writer of children's books, she might have been a poet, and would,
from choice, have been a philanthropist and reformer. Having worked
her own way with much difficulty, it was impossible that she should
not be interested in lightening the burdens which lay upon women, in
the race of life, and though never a prominent worker in the cause,
she was a zealous believer in the right of women to the ballot. She
attended the Woman's Congress in Syracuse, in 1875, "drove about and
drummed up women to my suffrage meeting" in Concord, she says, in
1879, and writes in a letter of 1881, "I for one don't want to be
ranked among idiots, felons, and minors any longer, for I am none of
them."
To say that she might have been a poet does her scant justice. She
wrote two or three fine lyrics which would justify giving her a high
place among the verse-writers of her generation. "Thoreau's Flute,"
printed in the _Atlantic_, has been called the most perfect of her
poems, with a possible exception of a tender tribute to her mother.
Personally, I consider the lines in memory of her mother one of the
finest elegiac poems within my knowledge:
"Mysterious death: who in a single hour
Life's gold can so refine,
And by thy art divine,
Change mortal weakness to immortal power."
There are twelve stanzas of equal strength and beauty. The closing
lines of this fine eulogy we may apply to Miss Alcott, for both lives
have the same lesson:
"Teaching us how to seek the highest goal,
To earn the true success,--
To live, to love, to bless,--
And make death proud to take a royal soul."
End of Project Gutenberg's Daughters of the Puritans, by Seth Curtis Beach