MARIA J. B. BROWNE.
Maria Jane Bancroft Browne is a native of the beautiful town of Northampton, Mass. In her early childhood, however, her parents removed from that place to the retired inland town of Templeton, Mass., which has since been her home.
Miss Browne’s parents belonged to that judicious class, who, while their pecuniary means were restricted, considered the acquisition of a liberal education by their children of vastly more value than the inheritance of that wealth which so proverbially spreads its pinions and flies away, or, what is worse, enchains the energies to frivolity and indolence. To facilitate so desirable an object, these excellent parents did what they could. They had already transmitted to their daughters their own characteristics of energy, resolution, and perseverance, and having removed obstacles out of the way, they left those qualities, under the sunshine of encouraging words and smiles, to their own irrepressible expansiveness and eventual success. Thrown thus mainly on their own resources, Miss Browne and her two elder sisters succeeded in completing an extensive course of study, and were graduated with distinction at the Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1841. Since that time Miss Browne has devoted herself principally to the instruction and training of young ladies in the various departments of moral, intellectual, and physical culture; a profession for which, by the structure of her own mind, and the nature of her acquirements, she is very happily adapted.
Her tastes, however,—the bent of those tastes having unfolded itself in very early life,—incline her to the pursuit of letters. Endowed with a vigorous and varied imagination, gifted with clear, quick, and discriminating perceptions, which penetrate beneath the surface of things for principles and conclusions; with eye, and ear, and heart, alive to all that is lovely and truthful in nature, art, and the peculiar province of intellect—possessing a wide humanity which earnestly labours for, and expects moral renovation
