thies—she was herself a child. But not in powers—for her powers were of the rarest and the greatest; not in knowledge and wisdom—for there have been few wiser or more accomplished women; not in courage—for her courage nothing could daunt, Yet these high endowments, with all the other manifold gifts of her nature, she consecrated to the service of childhood. To make child-readers happy first, and through this happiness to lead them on to higher and nobler living,—this was her aim and work. And all the joy and sweetness and enlargement which she brought into their lives, they have still and cannot lose.
Mrs. Dodge came of distinguished ancestry, which included, on both her father’s and her mother’s side, the names of many well-known citizens of New York. General Jonas Mapes had a patriot’s share in the War of the Revolution, and was an intimate personal friend of the Marquis de Lafayette; and other members of the Mapes family attained a well-earned distinction a century ago. Her own father, Professor James J. Mapes, has been called a “universal genius”—for he was noted as a scholar, an inventor,a scientist, and an author. Moreover he was a man of wide social acquaintance and a brilliant, humorous, accomplished talker—famous for his wit, and as a story-teller. The foremost men of his day in literary, artistic, and political life—men like Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant — were his familiar friends. Captain John Ericsson, who usually kept himself secluded from the world, was a close comrade of Professor Mapes, and a frequent visitor to his home in New York city—a home which attracted the best thought and the best people of the time—the hospitable center of a large literary and scientific circle.
It was into this home that little Mary Elizabeth was born on January 26, 1831. “I had a devoted father and mother and a happy childhood, a remarkably happy childhood, watched over with loving care,” is Mrs. Dodge’s own tribute to the wise and tender rearing which she received and to the home influences which molded her earliest thoughts.
The picture of Professor Mapes’s daughters in their childhood, painted by William Page, shows Mary, the second daughter, as the little figure in the foreground holding a doll in her arms. “I would not part with my dolly for all their coaxing,” she used to say. In this devotion, as well as in the clear, bright eyes of the little girl, which look into our own with such a happy and yet searching gaze, in the frank, earnest, eager, and joyous expression of the round, rosy face, and in the tender grasp with which the motherly arm clutches the dolly, we may surely read prophetic glimpses of the child-lover and benefactor of children that she was one day to become. And as if to fit her for the work, she was, as a good friend once wrote of her, “one of those fortunate mortals at whose christening feast no ill-tempered fairy sulked.” She was supremely gifted from the first.
But until she was twice as old as at the time when the picture was painted, she was merely a happy, healthy child, with a buoyant nature and a child’s delight in the joys and pleasures of the passing hour,—frolicsome, filled with energy and animal spirits like many another, and taking no thought of time, as the happy days sped by. Before she was ten, however, she had become a great reader, and she early showed her literary bent by celebrating the family anniversaries in “poetical effusions.” Some of these stately but comical efforts she used to repeat with gleeful amusement in after years.
The daughters of Professor Mapes never went to school. They gained their education at home under the care of tutors and governesses, being carefully trained, not only in the usual English branches, but in French, drawing, music, and Latin.
There was no such thing in those days as a children’s magazine; but there were the great masterpieces of literature, the Bible, the old English ballads, Shakspere, Milton, Bunyan, and Walter Scott. Professor Mapes inspired in his daughters a love for the world’s great books, and Mrs, Dodge may have gained from them the crystal clearness and the force of her literary style. As she grew into her teens she grew also more and more fond of writing, and before her girlhood ended was already helping her father in the preparation of his learned pamphlets and essays; and for him throughout her life she