enough for her public. She did not, therefore, win that intellectual immortality which only the very best writers command, and which few Americans have attained. But she won a meed which she would value more highly, that warmth of sympathy, that mingled gratitude of intellect and heart which men give to those who have faithfully served their day and generation. No rural retirement can hide her from the prayers of those who were ready to perish, when they first knew her; and the love of those whose lives she has enriched from childhood will follow her fading eyes as they look towards sunset, and, after her departing, will keep her memory green.

5

FANNY FERN-MRS. PARTON.

BY GRACE GREENWOOD.

SARA PAYSON WILLIS, daughter of Nathaniel and Sara Willis, was born in Portland, Maine, in midsummer of the year of our Lord 1811. In that fine old town, in that fine old State, where as she says, "the timber and the human beings are sound," she spent the first six years of her life. During those years, our country passed through a troublous time, - a supplementary grapple with the old country, — final, let us hope, and eminently satisfactory in its results, to one party at least. But it is not probable that the shock and tumult of war seriously disturbed the little Sara, sphered apart from its encounters, sieges, conflagrations, and unnatural griefs, in the fairy realm of a happy childhood. Whether we made a cowardly surrender at Detroit, or incarnadined Lake Erie with British blood,-whether we conquered at Chippewa, or rehearsed Bull Run at Bladensburg, - whether our enemy burned the Capitol at Washington, or was soundly thrashed at New Orleans, it was all the same to her. However the heart of the noble mother may have been pained by the tragedies, privations and mournings of that time, it brooded over the little baby-life in sheltering peace and love ;- as the robin, when her nest rocks in the tempest, shields her unfledged darlings with jealous care.

I have a theory, flanked by whole columns of biographical history, that no man or woman of genius was ever born of

The mother of Na

an inferior, or common-place woman. thaniel, Richard, and Sara Willis was a large-brained, as well as great-hearted woman. The beautiful tributes of her poetson made all the world aware of her most lovable qualities —her faithful, maternal tenderness and broad, sweet charity'; but to these were added rare mental power and character of singular nobility and weight.

From a private letter, addressed by the subject of this biographical sketch to a friend, in answer to some questions concerning this noble mother, I am permitted to take the following touching tribute: "All my brother's poetry, all the capability for writing which I possess - be it little, or muchcame from her. She had correspondence with many clergymen of the time and others, and, had she lived at this day, would have been a writer worthy of mention. In those days women had nine children - her number and stifled their souls under baskets of stockings to mend and aprons to make. She made every one who came near her better and happier for having seen her. She had a heart as wide as the world, and charity to match. Oh, the times I have thrown my arms wildly about me and sobbed 'Mother!' till it seemed she must come! I shall never be 'weaned,' never! She understood me. Even now, I want her, every day and hour. Blessed be eternity and immortality! That is what my mother was to me. God bless her!"

In 1817 Mr. Willis removed to Boston, where he for many years, edited the "Recorder," a religious journal, and "The Youth's Companion," a juvenile paper, of blessed memory. In Boston, Sara spent the remainder of her childhood; and a grand old town it is to be reared in, notwithstanding the east wind, its crooked, cow-path streets, and general promiscuousness, notwithstanding its exceeding self-satisfaction, its social frigidity, its critical narrowness and its contagious isms; among the most undesirable of which count conven

tionalism and dilettanteism; and it is an admirable town to emigrate from, because of these notwithstandings.

The stern Puritan traditions and social prejudices of the place seem not to have entered very strongly into the character of Sara Willis. She probably chased butterflies on Boston Common, or picked wild strawberries (if they grew there) on Bunker Hill, without much musing on the grand and heroic associations of those places. She doubtless tripped by Faneuil Hall occasionally, without doing honor to it, as the august cradle of liberty. She must have been an eminently happy and merry child; indulging in her own glad fancies in the bright present, with little reverence for the past, or apprehension for the future, - much given to mischief and mad little pranks of fun and adventure.

Sara was educated at Hartford, in the far-famed Seminary of Miss Catharine Beecher. At that time, Harriet Beecher, Mrs. Stowe, was a teacher in this school. She was amiable and endearing in her ways, and was recognized as a decidedly clever young lady, with a vein of quiet humor, a sleepy sort of wit, that woke up and flashed out when least expected; but of a careless, unpractical turn of mind. She was not thought by any means the equal in mental power and weight of her elder sister, whose character was full of manly energy, who was a clear thinker, an excellent theologian, a good, great, high-hearted woman, with a strong will and remarkable executive abilities. Of all his children, Dr. Beecher is said to have most highly respected Catharine.

Sara Willis must here have laid an excellent foundation for successful authorship, though probably nothing was farther from her thoughts at the time than such a profession. It would have seemed too quiet and thought-compelling a career for her, with her heart as full of frolic as a lark's breast is of singing. There are yet traditions in that staid old town of Hartford, of her merry school-girl escapades, her "tricks and

her manners," that draw forth as hearty laughter as the witty sallies, humorous fancies, and sharp strokes of satire that give to her writings their peculiar sparkle and dash.

If she grappled with the exact sciences it is not probable that they suffered much in the encounter. For Geometry she is said to have had an especial and inveterate dislike. Indeed, her teacher, Mrs. Stowe, still tells a story of her having torn out the leaves of her Euclid to curl her hair with. So she laid herself down to mathematical dreams, her fair head bristling with acute angles, in parallelogrammatic and paralellopipedonic papillotes,-in short, with more Geometry outside than in. A novel way of getting over "the dunce bridge,” by taking that distasteful Fifth Proposition not only inwardly, but as an outward application; so that it might have read thus: "The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal to one another; and if the equal sides be produced in curl papers, the angles on the other side of the os frontis are also equal."

But in the laughing, high-spirited girl there must have existed unsuspected by those about her, almost unsuspected by herself, the courage and energy, the tenderness, the large sympathy, the reverence for the divine and the human, which love and sorrow, the trials and stress of misfortune, were to evolve from her nature, and which her genius was to reveal. A seer that might have perceived towering above the ringleted head of her absent-minded young teacher, a dark attendant spirit, benignant, but mournful,-poor, grand, old worldbewept, polyglotted Uncle Tom, - might also have seen in the few shadowy recesses of her young pupil's sunny character, the germs of those graceful" Fern Leaves" that were to bring to the literature of the people new vigor and verdure, the odors of woodlands, and exceeding pleasant pictures of rature.

It must have been while Sara was at school in Hartford,