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Woman of the Century/Cynthia Morgan St. John

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2291733Woman of the Century — Cynthia Morgan St. John

ST. JOHN, Mrs. Cynthia Morgan, Wordsworthian, born in Ithaca, N. Y., 11th October, 1852. She is the only daughter of Dr. E. J. Morgan, a successful homeopathic physician, and Anne Bruyn Morgan Her maternal grandfather was Judge A. D. W. Bruyn. From early girlhood Mrs. St. John showed a passionate love of nature and a devotion for the poetry of Wordsworth. She also possessed the gift of composition and wrote for children's papers before the age of fourteen. She was educated in a small private school, where her natural tendency had full play. On 25th June, CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN. 1883, she became the wife of Henry A. St. John, a former civil engineer, now a resident of Ithaca, N. Y. They have two children. She is president of a Working Girls' Union and has given her sympathies, her time and her pen to forward that cause. She frequently contributes articles upon religious, benevolent or educational subjects to the religious press, in particular to the "Sunday-School Times," and has written two or three short stories. Her one preeminent interest in a literary way has been Wordsworthian. She was a member of the English Wordsworth Society and a contributor to its meetings. In that way she formed friendships with prominent Wordsworthians, among whom is Prof. William Knight, of St. Andrews, secretary and founder of the Wordsworth Society. She has collected the largest Wordsworth library in this country, and probably the largest in the world. The library contains all the regular editions, the complete American editions of the poetry, autograph letters, prints, portraits, sketches and relics associated with the poet. In 1883 Mrs. St John, with her husband, visited the English Lake Region and saw every place associated with Wordsworth from his cradle to his grave, and alluded to in his poems. One result of that visit was a "Wordsworth Floral Album," the flowers, ferns and grasses in which were gathered by her own hand. The chief fruit of her life-long study of the poet has been her "Wordsworth for the Young" (1891), with an introduction for parents and teachers. The object of the book is to bring the child to nature through Wordsworth.