GRACE GREENWOOD-MRS. LIPPINCOTT.

BY JOSEPH B. LYMAN.

ABOUT thirty years ago, when Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren lived in the White House; when questions of a national bank and a protective tariff interested without arousing the popular mind; when the great and glorious valley of the Mississippi still gave homes to the red man and haunts to wild beasts; when Bryant was fresh from those native hills, broad, round, and green, where he dreamed the Thanatopsis; when visions of Absalom and Jephthah's daughter were floating fresh and sacred before the eyes of Willis, -a traveller through Pompey, one of the youthful towns of western New York, might have turned in his saddle to take a second look at the lithe figure and the glowing face of a village romp. Could such tourist have known that, in the bright-eyed school-girl with rustic dress and touseled hair, he saw one of the rising lights of the coming age; a letterwriter who should charm a million readers by the piquant dash and spicy flavor of her style; a delightful magazinist ; a poetess, the melody and ring of whose stanzas should remind us of the most famous lyres of the world; a woman who, standing calm, graceful, and self-poised before great audiences, and thrilling them by noble aud earnest words spoken in the deep gloom of national disaster, should call up rich memories of the Roman matron in her noblest form, or of the brightest figures that move on the storied page of France,

could he have foreseen all that as in the future of this village beauty, the traveller would have done more than turn for a second look. He would have halted, and talked with the young Corinne; he would have lingered to hear her speak of wild flowers, and birds' nests, of rills and rocks and cascades; he might have gone with her to her father's door, and caught a glimpse of silvered hair and a noble forehead, and he would have observed upon that face lineaments that have for two hundred years been found in all the high places of American thought and character. For the father of this little Sara was Dr. Thaddeus Clarke, a grandson of President Edwards. Fortunate it is, and a blessing to the race, when a man so rarely and royally gifted as was this great theologian, with everything that makes a human character noble, is so wisely mated that he can transmit to the coming age, not only the most valuable thinking of his time, but a family of children, blessed with sound constitutions, developed by harmonious fireside influences, and endowed with vigorous understandings. In doing that, Jonathan Edwards did more to stir thought than when he wrote the history of the Great Awakening; he did more to establish the grooves of religious and moral thinking, and to fix the model of fine character, than he could ever accomplish by his Treatise on the Will. In mature life, the great-grand-daughter has shown many the traits of the Edwards family. She has rejected the ironhooped Calvinism of her ancestor, but she is indebted to him for an unflagging and ever-fresh interest in nature; for ceaseless mental fecundity, that finds no bottom to its cruse of oil, and for a toughness of intellectual fibre that fits her for a life of perpetual mental activity.

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There was not a gayer or more active girl in Onondaga County than Sara Clarke. The bright Alfarata was not fonder of wild roving. No young gipsy ever took more naturally to the fields. She loved the forests, the open pas

tures, the strawberry-lots, and the spicy knolls, where the scarlet leaves of the wintergreen nestle under the dainty sprigs of ground pine and the breezy hill-sides, where the purple fingers and painted lips attest the joy of huckleberrying. She says of herself that she was a mighty hunter of wild fruits. At this early age, she developed a taste which, at a later age, gave her name a piquant flavor of romance; the taste for horseback riding, and the ability to manage with fearless grace the most spirited steeds. Her figure was lithe and wiry, her step elastic, her eye cool, and her nerves firm. At ten years of age she was given to escapades, in which she found few boys hardy and fearless enough to rival her. She would go into an open pasture with a nub of corn, call up a frolicsome young horse, halter him, and then jump on his back. No saddle or bridle wants the little Amazon. She had seen bold riding at the circus, and in the retirement of the woods she could surpass it. So she would toss off her shoes, and stand upright on the creature's back, with a foot on each side of the spine. At first she was content to let the animal walk with his spirited little burden; then she would venture into a gentle amble, and finally into full gallop. As she grew older, the deep woods had a perpetual charm for her. She loved to wander afar into dim shades, and listen to the wild, sweet song of the wood-lark, and to watch the squirrels gambolling on the tops of beech-trees, or leaping from one oak to the other. It is not possible to say how much she, and every other active and finely tempered genius, gains by such a childhood. A love of nature and a habit of enjoying nature is thus rooted in the spirit, so deeply that no flush of city life can destroy it. The glare of palaces and the roar of paved streets seem, for a lifetime, tiresome and false; the world-weary spirit evermore longs for the music of the west wind blowing through the tree-tops, the melodies of the forest, the splash of waterfalls, the ring of

the mower's steel, the swaying of the golden wheat fields, the songs of the whippoorwills, and the glancing of the fireflies. Such a childhood gives a firmness of health, a vigor and a hardihood, a power of recovering from fatigue, and a capacity for constant labor without exhaustion, that are a greater blessing than the wealth of a Girard or a Stewart.

At the age of twelve Sara Clarke went to Rochester to attend school. Her home was with an elder brother, and she entered with zeal and with success on the studies of a regular education. Like many others who, in after life, have written that which the world will not willingly let die, she did not excel in mathematical studies. The multiplication table was no labor of love. The Rule of Three was a hopeless conundrum. Interest had no interest for her. But whatever related to the graceful expression of fine thought, whatever unsealed the ancient fountains of song and of story, was easy, harmonious, and attractive; this was native air.

Nothing is harder than to say just what faculty or grouping of faculties makes the writer. One may be witty, vivacious, charming in the parlor, or at the dinner-table, yet no writer. Many have the faculty of expressing a valuable thought in appropriate language; but that does not endow one with the rights, the honors, and the fame of authorship. Give Edward Lytton Bulwer three hours of leisure daily, and in a year he will give the world three hundred and sixty-five chapters of unequalled story-telling, in a style that never grows dull, never palls upon the taste, that is perpetually fresh, clear-cut, and brilliant.

Charles Dickens will sit down by any window in London, or lounge through any street in London, and describe the characters that pass before him, in a way that will charm the reading public of two continents, in paragraphs for every one of which his publishers will gladly pay him a guinea before the ink is dry. Sara Clarke was not three years in her teens

before the Rochester papers were glad to get her compositions. They were fresh, piquant, racy. It was impossible to guess whether she had read either Whately or Blair, but it was clear that she had a rhetoric trimmed by no pedantic rules. It was nature's own child talking of nature's charms, her pen, like a mountain rill, neither running between walls of chiselled stone, nor roofed with Roman arches, but wandering between clumps of willows, and meandering at its own sweet will through beds of daisies and fields of blooming clover. There was nothing remarkable about her education. When she left school in 1843, at the age of nineteen, she knew rather more Italian and less algebra, more of English and French history, and less of differential and integral calculus, than some recent graduates of Oberlin and Vassar; but perhaps she was none the worse for that. Indeed, austere, pale-faced Science would have chilled the blood of this free, bounding, elastic, glorious girl. Meantime, Dr. Clarke had removed from Onondaga County to New Brighton, in Western Pennsylvania. This village is nestled between the hills among which the young Ohio, fresh from the shaded springs and the stony brooks of the Alleghanies, gathers up its bright waters for a long journey to the far-off Southern Gulf.

Not long after she went home, in 1845 and 1846, the literary world experienced a sensation. A new writer was abroad. A fresh pen was moving along the pages of the Monthlies. Who might it be? Did Willis know? Could General Morris say? Whittier was in the secret; but he told no tales. And her nom de plume, so appropriate and elegant! This charming Grace Greenwood, so natural, so chatty, so easy, chanting her wood-notes wild. Ah me! those were jocund days. We Americans were not then in such grim earnest as we are now. The inimitable, much imitated pen, that in the early part of the century had given us "Knickerbocker" and the "Sketch Book," was still cheerfully busy at