harps sighing and wailing through a forest of pines, was most affecting to my youthful heart.”
Besides the advantage of the best Southern society, she had also the opportunity of most extensive acquaintance with clergymen and others from various Northern States—the hospitality of her parents being unbounded.
She was educated by the Misses Ramsay, the daughters of Dr. David Ramsay, the historian, and grand-daughters, on the maternal side, of Mr. Laurens, who figured so conspicuously in the early history of our Independence. The summer of 1825 her parents spent in Hartford, Conn., and she was placed for six months at the seminary of the Rev. Mr. Emerson, in the neighbouring town of Wethersfield. In 1826 she was placed at a young ladies’ seminary in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, with the expectation of remaining eighteen months, in the hope that so long a residence in the North would invigorate her constitution, which was rather delicate; but she pined for her Southern home, and at the expiration of six months was allowed to return to the arms of her parents. She subsequently spent several months at the seminary of the Rev. Claudius Herrick, in New Haven.
On the 19th of June, 1835, she became the wife of Mr. Charles E. Dana, and accompanied him to the city of New York, where they resided for two or three years. During this time she occasionally wrote little pieces of poetry, but did not publish them. Before her marriage, however, she had written considerably for the “Rose-Bud,” a juvenile periodical published in Charleston by Mrs. Gilman.
The tone of subdued melancholy that pervades her first publications is explained by the sad story of her afflictions, which can be told in no way so well as in her own simple and affecting language.
“In the fall of the year 1838,” says she, in a letter now before me, “accompanied by my parents, we removed to the West. I was then the mother of a beautiful boy, who was born in May, 1837. We spent the winter in Cincinnati, and, as soon as the river rose in the spring, we all went to New Orleans. While in that city, a letter was received from Alabama, acquainting my parents with the fact that my only brother, who was a physician, and was on a tour of inspection for the purpose of finding a pleasant location for the practice of his profession, was in Greene county, sick, and failing rapidly. A favourite sister had died of consumption at my house in New York, just a week after the birth of our little boy, and the news of my brother’s illness filled us with the saddest apprehensions. The letter, too, bore rather an old date, having first being mailed to Cincinnati, and forwarded from thence to New Orleans. My afflicted parents immediately hastened to the spot, but they arrived too late even to take a last fond look upon their only son. He had been buried several days
