themes, probably undervalued by their authors, but floating now like flowers above the tide that has swallowed so many pretentious, sand-based structures. Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, the most prolific poetess of the period, was hailed as “the American Mrs. Hemans.” A gentle and pious womanhood shone through her verse; but her books are undisturbed and dusty in the libraries now, and likely to remain so. Maria Gowen Brooks,—“Maria del Occidente,”—was, on the other hand, not popular at home, but put forth a far stronger claim than Mrs. Sigourney, and won indeed somewhat disproportionate praises abroad. “Southey says ‘Zophiel, or the Bride of Seven,’ is by some Yankee woman,” writes Charles Lamb; “as if there had ever been a woman capable of anything so great!” One is glad that we need not now consider as the acme of woman’s poetic achievement this metrical narrative of the loves of the angels; nevertheless, it is on the whole a remarkably sustained work, with a gorgeousness of coloring which might perhaps be traced to its author’s Celtic strain. As Mrs. Samuel Gilman, Caroline Howard, of whom we have already spoken, carried the New England spirit into a Southern home, and there wrote not only verses, but sketches and tales, much in the manner of her sisters, who never left the Puritan nest; though dealing at times with material strange to them, as in her “Recollections of a Southern Matron.” With the women of New England lies our chief concern, until a date comparatively recent. A strong, thinking, working race,—all know the type; granite rock, out of its crevices the unexpected harebells trembling here and there. As writers they have a general resemblance; in one case a little more mica and glitter, in another more harebells than usual. Mrs. Sigourney, for instance, presents an azure predominance of the flowery, on a basis of the practical. Think of her fifty-seven volumes—copious verse, religious and sentimental; sketches of travel; didactic “Letters” to mothers, to young ladies; the charmingly garrulous “Letters of Life,” published after her death. Quantity, dilution, diffusiveness, the dispersion of energy in a variety of aims,—these were the order of the day. Lydia Maria Child wrote more than thirty-five books and pamphlets, beginning with the apotheosis of the aboriginal American in romance, ending in the good fight with slavery, and taking in by the way domestic economy, the progress of religious ideas, and the Athens of Pericles, somewhat romanticized. Firm granite here, not without ferns of tenderest grace. It is very curious and impressive, the self-reliant dignity with which these noble matrons circumambulate the whole field of literature, with errant feet, but with a character central and composed. They are “something better than their verse,” and also than their prose. Why was it that the dispersive tendency of the time showed itself especially in the literary effort of women? Perhaps