buds of Provence and moss, the lavish garlands of the old white rose, and the delicate odorous damask. Why should I catalogue them? Yet they all rise crowding on my memory, and the air swims with their odors. … The smooth-cheeked crisp apricots ripened against the wall; bell-pears,—a fruit passed out of modern reach, a wondrous compound of sugar, and wine, and fragrance,—dropped in the rank grass; peaches that are known no more to man, great rose-flushed globes of honey and perfume that set the very wasps crazy, drooped the slight trees to earth with their gracious burden; cherries and plums strewed the ground, and were wasted from mere profusion; curculio was a stranger in the land, fire-blight unknown, yellows a myth, black-knot never tied, and the hordes of ravaging insects yet unhatched; there was enough for men and robins; the land was full of food.

How she delights to people this garden and its house with the old figures that belonged there—there is something touching in the way she lingers about them; perhaps the figure of the distant uncle to whose inheritance she at last owes that comfort which makes her in a measure independent of publishers,—perhaps that of the rosy, wilful, sweet, high-spirited maiden whose

very self has come back to earth in the third generation, romping, blooming, blue-eyed, and bewitching as her great-grandmother, with the same wide clear eyes and softly curving lips, the imperious frown, broad white forehead, and careless waving hair, that charmed the eyes of Rochambeau and Washington, and made the gay and gallant French officers clink their glasses for honor of little Molly when she was set on the dining-table with dessert to drink the general's health at a dinner-party. Sitting at her feet on a cricket and looking up at the wrinkled face and ruffled cap above us, it seemed more incredible than any wildest fairy tales that she should ever have been young and beautiful; but her picture, taken in the prime of womanhood, attests with its noble beauty all that tradition tells.

Here, too, she lingers with Mabel, the old great-great-grandmother, stern, self-reliant, with regular features, set lips, and keen, cold, gray eyes. “That chill and steel,” she says, “come out here and there among her descendants, and temper, perhaps desirably, the facile good-nature and bon-hommie that her husband bequeathed also among us.” That husband rode, to serve his country, on some emergency, till his legs were so swollen with the fixed position and fatigue that it was necessary to fill his riding-boots with brandy before they could be forced off.

It is his clothes laid up in the garret, the clothes of the old Wadsworth of the Revolutionary era, worn at the French court and other less regal festivities, that were wont to delight Rose's childish fancy.

How goodly were those ample suits of Genoa velvet,—coats whose skirts would make a modern garment, with silver buttons wherever buttons could be sewed; breeches with paste buckles at the knees, so bright in their silver setting that my childish soul secretly cherished a hope that they might possibly be diamonds after all; and waistcoats of white satin, embroidered with gold or silver, tarnished, it is true, by time,—but what use is an imagination only eight years old if the mere tarnish of eighty years counts for anything in its sight. These coats were wonderful to me;—how wonderful would they not be in the streets to-day! One was of scarlet velvet, with a silvery frost on its pile like the down on a peach,—velvet so thick that I pricked my fingers painfully attempting to fashion a pincushion out of a fragment thereof; another was purple, with a plum-like bloom on its royal tint, and another sober gray and glittering only with buttons and buckles of cut steel. Think how a goodly and personable man dazzled the eyes of fair ladies in those days, arrayed like a tulip, with shining silk stockings, and low shoes all of a sparkle with steel, or paste, or diamonds; his shapely hands adorned with rich lace frills, his ample bosom and muscular throat blossoming out with equally soft and costly garniture!

Between Rose and her mother, with the beautiful dark eyes she spoke of,—to return to herself after this glimpse at her ancestry,—there existed the most close and tender relation in a tie of unusual intimacy. But to her father she owes much of her love of nature, and of her varied knowledge of its manifestations. It was he that taught her how to study the clouds and the stars, flower and weed, and landscape; it was he that taught her the names of blossoms and the songs of birds, so that there seems to be small sum of wildwood lore of which she is not mistress. An apt little pupil, a child of the woods in which she lived so much, these studies were after her own heart,—she stood once nearly an hour, as silent as a stone, to see if a big, burly bumble-bee, buzzing and humming about, would not mistake her for a flower and alight upon her. She can tell you where to find the partridge's nest, the whippoorwill's eggs hidden in dry leaves, the humming-bird's pearls; her glance knows all the difference between the basket-nest of the vireo hanging from its twig, the pensile grossbeak's swinging over the stream, and the orchard oriole's. She distinguishes their notes, and as if she understood their meaning; she knows the “faint songs of blue-birds closing their spring serenades in a more plaintive key, as if the possible accidents of hatching and rearing assailed them now with apprehension;” an old acquaintance of hers is the cat-bird, “giving his gratuitous concert from the topmost twig of an elm;” and it is she that describes “the distant passionately mournful lyric of the song-sparrows, reserved for spring alone, as if a soul had merged its life in one love, and in its deepest intensity and most glowing fervor knew through all that the love was wasted and the fervor vain.”

All the wild-flowers and their haunts are pre-eminently hers, too. She knows where the first of the pink moccasin-flowers hang out their banners, in what wet spot the sweet and rare white violets hide their fragrances, the brookside where the cardinals gather the later heats into their hues, the forgotten paths where the shy-fringed gentian may be found, and the field where here and there is to be seen “a vivid fire-lily holding its stately cup of flame right upward to the ardent sun, as if to have it filled with splendor and overflowed with light;” and so true is she to their seasons, as if she felt with them the life that pulses up through the old earth to their blossoming, that if she said the wild-rose wreathed the snowdrifts of January, I should believe that the rest of the world had always been mistaken regarding that particular blossom. She ought to know about roses, anyway, for none in all the country-side bloom more beautifully than hers do in the little plots where she is a famous gardener to-day. Perhaps it was her mother, on the other hand, again, who taught her the love of man and woman and child, the knowledge of human nature which marks every word she utters, and from whom she inherited that innermost poetry of being, the emotional delicacy which gilds and illumines all her thoughts. She was a delicate child, owing to an early illness, so severe an illness that for a space it was thought she had really passed away from life; and it was possibly for that reason that her out-door habits were encouraged. She was an exceedingly sensitive and imaginative child, too, and her imagination was by no means dwarfed by the servants, who told her ghost-stories, so powerfully affecting her that years afterward she would slip out of bed in all the dreadful, haunted darkness, grope shivering and shuddering to the stairs, and crouch there where she could see a glimmer of light or hear a murmur of voices.

The most noted of these servants was Athanasius, a Greek boy escaped from the Turkish massacre,—more's the pity, one is tempted to say,—and despatched to her father as a waiter by Bishop Wainwright. Rose was sent out to walk with him every day, being then only three years old, and he would regale her on the way with the most frightful recitals, threatening that if she ever told her father or mother he would murder her, a possibility which she fully believed of him. So thoroughly had secrecy been burned into her soul by fear that she never told of him till she was a grown woman, and had forgotten every word of his stories; but she never forgot, she has said, her horror when she chanced to meet his fierce black eyes at the table, and, thinking he might fulfil his threat on the supposition that she had betrayed him, would open her lips to cry out, “O Athanasius! don't kill me! I haven't told!” when the thought that such an exclamation was truly betrayal and sudden death checked her. It is very possibly something of her own experience of this sort that has made her one of the most eloquent advocates of oppressed children.

After leaving the shelter of her mother's side, Rose entered a female seminary, under the care of Mr. John P. Brace, who had been an instructor in the school where her mother received her education before becoming a pupil of Mrs. Sigourney's. The early growth of her powers, which was marked by the fact of her knowing how to read perfectly at the age of three, was equally perceptible in her school life, where she wrote prize-poems, composed dramas for the young amateurs of the school, and learned languages, all as if it were play: some verses written then under the title of “Heartsease” would have done credit to the maturer poetesses of the preceding generation.

At sixteen she graduated; and it was during the same year that she united with the church, making a profession of religion which has ever since been as vital to her as the atmosphere she breathed. But although of the straitest sect herself, she has always been liberal and kindly in relation to the views of others. To some, in her enthusiasm for beauty, her idealism, and her sense of the consoling power of visible nature, it would seem as if a strain of pagan blood had, after all, a little enlarged the Puritan, if there were any possibility of the pagan upon the scene. For if one recalls the dark antecedents of that region which gave her birth, the strength and sternness of a race springing on a soil but half reclaimed from the primeval forest, but half redeemed from the lurking savage, haunted by terrors of the known and of the unknown, where thought descended straightened by the iron cage of a strict creed, nowhere stricter, and nowhere enduring with more unrelaxing rigor, it will be felt that so rich and beautiful a nature as Rose Terry's was as foreign to all that gloomy shadow of descent as a tropical blossom would be to that belt of the eternal snows where only the lichen grows.

But whatever her own nature and identity may be, that descent has given her a warm and kindred sympathy with the experiences of people who share it with her, and she derives from it her faculty of depicting the last delicate shade and contour of the New England country life in a manner rivalled by no other delineator. For capital as the dialect of Mrs. Stowe is in this field, and delicious as the “Biglow Papers” are, I should say that they neither of them quite render that inner piquancy and flavor which she has caught, nor altogether evince complete perception of that strange character, soon to be only a thing of history, with all its contrasts and colors, its wealth and its meagreness, the depth of its sombreness, the flashes of its drollery, the might of its uprightness, the strength of its superstitions, with its shadows, its grotesqueries, and its undying pathos,—all of which she sees with keen insight and personal sympathy, humanizes with fearless fidelity to nature and most tender humor, and brightens with a brilliant wit.

It is not in any flattering light that she takes up this theme; she finds in it occasion for romance of all the darker sort, as well as for trenchant phrase and for illimitable laughter. In the sketch of the “West Shetucket Railway,” that Hawthorne might have written (“Crispin, rival de son maître, un petit chef d'œuvre que Molière a oublié de faire,” as Arsene Houssaye says), she looks on a blacker side than many of us are quite willing to admit the existence of; but it is on this black side that she knows how to throw the irradiation of her genius, and, while bringing out the abrupt lights and darks, softening all with the divine glow of pity.

“To a person at all conversant with life in the deep country of New England,” she says:

Life in lonely farms among its wild mountains, or on the bare, desolate hills that roll their sullen brown summits mile on mile through the lower tracts of this region, there is nothing more painful than the prevalence of crime and disease in these isolated homes. Born to an inheritance of hard labor, labor necessary to mere life; fighting with that most valorous instinct of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation, against a climate not only rigorous but fatally changeful, a soil bitter and barren enough to need that gold should be sewn before more than copper can be harvested, without any excitement to stir the half torpid brain, without any pleasure, the New England farmer becomes in too many cases a mere creature of animal instincts akin to the beasts that perish,—hard, cruel, sensual, vindictive. An habitual church-goer, perhaps; but none the less thoroughly irreligious. All the keener sensitiveness of his organization blunted with over-work and under-feeding till the finer emotions of his soul dwindle and perish for want of means of expression, he revenges himself on his condition in the natural way. And when you bring this same dreadful pressure to bear on women, whose more delicate nature is proportionately more excitable, whose hearts bleed silently to the very last drop before their lips find utterance,—when you bring to bear on these poor weak souls, made for love and gentleness and bright outlooks from the daily dulness of work, the brutality, stupidness, small craft, and boorish tyranny of husbands to whom they are tied beyond escape, what wonder is it that a third of all the female lunatics in our asylums are farmers' wives, and that domestic tragedies, even beyond the scope of a sensation novel, occur daily in these lonely houses, far beyond human help or hope?

It is not always from such gloomy material, however, that she has drawn, and whenever she has used it it is to brighten it with her inexhaustible pleasantry. “The's other folks die and don't remember you, and you're just as bad off as if you wa'n't a widder,” comes on a funereal occasion; a touch of rude nature breaks upon the pathos of a scene where “the locusts in the woods chittered as though they was fryin',” and phrases of the vernacular, such as “chewin' of meetin'-seed,” “the shockanum palsy,” “dumb as a horned critter,” and a world of others are preserved for all time, like bugs in amber.

A multiplied value is given to these characterizations by the circumstance that their types are fast becoming extinct. The pious old spinster, who could give lessons in the five points of Calvinism to the modern minister, will soon be no more, and it is a historical study when we find her, as we do, for instance, in the person of Miss Lavvy, uttering her shrewd aphorisms, “Well, of all things! if you hain't got aground on doctrines,” cries the old tailoress. “Happilony, you hear to me, you've got common sense, and does it stand to reason that the Lord that made you hain't got any? … If you've got so't you can't understand the Lord's ways, mebbe you'd better stop. Folks that try dippin' up the sea in a pint-cup don't usually make it out. … We ain't right to vex ourselves about to-morrow; to-day's all we can handle; the manna spiled when it was kep' over.”

Immediately after graduation Rose began to teach in Hartford, although she did not long remain there while thus occupied, presently taking a situation in a Presbyterian church school in Burlington, N. J. In the fourth year there she became a governess in the family of the clergyman; but after a while, feeling the need there was of her at home, she returned to Hartford and began her more precisely literary life.

Her first story, written for “Graham's Magazine,” at the age of eighteen, encouraged her; but her dream was that of developing her powers of poetry. Sympathy with those whom she met and knew from day to day, a quick and keen eye for the ridiculous, a heart touched with pity, and the natural faculty of the raconteur, diverted her in some measure into the stories of New England life of which I have spoken; but the fluttering aspiration of her nature, at home in lofty regions, lifted her on wings of song; and every one of her stories that deals with human nature in other than its rustic New England aspects is as much a poem as if written in measure with rhyme and rhythm.

Her first verses were printed in the New York Tribune, and nothing better shows the tenderness of the tie between her and her mother, and the inherent modesty of her nature, than the fact of her using her mother's initials for a pseudonym, and hiding her own authorship altogether. Mr. Charles A. Dana, then editorially connected with the Tribune, was her very good friend in this matter, and she has always cherished for him a grateful attachment. Those who befriend us in these trying if glowing days of our first endeavor, become in some degree a part of the ideal we pursue, and never lose the light then shed about them, and this was her case in relation also to many others who watched the opening of her genius with interest and sympathy. Rose Terry is the most loyal of friends where she has given her affection; her fidelity is as stanch as her choice is discriminating, and her enthusiasm once kindled knows no bounds, since in its cause there is nothing she would not sacrifice except her soul. Possibly she would be as good a hater as lover should occasion rise, for indifference is impossible to her, and all her emotions are strong ones.

Such a spirit, sensitive to all the phenomena of the material and immaterial universe, is the animate essence of poetry; and it is no wonder that as week by week her verses appeared they touched a wider and wider circle, till inquiry rose as to their origin, and it was at last demanded that they should be gathered into a volume where their lovers could have them more nearly at hand. Between the lines of this little volume much of the author's experience and personality can be read by one in search of it. A passionate love of beauty pervades it, a stinging scorn of the ignoble. Every here and there a delicate sadness breaks through its reserves:—

My life is like a song
          That a bird sings in its sleeping,
Or a hidden stream that flows along
          To the sound of its own soft weeping.

And again we have it in the “New Moon,” in “Implora Pace,” and in the “Fishing Song” heard over the wide gray river:—

And the ways of God are darkness,
          His judgment waiteth long,—
He breaks the heart of a woman
          With a fisherman's careless song.

It is a sadness, nevertheless, that once in a while rises to an impersonal height, as in the strength of the lines:—

Hast thou no more enduring date
Than out of one despair to die?

Or yet again,

                              God sees from the high blue heaven,
                                        He sees the grape in the flower;
                              He hears one's life-blood dripping
                                        Through the maddest, merriest hour;
He knows what sack-cloth and ashes hide in the purple
                                                            of power!

Here, too, in such fiery verses as “Samson Agonistes,” “Fremont's Ride,” and “After the Camanches,” may be seen the writer's patriotism, her politics, and her lively interest in the questions of the day; her religious feeling is found in the “Bell Songs” and in “Prayer,” to speak of no others; and her sympathy with the human heart in “At Last,” and in “The Two Villages,” a thing that has been printed and reprinted, carried in work-baskets and pocket-books, and everybody's heart. There is a tremendous vigor and vivid picturesqueness in her poems of “Semele” and “The Suttee,” weird and wonderful phases of passion, and in “Doubt,” a poem without a peer, in its own order, unless it be Emerson's “Brahma;” while “Basile Renaud” is a ballad that in dramatic fire, spirit, and beauty is worthy of the first poet of the age. Meantime, “In The Hospital,” “Done For,” and “Lost on the Prairie,” were the pioneers of the Border ballad, originated the idea and gave the motive to all of that nature that have ever followed.

There are few poets who have the power of presenting a scene so that its very atmosphere is felt; but Rose Terry always does; here the spell of cool odors and dews and rustling leaves are had, where—

                    Far through the hills some falling river grieves,
                                                            All earth is stilled
Save where a dreaming bird with sudden song is thrilled;

And there the sense of the forest distils about us as—

The thick leaves that scent the tremulous air
          Let the bright sunshine pass with softened light,
And lips unwonted breathe instinctive prayer
          In these cool arches filled with verdurous night.

None of her poems are more spiritually or suggestively lovely than that with the title of “Trailing Arbutus,” which seems to bear about it the fragrance of the flower itself.

                                                  Were your pure lips fashioned
                                                            Out of air and dew,
                                                  Starlight unimpassioned,
                                                            Dawn's most tender hue,
And scented by the woods that gathered sweets for you?
                                                  Were not mortal sorrow
                                                            An immortal shade,
                                                  Then would I to-morrow
                                                            Such a flower be made,
And live in the dear woods where my lost childhood played.

Through all these pages a sweet, keen, delicate music throbs and sings itself. I remember when I first read them how it haunted me, a beautiful ghost that would not down, and after twenty-five years they are still singing their tunes in my brain.

Of late years other work has in too great measure superseded the delight of singing, although a long poem was written to be read at the celebration of the anniversary of the Groton Massacre, the selection of her name as that of the poet of the day, showing the pride and appreciation in which her native State holds her; and later she gave the young girls of the graduating class of Smith College “The Flower Sower,” as full of freshness and purity as the spring morning is of sun-shine and dew.

Ten years after writing her first story, “The Mormon's Wife,” of which we have already spoken, was published, and after that time Rose became a constant contributor to Putnam's Monthly till it ceased, to Harper's, the Atlantic, and other periodicals as they rose, receiving the best pay given, although the best may be said to be inadequate for such work. If many of these stories are not poems, as I have said, it is simply in form. What fine unison with nature breathes through them, what feeling for the ineffable experiences of which all are conscious but which most are powerless to reduce to words, how rich and varied is the diction, and how sonorous the phrasing! What sentences are such as this: “The music lived alone in upper air; of men and dancing it was all unaware; the involved cadences rolled away over the lawn, shook the dew-dropped roses on their stems, and went upward in the boundless moonlight to its home.” And who, with brush and pigment, can paint a picture more actually and perfectly than this:

From the front door-step, a great slab of hewn granite, you looked southward down a little green valley, striking a range of wooded hills, and on the other hand a bright chain of lakelets threaded on a rippled river. To the right, as you faced this lovely outlet, a mountain lifted its great green shoulders and barren summit high in air; and, to the left, a lake slept in the bosom of just such lofty hills, wooded to the water's edge, and so reflexed and repeated in that tranquil mirror that its shifting dyes of golden verdure mimicked the peacock's beauteous throat, and changed, faded, brightened, grew dark, or gold, or gray, with every wandering cloud, each sun-kiss from the sunnier heaven, all flying showers or ruffling winds; while, to the north, mountain overlapping mountain, painted by the deepening distance with darkest green, solemn purple, or aerial blue, and hiding in their giant breasts the road that threaded those secret abysses, daunted and defied the gazer with a mystery of grand beauty that might make a poet hopeless and a painter despair.

Although stories as forcible as “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy,” full at once of a terrible pathos and a grim humor, have since come from her pen, nothing that she has ever written has exceeded the absolute beauty of “Metempsychosis,” published twenty years or more ago, and of which I subjoin a portion:—

I drew the long skirt of my lace-dress up over my hair, and quietly went into the greenhouse. The lawn and its black firs tempted me, but there was moonlight on the lawn, and moonlight I cannot bear; it burns my head more fiercely than any noon sun; it scorches my eyelids; it exhausts and fevers me; it excites my brain, and now I looked for calm. This the odor of the flowers and their pure expression promised me. A tall, thick-leaved camellia stood half-way down the border, and before it was a garden-chair. The moonlight shed no ray there, but through the sashes above streamed cool and fair over the blooms that clung to the wall and adorned the parterres and vases; for this house was set after a fashion of my own, a winter-garden under glass; no stages filled the centre. It was laid out with no stiff rule, but here and there in urns of stone, or in pyramidal stands, gorgeous or fragrant plants ran at their own wild will, while over all the wall and along the woodwork of the roof trailed passion-flowers, roses, honeysuckles, fragrant clematis, ivy, and those tropic vines whose long dead names belie their fervid luxuriance and fantastic growth; great trees of lemon and orange interspaced the vines in shallow niches of their own, and the languid drooping tresses of a golden acacia flung themselves over and across the deep glittering mass of a broad-leaved myrtle.

As I sat down on the chair, Pan reared his dusky length from his mat and came for a recognition. It was wont to be something more positive than caresses; but to-night neither sweet biscuit nor savory bit of confectionery appeared in the hand that welcomed him; yet he was as loving as ever, and, with a grim sense of protection, flung himself at my feet, drew a long breath, and slept. I dared not yet think; I rested my head against the chair, and breathed in the odor of flowers; the delicate scent of tea-roses; the southern perfume, fiery and sweet, like Greek wine, of profuse heliotropes,—a perfume that gives you thirst, and longing, and regret. I turned my head towards the orange-trees; southern, also, but sensuous and tropic was the breath of those thick white stars,—a tasted odor. Not so the cool air that came to me from a diamond-shaped bed of Parma violets, kept back so long from bloom that I might have a succession of them; these were the last, and their perfume told it, for it was at once a caress and a sigh. I breathed the gale of sweetness till every nerve rested and every pulse was tranquil as the air without.

I heard a little stir. I looked up. A stately calla, that reared one marble cup from its gracious, cool leaves, was bending earthward with a slow and voluntary motion; from the cup glided a fair woman's shape; snowy, sandalled feet shone from under the long robe; hair of crisped gold crowned the Greek features. It was Hypatia. A little shiver crept through a white tea-rose beside the calla; its delicate leaves fluttered to the ground; a slight figure, a sweet sad face with melancholy blue eyes and fair brown hair, parted the petals. La Vallière! She gazed in my eyes.

“Poor little child!” said she. “Have you a treatise against love, Hypatia?”

The Greek of Egypt smiled and looked at me also. “I have discovered that the steps of the gods are upon wool,” answered she; “if love had a beginning to sight should not we also foresee its end?”

“And when one foresees the end, one dies,” murmured La Vallière.

“Bah!” exclaimed Marguerite of Valois, from the heart of a rose-red camellia; “not at all, my dear; one gets a new lover!”

“Or the new lover gets you,” said a dulcet tone, tipped with satire, from the red lips of Mary of Scotland,—lips that were just now the petals of a crimson carnation.

“Philosophy hath a less troubled sea whereon to ride than the stormy fluctuance of mortal passion; Plato is diviner than Ovid,” said a Puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was fashioned of the white camellia-blooms behind my chair, and circled the prim beauty of Lady Jane Grey.

“Are you a woman, or one of the Sphinx's children?” said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor from the lithe waist and slender arms of a dark woman, no more young,—sallow, thin, but more graceful than any bending bough of the desert acacia, and with eyes like midnight, deep, glowing, flashing, melting into dew, as she looked at the sedate lady of England.

“You do not know love!” resumed she. “It is one draught,—a jewel fused in nectar; drink the pearl and bring the asp!”

Her words brought beauty; the sallow face burned with living scarlet on lip and cheek; the tiny pearl-grains of teeth flashed across the swarth shade above her curving, passionate mouth; the wide nostril expanded; the great eyes flamed under her low brow and glittering coils of black hair.

“Poor Octavia!” whispered La Vallière. Lady Jane Grey took up her breviary, and read.

“After all, you died!” said Hypatia.

“I lived!” retorted Cleopatra.

“Lived and loved,” said a dreamy tone from the hundred leaves of a spotless La Marque rose; and the steady “unhasting, unresting” soul of Thekla looked out from that centreless flower, in true German guise of brown, braided tresses, deep blue eyes like forget-me-nots, sedate lips, and a straight nose.

“I have lived, and loved, and cut bread and butter,” solemnly pronounced a mountain-daisy, assuming the broad features of a fräulein.

“Cleopatra used an Egyptian oath. Lady Jane Grey put down her breviary and took up Plato. Marguerite of Valois laughed outright. Hypatia put a green leaf over Charlotte, with the air of a high-priestess, and extinguished her.

“Who does not love cannot lose,” mused La Vallière.

“Who does not love neither has nor gains,” said Hypatia, “The dilemma hath two sides, and both gain and loss are problematic. It is the ideal of love that enthralls us, not the real.”

“Hush, you white-faced Greek! It was not an ideal; it was Marc Antony. By Isis! does a dream fight and swear and kiss?”

“The Navarrese did; and France dreamed he was my master,—not I!” laughed Marguerite.

“This is most weak stuff for goodly and noble women to foster,” grimly uttered a flame-colored hawk's-bill tulip, that directly assumed a ruff and an aquiline nose.

Mary of Scotland passed her hand about her fair throat. “Where is Leicester's ring?” said she.

The Queen did not hear, but went on. “Truly, you make as if it was the intent of women to be trodden under foot of men. She that ruleth herself shall rule both princes and nobles, I wot. Yet I had done well to marry. Love or no love, I would the House of Hanover had waged war with one of mine own blood; I hate those fair, fat Guelphs!”

“Love hath sometimes the thorn alone, the rose being blasted in bud,” uttered a sweet and sonorous voice, with a little nasal accent, out of the myrtle-boughs that starred with bloom her hair, and swept the hem of her green dress.

“Sweet soul, was thou not, then, sated upon sonnets?” said Mary of Scotland, in a stage aside.

“Do not the laurels overgrow the thorn?” said La Vallière, with a wistful, inquiring smile.

Laura looked away. “They are very green at Avignon,” said she.

Out of two primroses, side by side, Stella and Vanessa put forth pale and anxious faces, with eyes tear-dimmed.

“Love does not feed on laurels,” said Stella; “they are fruitless.”

“That the clergy should be celibate is mine own desire,” broke in Queen Elizabeth. “Shall every curly fool's pate of a girl be turning after an anointed bishop? I will have this thing ended, certes! and that with speed.”

Vanessa was too deep in a brown study to hear. Presently she spoke. “I believe that love is best founded on a degree of respect and veneration, which it is decent in youth to render unto age and learning.”

“Ciel!” muttered Marguerite. “Is it, then, that in this miserable England one cherishes a grand passion for one's grandfather?”

The heliotrope clusters melted into a face of plastic contour, rich, full lips, soft, interfused outlines, intense, purple eyes, and heavy, waving hair, dark indeed, but harmonizing curiously with the narrow gold fillet that bound it. “It is no pain to die for love,” said the low, deep voice with an echo of rolling gerunds in the tone.”

“That depends on how sharp the dagger is,” returned Mary of Scotland. “If the axe had been dull”—

From the heart of a red rose Juliet looked out; the golden centre crowned her head with yellow tresses; her tender hazel eyes were calm with intact passion; her mouth was scarlet with fresh kisses, and full of consciousness and repose. “Harder it is to live for love,” said she; “hardest of all to have ever lived without it.”

“How much do you all help the matter?” said a practical Yankee voice from a pink hollyhock. “If the infinite relations of life assert themselves in marriage, and the infinite “I” merges its individuality in the personality of another, the superincumbent need of a passional relation passes without question. What the soul of the seeker asks for itself and the universe is, whether the ultimate principle of existent life is passional or philosophic?”

“Your dialectic is wanting in purity of expression,” calmly said Hypatia; “the tongue of Olympus suits gods and their ministers only.”

“Plato hath no question of the matter in hand,” observed Lady Jane Grey, with a tone of finishing the subject.

“I know nothing of your questions and philosophies,” scornfully stormed Cleopatra. “Fire seeks fire, and clay clay. Isis send me Antony, and every philosopher in Alexandria may go drown in the Nile! Shall I blind my eyes with scrolls of papyrus when there is a goodly Roman to be looked upon?”

From the deep blue petals of a double English violet came a delicate face, pale, serene, sad, but exceeding tender. “Love liveth when the lover dies,” said Lady Rachel Russell. “I have well loved my lord in the prison; shall I cease to affect him when he is become one of the court above?”

“You are cautious of speech, Mesdames,” carelessly spoke Marguerite. “Women are the fools of men; you all know it. Every one of you has carried cap and bell.”

They all turned towards the hawk's-bill tulip; it was not there.

“Gone to Kenilworth,” demurely sneered Mary of Scotland.

A pond-lily, floating in a tiny tank, opened its clasped petals; and with one bare pearly foot upon the green island of leaves, and the other touching the edge of the marble basin, clothed with a rippling, lustrous, golden garment of hair, that rolled down in glittering masses to her slight ankles, and half hid the wide, innocent blue eyes and infantile, smiling lips, Eve said, “I was made for Adam,” and slipped silently again into the closing flower.

“But we have changed all that!” answered Marguerite, tossing her jewel-clasped curls.

“They whom the saints call upon to do battle for king and country have their nature after the manner of their deeds,” came a clear voice from the fleur-de-lis that clothed itself in armor, and flashed from under a helmet the keen dark eyes and firm beardless lips of a woman.

“There have been cloistered nuns,” timidly breathed La Vallière.

“There is a monk's hood in that parterre without,” said Marguerite.

The white clematis shivered. It was a veiled shape in long robes that hid face and figure, who clung to the wall and whispered “Paraclete!”

“There are tales of saints in my breviary,” soliloquized Mary of Scotland; and in the streaming moonlight, as she spoke, a faint outline gathered, lips and eyes of solemn peace, a crown of blood-red roses pressing thorns into the wan temples that dripped sanguine streams, and in the halo above the wreath,—a legend partially obscured, that ran, “Utque talis Rosa nulli alteri plantœ adhœreret.”

“But the girl there is no saint; I think, rather, she is of mine own land,” said a purple passion-flower that hid itself under a black mantilla, and glowed with dark beauty. The Spanish face bent over me with ardent eyes and lips of sympathetic passion, and murmured, “Do not fear! Pedro was faithful unto and after death; there are some men”—

Pan growled. I rubbed my eyes. Where was I? …

The oftener I read this story, in which history, poetry, the dramatic, and the natural, blend so many charms, the more irresistible I find its spell, and sometimes I hesitate to acknowledge that, in its own vein, the passage I have quoted has its superior. To me Rose Terry Cooke is the queen of all living story-tellers; in the power of wringing tears and forcing laughter I do not know her superior, and Ludvig Tieck and Edgar Poe are alone her equals.

The writing of stories and poems has been, after all, but an outside matter with her, a sort of ring of Saturn. The real business of her life has gone on within its circle, a life largely given to others, crowded with domestic interests and occupations, in which she has proved, to quote a couplet of her own, that—

Daily, hourly, loving and giving
In the poorest life makes heavenly living;

a life little of which belongs to the public, and whose tenor until her marriage was varied only by a journey to Canada, or the West, or the White Mountains, by the publication of her Poems, and a marvelously sweet and simple book for Sunday-school children called Happy Dodd, and later by a volume of collected stories, by no means her best.

When Rose was about twenty-nine her idolized sister Alice, younger than herself by nearly five years, married; and in the delicate state of this sister's health her two children became the care and delight of Rose. Much as these children may owe to her, it is to them chiefly that Rose owes her delicate and innermost sympathy with children, the knowledge of their pretty patois, and of their needs and natures; and for years they made all the happiness she had. Great griefs came to her,—the death of her mother, the long illness and death of her sister; but the love of the children has remained a precious possession.

It would be no brief or light thing to tell the story of all that Rose Terry Cooke is in a home, among the poor, in the life of a neighborhood, or beside a sick-bed. Her sister used to say that she thought of everything like a woman and did everything like a man. There was never any limit to her self-devotion, and there is none to-day; she is a prodigal of her time, her work, her thought, her money, and herself. Hardly less is to be expected of so generous and enthusiastic a spirit; for enthusiasm is itself a self-forgetting.

I recall an instance of this enthusiasm, when she was a good deal younger than she is now. She happened to attend Plymouth Church one morning when the pastor brought upon the platform a little colored child who was to be returned to slavery unless a certain sum of money could be paid for her at once, Mr. Beecher undertaking to raise that money in his church and set the child free. As he told the story of her little life and wrongs, in his inimitable manner, every heart was harrowed, none more so than that of Rose, who was half wild with excitement, wrought to a fever of pity and horror; and every purse flew open, and Rose had no purse about her. But on her hand, a white and tiny hand, was a ring she valued, a ring with a single fine opal in its setting,—if it had been the Orloff diamond it would have made no difference, it was all she had when the box came round, and she took it off and dropped it in. It chanced that the ring exactly fitted one of the fingers of the little brown hand, and Mr. Beecher gave it to the child in token of her freedom and her friends, as the money raised was amply sufficient to purchase her safety; and presently advertising for information concerning the giver of the ring, he christened the child into the new life with the name of Rose. If the reader should ever see a painting by Eastman Johnson, called the “Freedom Ring,” where a child sits on a tiger-skin and looks curiously and gladly at a jewel on her hand, it is this incident which it commemorates.

It is such hearty consonance and accord, such quick response, aided perhaps by the pungent wit which is born of common sense at its highest development, that makes Rose Terry constantly the recipient of all manner of sympathetic confidences, both from people whom she knows and those whom she never met before, but who seek her, certain of receiving comfort, and repose in her the sad and sacred secrets of their lives. People, too, turn up, thinking that this or that passage of her writing is about themselves, so true a chord does she strike with her touch that knows the sore spots of the human heart.

Possibly no odder experience ever befell any one than she has encountered in the simulation and personation of herself by various individuals for reasons best known to themselves. The first of these appeared in a Pennsylvania town, in the shape of a woman who claimed there that she had written everything ever published under Rose Terry's name, that the name was a nom de plume any way, the name of a little cousin of hers who died young, her uncle, the child's father, allowing her to use it.

This interesting person aroused a wild religious excitement among the young people of the place, fell into hysteric trances on hearing sacred music, and made herself generally adored and followed. As irritating a fact as any in the matter may have been her statement that she had received eighty thousand dollars from these writings of hers, and had used it all in educating poor girls! After a time Mrs. Stowe received a note from the lady with whom this pretender boarded, which ran,—

Dear Madam,—I call upon you to silence the base reports spread about here concerning a lovely Christian woman at present staying with me. A line from you, stating that she is the author of the works written under the signature of Rose Terry, will stop the rumors at once, and much oblige yours truly.

Mrs. Stowe immediately responded that she had known Rose Terry from her birth, and that she was then, and had been for many years, living in Hartford, and the other person was necessarily an impostor.

Years afterward this gay deceiver came to Rose's native place, established herself there as one of the leaders in religious and charitable matters, told some one that she had written much under Rose's name, told some one else that she had eighteen hundred dollars a year from the Atlantic Monthly, and marked several of the best poems in a religious collection as her own, the publisher positively denying her statement when asked about it. This peculiar individual still holds a trusted position in a city charity, and lives in a wealthy family as guide, philosopher, and friend, although the truth has been told to her clientèle, who persist in regarding her as a persecuted saint.

The next counterfeit of her identity was in the person of a lady on a railroad train, who made acquaintance with the sister of a friend of Rose's, the sister never happening to have seen Rose; she informed her that she was Rose Terry, that she was going abroad to write a book, and various other items of her literary affairs, of which Rose herself is never in the habit of speaking to casual acquaintances, having, as she says, an old-fashioned predilection for the passée grace of modesty.

Number three of these replicas was not so bad as might be, as she simply offered her services in a New York Sunday school, and having registered this name of her fancy, never appeared.

Number four, however, very soon replaced her, making her avatar at a hotel in New York and confiding the fact of the authorship of certain sentimental, romantic, and humorous stories and verses to a Southern lady who presently betrayed her.

But number five carried things to a pretty pass; meeting an acquaintance of Rose's in the cars on the way from Hartford, she naturally enough inquired if she lived there, and then if she knew Rose, and thereat proceeded to give quite a circumstantial account of her own intimacy with the object of her remark. On reaching New York, she left the train at the upper station, and the pocketbook of Rose's Hartford acquaintance left with her.

As curious as anything done in the counterfeiting way by these worthies is the fact that it was Rose whom they dared to make the subject of their deceits and lies, for in the fires of her indignant scorn and anger a lie is something that should shrivel,—it could not live in her presence. Honest herself, with an unflinching integrity, she has small mercy on meannesses and falsehood, although, tender-hearted to a fault, she is full of forgiveness for the repentant.

Rose is one of the most emotional of people. Music flatters her to tears, as it did the “aged man and poor” of St. Agnes' Eve; she loses herself, like a child, at the play; and she outstrips justice in the generosity of her judgments on her literary contemporaries, some of whom owe her a debt of inspiration not to be repaid. She is an easy and rapid writer, a child of nature, owing little to art, writing on her knee and seldom copying, in a compact and regular script that tells of an even pulse; submitting to interruption, and never shutting herself up from her household duties for the sake of her pen. She is an amazing mimic, a delightful talker, having an immense memory with stores of learning, and being the wittiest woman I have ever met; alive to the tips of her fingers, she takes the keenest interest in everything and everybody about her. Tall and shapely, dressing richly, she is still very attractive in person; in her youth, with her Spanish color, her great soft dark eyes, her thick and long black hair, and the sweetness and vivacity of her expression, she is said to have been singularly beautiful. I have a picture of her, taken as a Quakeress, the relic of some fancy fair where all were in costume, that is lovely enough for a Madonna.

On the 16th of April, 1873, a great change came into Rose Terry's life, a change that lifted its daily round into the ideal. She became then the wife of Mr. Rollin H. Cooke, an iron manufacturer of Litchfield County, Connecticut; and she went to live with him, after the death of her father, at Winsted, a little mountain town full of gorges and boulders, and forest trees, the tumbling foam of brooks and the whirring wheels of manufactures, which she has described in a number of “Harper's Monthly,” and where she occupies a large old-fashioned house, once a colonial mansion, standing under the shadow of great trees, with a rocky ledge in front lifting its black edge against the sunset. Her life has been ideal; for there is an entire sympathy of taste, and feeling, and opinion, and enjoyment between the husband and wife; they are completely complementary to each other; and a more intimate union could hardly be imagined;—a union at which all who know them, who love and honor them, who realize the tenderness of her nature and the nobility of his, rejoice with a full heart, and which has given them ten years of almost perfect happiness. Out of this late happiness, with life, and strength, and health, what lovelier work than ever before may yet blossom from Rose Terry Cooke's hands!