Her library was the feature of her home in which she always evinced the most interest. She never abandoned those habits of study which kept her in touch with the progressive minds of the world. Beauty alone is not sufficient to give a woman the place Madame Le Vert filled. It attracts, but there must be behind it the sustaining force of an intelligence radiating sympathy, of a mentality developed and adorned with those graces that enable it to enter into and illuminate the lives that approach it. She continued to read in the foreign languages she had mastered in her early girlhood, painstakingly teaching them to her children, whom, in their infancy, she often sung to sleep with the love ditties of Italy. To her husband she was a continual source of revelation and pride. Precise, practical, profoundly interested in his profession, he felt little interest in the purely fashionable element of the life that revolved about her. In her relationship to it, however, her power to attract and hold such a diversity of tastes and temperaments he found an interesting study. At her levees and receptions it was his delight to take up his position where he could watch her, and, if possible, where he could occasionally catch the sparkle of her words. To a nature keenly alive to every impression, the loss of her only brother, to whom she was attached by ties of an extraordinary sympathy, brought a grief that for a long time overshadowed her happy spirit. A few years after this loss,--in June, 1853,--accompanied by her father and the elder of her daughters, she made her first visit to the Old World, whose treasures and resources her classical education had so ably fitted her to enjoy. Her journal and letters written during this period and a subsequent trip ring with the enthusiasm of a girl. They formed the basis of her first published work, which met with much success, for in those days the theme was fresher, and she handled it with a sprightliness that gave individuality and interest to every page. Very graphically she relates how the first ardor with which she embarked upon the new and delightful experience of a transatlantic voyage was quenched by that unromantic malady, sea-sickness. With the memory of the torture fresh upon her, she wrote that Solomon, when he ejaculated, "O that mine enemy would write a book!" probably knew nothing of the agonies of sea-sickness, or he would rather have invoked that malady upon him.