Woman of the Century/Della Whitney Norton

NORTON, Mrs. Della Whitney, poet, author and Christian Scientist, born in Fort Edward, N. Y., 1st January, 1840. She was educated mainly in Fort Edward Academy. She commenced to write at an early age. Before her twelfth year she was a regular contributor, as Miss Della E. Whitney, to several Boston and New York papers and magazines. The Boston "Cultivator" published her DELLA WHITNEY NORTON. first literary efforts. Afterward she contributed to the "Galaxy," "Scribner's Magazine," "Ladies' Repository," the "Christian Union," the "Advance," the "Boston Repository" and other journals. The International Sunday-School Association a few years ago offered prizes for the best hymns on the lessons for the year. Mrs. Norton wrote fifty-nine hymns in about ten days, which were accepted, and among eight-hundred competitors she won three first prizes. She became an invalid when thirteen years of age, and for many years suffered excruciatingly. In January, 1874, she became the wife of H. B. Norton, of Rochester, N. Y. She has one son, Frank Whitney Norton, a promising boy of sixteen. Madame Parepa Rosa, the Italian prima donna, sent her manager on a journey of five-hundred miles to request of Mrs. Norton a song for concert purposes, when Mrs. Norton wrote the humorous poem, "Do Not Slam the Gate" which has since been sung and published the world over. In spite of delicate health, she has always been identified with every good work in church, society and humanitarian directions. The Woman's Christian Temperance Unions, Woman Suffrage Associations, Woman's Relief Corps, Woman's Industrial Exchanges, hospital boards and private charities have absorbed her time for many years to the almost entire exclusion of literary labor. A few years ago she was restored to health, after surgeons and physicians had failed to help, by fixing her faith on God as a healing power, and since then she has given her whole time to the work of healing others, and preaching the gospel of Christian Science, in private and public, as revealed to her in the Scripture, and demonstrated through the restoration of the blind and lame, the diseased and deformed, the conversion of infidels and the cure of the evil of intemperance and kindred habits. She has been in that work seven years, greatly blessed, and is soon to be ordained for the public ministry. Her home is in Minneapolis, Minn.