_Mrs. Brooks and Mrs. Sigourney._--The same generation produced several women of note, whose poetry demands some attention; in particular, Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1865), a prolific maker of books, not to speak of “more than two thousand articles in prose and verse” which were issued during her long and quiet life in Hartford. Mrs. Sigourney was no genius, albeit she passed for “the American Hemans.” She was a person of great moral worth and the most charitable disposition. It has been suggested that the beauty of her character was responsible for her extraordinary vogue. More probably the attention she gave to the legends of her own country, the not unwholesome cast of sentimentalism in her thought, and her readiness to contribute verses for any occasion, however slight, will in large part account for the unbounded admiration which she enjoyed. In 1822 appeared her poem, in five cantos, “Traits of the American Aborigines”; her “Lays of the Heart” were published in 1848. Besides her innumerable shorter articles, she is said to have been responsible for something like fifty volumes. “Maria del Occidente” (Mrs. Maria Gowen Brooks, 1795-1845) was of a different cast, less homely in her sentiments, a romantic soul, filled with the spirit of Southey and Moore, leaning toward the sensuous and exotic. When she bent her energies to verse, as in “Judith, Esther, and Other Poems” (1820), and “Zophiel, or The Bride of Seven” (1833)--a story based on the Apocryphal Book of Tobit--she showed herself far removed from Mrs. Sigourney and “The Power of Maternal Piety” or “The Sunday School.” On the whole, the taste of “Maria del Occidente,” as Southey called her, was worse than that of “the American Hemans”; and if Southey termed Mrs. Brooks “the most impassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses,” he paid an astounding tribute to his own acumen as a critic. Emma H. Willard (1787-1870), like Mrs. Sigourney, was prominent as an educator, accomplishing more as the head of a female seminary in Troy, N. Y., than by her writings. She was the author of “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.” In the next generation were Sarah H. Whitman (1803-78) and Frances S. Osgood (1811-50), who composed verse not lacking in merit, but who are recalled rather for their championship of Edgar Allan Poe. Mrs. Whitman was at one time betrothed to him.