With Mrs. Alcott, hardship, poverty, the grief of seeing her husband misunderstood and often scoffed at, never lessened her love for him, or her contentment in the marriage relation. The year following her marriage in a letter to her brother she wrote: "My father has never married a daughter or son more completely happy than I am. I have cares, and soon they will be arduous ones, but with the mild, constant, and affectionate sympathy and aid of my husband, with the increasing health and loveliness of my quiet and bright little Anna, with good health, clear head, grateful heart and ready hand,--what can I not do when surrounded by influences like this?" Ideals were never shattered; illusions, if so they may be called, were never lost by Mrs. Alcott through the stormy years that laid between the first happy months of her married life and the sunset days when all her burdens were laid down. To her, the husband who was so long denied material success and intellectual sympathy ever remained the lover and friend. Her admiration for him was unbounded, her faith in him complete. So high she held him in heart and mind, that it was difficult even for those who loved him most to appreciate her estimate of him as Poet, Philosopher, and Sage. Concerning the most famous portrait ever made of Bronson Alcott, done in crayons by Mrs. Richard Hildredth, wife of the historian and aunt of the portrait painter, George Fuller, which, beautiful as it was, did not satisfy the wife's ideal, Mrs. Alcott writes: A tinge of the incomprehensible lies softly around it, a field of atmosphere, as if she had worked with down from an angel's wing rather than with a crayon,--as if the moonlight had cast a shadow on the lights of her picture, and a divinity had touched with a soft shade, the dark portion of the figure. Mrs. Hildredth has changed the costume from a dress suit to a mantle draped about the shoulders. This, I do not like. The chaste simplicity of Mr. Alcott's dress is more in character and keeping with the severe simplicity and rectitude of his life. Louisa admirably describes her father's appearance as she met him at the cars. "His dress was neat and poor. He looked cold and thin as an icicle, but serene as God." After such a testimony, from such a daughter, he can afford to dress shabbily. Contentment, whatever her lot, was an attribute of Marmee; she underestimated herself always. Unquestionably, Louisa inherited her literary gift quite as much from mother as from father, and flashes of the quaint humor so delightful in the daughter's books are found in the mother's letters. To a friend she writes: "My gifts are few. I live, love and learn, and find myself more content every day of my life with humble conditions."