[In the following essay, Spofford offers her personal observations on Cooke's life and career.]

With what pleasure the circle of girls of which I was one read Rose Terry's stories in the first Atlantic magazines! We went across the river to a place of woods and rejoiced in the Autocrat and in Rose Terry. That we could ever know Rose Terry and call her Rose never entered our heads. She was far away in upper skies. Hers were the first of the dialect stories (although Mrs. Stowe's were nearly of the same period) since the old days of Judge Haliburton and of Seba Smith; and they were of a very different order from those earlier ones, not of that type of buffoonery, but transcripts of genuine life, the interest interwoven with pure wit and humor, sweetness and tenderness. And the purpose was always high. The use of words was often novel and striking. “The grasshoppers chittered as if they was fryin',” says a girl in one of those stories.

In another early Atlantic there was a story of hers in a quite different line,—the account of a girl one night in a conservatory in doubt if she should accept a lover, and who summons before her all the dead and gone women of history with their loves; an exquisite thing, full of power and the very spirit of poesy. It had a wonderful effect upon us. But the greater part of Rose Terry's work was in the study of New England life. One of these studies, “The Deacon's Week”, was reprinted in a little paper-bound book by an admiring friend for wider distribution, and was warmly welcomed. No greater story of its character has ever been written than “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with God.”

In person Rose was tall and well-made; she was distinguished-looking, and would have been beautiful, with her fine features, and great black eyes, but for too high a forehead. She had an irresistible smile. When she was talking, with high spirit and ebullient gayety, you never thought how she looked; you only knew she was altogether delightful. She was very graceful, dressed modestly and in good taste, and was very fond of old lace; indeed, she loved all beautiful things.

I met her first at Mary Booth's, in New York; afterwards she came to me and by and by wrote a little memoir of me, among others, for a subscription book, for which one of my fond aunts gave her incidents of my childhood that I did not know myself.

She had been described to me as living with her stately old father in a stately old brick house in Hartford, rather stately herself and of caustic wit. I myself never saw anything of this stateliness. She was of a rare friendliness and kindness, and if dignified always sweet-natured and tempering her steel with common sense. Later on she had left the old brick house and was boarding. She was extremely affectionate, loving her little nieces devotedly. “They have been up here for a few days,” she said. “It was a glint of brightness that did me good.” Said little Faith, “If your name is Wose, I fink you is a wivvered wose.” Little Faith grew up to be a fair and lovely white-rose-looking girl, studying art in Boston, at the time just before Rose was dying.

In the house where Rose boarded, Mr. Rollin Cooke was also a resident, and his circumstances so excited her pity, that pity which is akin to love, that finally she yielded to his persuasion and became his wife, although she was very much older than he. His business brought him frequently to Amesbury, and she usually came with him and stayed with us. Those were gala days. “We love you all so much that it is ridiculous,” she wrote. Mr. Cooke was devotedly attached to her, and thought nothing that she did could be bettered. He was a very attractive and lovable man, witty himself and the cause of wit in others, always interesting and always good-natured, and their relation was quite perfect. “The praises he is receiving,” she wrote, “are quite turning his dear old bald head.”

After her marriage, Rose lived in Winsted, Connecticut, going occasionally to her friends, of whom Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, who survives her, was one. Mrs. Slosson is famous as an entomologist—many a winged and creeping thing being named for her—and famous also as a writer of wonderfully original stories where an inspired imagination and spirituality combine with a quaint humor. Rose was a superior housekeeper and entertained simply but delightfully. In Winsted her house, her work, and her gardening, filled her time, the last giving her great pleasure. She was a botanist; and a flower was to her like a person, having individuality, a life of its own, and, as you might say, a soul. I treasured for many, many years a white Mabel Morrison rosebush that she gave me, of ineffable sweetness, one of the old-fashioned kind that climb to upper windows, and look as if trained by your great-grandfather, whose mere possession, as it has been said, is like a patent of nobility. Alas, it blooms no more.

Rose's hospitality kept open house; the place was full of welcome. To a friend in distress she once wrote: “If you want to run away from every place that is haunted for you by memory or association, come here. Come any time, with or without warning, and feel as if you were coming home. There will at least be love and welcome for you here as long as I have a home.”

When Rose was not attending to her house, was not entertaining, writing, or gardening, she was reading, and her reading was very varied and extensive,—biographies, histories, poems, polemics, novels. How pleased I was when in one of her letters she spoke of her delight in the pages of Elizabeth Shepard; she was joyful that I also liked “Counterparts”, and said, as for her, she fairly loved it. “I almost put it beside Charles Auchester, not quite, for it is more human. The other is crystallized and supernatural music; it is heavenly and entrancing and makes one fall to passionate longing for power to bring out that torturing minor music that is like a thirst for which there is no water, no expression. But ‘Counterparts’ is so wise, so tremendously human and lovable.” Poetry and romance were at the very root of her being.

In quite another vein she wrote concerning Mrs. Carlyle's letters. “I am so sorry Carlyle is dead. I want so mightily to give him a piece, a large and strong piece of my mind. Wretch! I could do him a mischief with intense satisfaction. Poor dreary, sweet, brave, unhappy woman! The book is dreadful. It makes me ache to the heart.”

When she was familiar, and with accustomed friends, Rose was a marvel in the way of jest and anecdote. “Laughter, holding both his sides,” was her constant companion. It was to her that a delinquent milkman said, on her reproval of his neglect: “Well, to tell you the truth, my wife died last week; and I don't know when a little thing has put me so about!”

Her wit was sometimes so pungent (she renamed a person who wrote under the initials ‘M. E. W. S.’ the Tenth Muse) that on first hearing her you wondered if there were not a gentler side to her nature. But there was, and it was by far the most of her. She was painfully tender-hearted; every one's woes were her woes. A kindness made her your friend forever; but she was never maudlin or sentimental.

Another side to this many-faceted nature was her love of nature and her interpretation and impersonation of it. She loved her gardens, but she loved wild nature more. From Glen Ellis, where she was visiting Mrs. Slosson, she wrote: “There is a waterfall here which ‘bates Banagher,’ especially when it is mad with an all-night's pour of summer rain, and comes roaring, laughing, rushing and sparkling down the great tilted granite steps of its bed into the cool green hollow below.” Her love of nature was often accompanied by a sense of spiritual analogies, as one springtime when “a green mist was in the willows,” she writes, “Oh, why can we not renew our youth once a year? But when we do, it will be forever and ever. Never to be old and sick and tired, the negatives of heaven! What must its great affirmations be!”

She was a member of the Orthodox church from her early girlhood. Her religion, however, was of the quiet kind, something as natural as the air she breathed. She had no doubts; she took things as they had been given to her at first. To a person happily married, yet who had been questioning the goodness of God, she said; “Do you know what a gift you have had in your one life-long perfect fulfilled love? And can you disbelieve in God's goodness when He has given you such a crown?” The time came when this habit of faith became an unfailing support to her.

Rose published only one volume of poems, republished with a few additions nearly thirty years later. She must have written many more for she wrote with great facility; but she was always indifferent to fame. Many of the verses were first published in the New York Tribune, signed, not with her own name, but with the initials A. W. H. which were her mother's, because her mother was so dear to her that she wished to associate her with all she did. The verses were illustrative of her manner of thought; but they were not as fine and great as she was. Some of these verses were powerful,—the border ballads; others were of gentle tenderness and beauty, betraying the inner sweetness of her nature, but they were not her strongest expression. The “Trailing Arbutus” was an immediate favorite and was widely copied. The book was a success, and gave her rank among the poets, but I always felt she was finer and greater in her best prose, and I enjoyed her prose more. I never told her so, for I would far rather have let truth go by than have hurt her feelings. In her outlook on life she used a singular combination of the Greek penetration to the secret of beauty and the matter-of-fact Puritan realism. In herself she was a thoroughly satisfying and dear person, sympathetic, confiding, and loving, of brilliant intelligence, of pure genius, and of a superb moral uprightness that was inherent.

She had some melancholy crises in her life, not to be rehearsed. And she had many amusing episodes. One of these latter affairs was when a young woman, occupying half of her seat in a railway car, introduced herself to her as Rose Terry, and talked quite freely of her stories and of her state of mind in writing this or that, and of the praise and money she received. Rose suffered her to go on without let or hindrance.

When Rose married, she had a comfortable competence; but it gradually became involved in the business of her father-in-law and her husband until she lost the whole of it, and faced the necessity of going to work again with her health ruined. Her husband was very unhappy about it, for her sake, and was thoroughly discouraged. “I hear him sigh in his sleep,” she wrote. It was really tragical.

One of the strongest feelings Rose had was her love of her mother. She could never accustom herself to the fact that her mother had died. On waking in the morning her mother always seemed to be in the next room, and she missed her bitterly every day. Once when I asked her where she found her tropic streak, she answered, “My mother was nursed by a gypsy, and in her were the oddest streaks. Severer in her Puritanism than ever I was, there was a favorable wildness about her, a passion for getting out of doors, and in just as little covering as possible. I have known her to go out in her garden, of a summer day, with only a scant skirt over her under-garment, and a hat on her head, and weed, risking interruption. The blood told. She struggled to be rugged and free and out of doors, though her habit was to be proper and shy and meek. It made her interesting, though alarming, especially when young men used to be about of a summer's afternoon and Alice and I spied her, stealing out among the young trees to the carnation bed. Poor little mother! ‘without were fightings, within were fears,’ for her always. I dreamed, Sunday night, that she came for me to go home. I saw her as plainly as if I had been awake. But when I was awake, she did not come.” Perhaps the beloved little mother did come. For Rose died that year.