Later still this house became a kind of shrine, and a distinguished Yale teacher and poet, whose people, back in his undergraduate days of the sixties, dwelt for a time in the poetess's old home, has told the writer how nice old ladies from the country used to make pilgrimages thither to pluck a spray of lilac from the garden where the poetess was wont to walk and to see the room where she "mused." The fact is that she appears to have dwelt in a world of the mind that, however real to her, was in reality distinctly artificial, like most of her poetic writings. In these faded verses there now appears to be little real thought, still less real poetry. The only stanzas about which any flavor of poetic eloquence still clings are those entitled "The Return of Napoleon from St. Helena" and "Indian Names." Compare her "Niagara" and "The Indian Summer" with the poems on the same subjects by J. G. C. Brainard, another now almost forgotten Hartford poet of her time, whose early death prevented the flowering of a fame that was just beginning to unfold, and the reader grasps at once the difference between a certain graceful turn of thought and facility of phrase on the one hand, and genuine poetic genius on the other. [Illustration: LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY FROM A MINIATURE IN THE COLT COLLECTION BY PERMISSION OF THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM] And yet in her day she had a prodigious vogue and the reference to her as "The Hemans of America," while now holding a certain facetious implication, was gravely accepted at the time. Her journey abroad after her husband's death was in its way a sort of mild ovation. She met Queen Victoria and it is significant as well as amusing to find that our Hartford citizeness alluded to the Queen as "a sister woman." Her verses were translated into several languages and she received presents and letters of commendation from the King of Prussia, the Empress of Russia and the Queen of France. The explanation of her contemporary popularity must lie in the state of mind of the period. In that era "sensibility" was the passport to literary success and Mrs. Sigourney certainly possessed sensibility, if nothing else, to a high degree. Those sentimental, yearly gift books known as "annuals" were a phenomenon of the time, and no "annual" was complete without one or more of her poems. It is time that some qualified person gave to the world a study of this old "annual" literature, so sentimental, so romantic, and so generally languishing. The most delightful appreciation that comes to mind at the moment, of the "annual" as a literary curio is contained in Professor Beers's life of Willis in the American Men of Letters series--or in his essay on Percival in "The Ways of Yale." There is a certain pathos in the fact that the years have denied this Hartford poetess's gentle claim to immortality, because the impossibility of granting this claim has led the world to neglect two very definite and admirable characteristics she possessed.