Speech and Expression, of which she is principal. The aim of this school is to give instruction in higher English and in the art of expression. Its marked success proves that public speakers, readers, and teachers of reading and elocution in public schools and colleges appreciate a school conducted by teachers who present sound methods. The school also meets the need of many who have no thought of entering a profession, but who realize the value of training for the development of power and for the opening up of new and enduring fields of culture.
Miss Laughton has been identified with several clubs and with the Daughters of the American Revolution, being the first woman in Massachusetts to hold the office of State Vice-Regent of the Society. She is the founder and is now Regent of the Committee of Safety Chapter, D. A. R., of Boston.
EDNA DEAN PROCTOR.— It is an interesting question how far early environments of place and scene affect gift and character; but with a sympathetic, receptive, aesthetic nature, and surroundings of unusual individuality and beauty, there can be no doubt of their vivid impression and moulding force.
Edna Dean Proctor is of unmixed English ancestry. Her father, John Proctor, a native of Manchester, Mass. (Manchester-by-the-Sea), was a descendant of John Proctor of England, who came to Ipswich, Mass., in 1635, and whoso eldest son, John Proctor, of Salem Village, was one of the victims in August, 1692, of the Salem witchcraft delusion. The Goodhues, the Cogswells, the Appletons, the Choates, of Essex County, were allied with this family. Her mother, Lucinda Gould, of Henniker, N.H., represented the Goulds who had come from Massachusetts to the newer settlement and the Prescotts and Hiltons of Hampton and Exeter, N.H. The Proctor family removed from Manchester-by-the-Sea to Henniker, and chose their home u})on a hill overlooking the Contoocook valley, the "pine-crowned hill" of her poem, "Contoocook River." The wide horizon of this noble elevation, her birthplace and early home—embracing Kearsarge, Monadnock, and the outlying ranges of the White Hills—the broad forests, and the beautiful stream flowing through the meadows, made a grand and picturesque landscape, which is reflected again and again in her poems, and which may have been an inspiration to high themes.
With the exception of less than a year at Mount Holyoke Seminary, her schools were those of her native village and of Concord, N.H.; but she has often said that her best education was had in reading with her mother. Several years of teaching in New Haven, Conn., and Brooklyn, N.Y., followed. In the latter city she made a collection of extracts from the sermons of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher—a book entitled "Life Thoughts"—which was very popular at home and abroad. Meanwhile she was deeply interested, as she has always been, in national affairs. Upon the day of John Brown's execution her poem, "The Virginia Scaffold," was read at a large meeting in New York City, and its prophecy in the stanza:
"They may hang him on the gibbet; they may raise the victor's cry
When they see him darkly swinging like a speck against the sky;
Ah I the dying of a hero that the right may win its way
Is but sowing seed for harvest in a warm and mellow May!
Now his story shall be whispered by the firelight's evening glow,
And in fields of rice and cotton when the hot noon passed slow,
Till his name shall be a watchword from Missouri to the sea,
And his planting find its reaping in the Birthday of the Free!"
has been amply fulfilled. During the war her poems, "Who's Ready?" "Heroes," "The Mississippi," and others, were marked and influential. Her first small volume of verse was published by Hurd & Houghton in 1867. Then came some two years of foreign travel, an outcome of which was "A Russian Journey." Of this book Whittier wrote: "I like it better than 'Eothen.'" Its chapter upon Sebastopol is said to have caused the neglected English cemeteries there to be cared for as their brave dead deserved. Upon the completion of the railway
