straight to the heart of institutioiiSy manners^ and habits of
thinking.
With the private life of an author, or a queen, the public has no business at all. Whether Airs. Howe stands in the kitchen eating bread and honey, or sits in the parlor counting out her money, may not be told in these pages. But certain things that any person in society may know are the property of the gentle reader. She has auburn hair, and large, sad eyes, " where soul seems concentrate in sight." Her mouth is her fine and expressive fcatiu'e, though her whole face is mobile. Her bell-like voice and her pure enunciation have a charm like music, and the eloquence of her fine hands is irresistible ; her wit is brilliant, ready, merciless, and her sarcasm polished and swift as the axe of the headsman Kudolph. Her friends know that music is her passion, swaying her whole being ; that the drama is to her the Beautiful Art, as she has written of it in a noble poem called ^ Hamlet at the Boston ; " that she' found the infancy of her children a constant miracle of beauty, and that now, they pet and rule her as if she were the child ; that the dignity of her nature, forcing her to accept simplicity as the best good, makes all luxurious and showy living distasteful to her, while her sense of synmietiy and harmony delights in order and elegance.
For the rest, in the winter she dwells in Boston, abode of the blest, and in summer she lives in an enchanted glade, the loveliest place on the earth, which nobody can enter without the magic password, and about which all that the world will ever know is written in tinted lines, and called "In my Valley." The lesson of her life is earnest work, and more than any one of her sex in America, perhaps, she has demonstrated that it 18 wisdom for Women to learn the Alphabet.
