we are still gladder of the privilege of closing it." Although this lady had eight children, about whom she wrote some amusing rhymes, she found time in the wilds of America to perpetuate also these ponderous-titled poems.
Phillis Wheatly, a colored girl, also wrote poetry in Colonial Boston, years before our Declaration of Independence startled the world. She was brought from Africa, and sold in the slave market of Boston, when only six years old. Mr. Sparks, the biographer of Washington, thinks "that the poems contained in her published volume, exhibit the most favorable evidence on record, of the capacity of the African intellect for improvement." When the Rev. George Whitefield died, at Newburyport, Mass., in 1770, the same writer from whom we quote these facts, says: "It was quite natural, his demise being much talked of in religious families, that our sable Phillis should burst into monody. That expression of grief I have before me. Of the most rhetorical preacher of his age, it is not inspiring to read:
"He prayed that grace in every heart might dwell.
He longed to see America excel."
Phillis married badly, and died at the age of thirty-one, in 1784, utterly impoverished, leaving three little children. Her own copy of her poems is in the library of Harvard College. When she died it was sold for her husband's debts.
In a letter thanking her for an acrostic on himself, General Washington said: "If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so gifted by the muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations."
Was there ever any story, which had such a hold upon the readers of a generation, as "Charlotte Temple"? It is said 25,000 copies were sold soon after publication — an enormous sale for that day. Mrs. Rowson, who wrote the book, was a daughter of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy; she was an actress in Philadelphia, and afterward kept a school in Boston for young ladies, where she died, in 1824, Her seminary was highly recommended.
Women in the last age naturally drifted into the didactic. They should have the credit of trying always to be useful. They go through so many pages, seeking to give the little people some notion of botany, of natural history, of other branches of human intelligence. There is no book cleverer in its way than Miss Hannah Adams "History of New England," of which the second edition
