1840-50.] REBECCA S. NICHOLS. 291 This mysterious irruption into the field of literature, was no small puzzle to the critics and amateur literateurs of the Queen City, who, after exhausting all their ingenuity in futile endeavors to discover the author, were forced to acknowledge that, whoever "Kate Cleaveland" might be, she was certainly a bright particular star in the literary firmament. When it became known that the mysterious mask was no other than Mrs. Nichols, that lady had received an indorsement of literary peerage, as flattering to herself as it had been confounding to her admirers. In 1851, under the patronage of Nicholas Longworth, was published a large and elegant volume of Mrs. Nichols's later poems, under the title of " Songs of the Heart and of the Hearth-Stone," from the press of Thomas, Cowperthwaite & Co., Phila- delphia, and J. F. Desilver, Cincinnati. Such was the established popularity of our author at this time, that the appreciative and enterprising publishers of the Cincin- nati Commercial, M. D. Potter & Co., entered into an arrangement with her, to pay a liberal price for an original poem for each week, if she chose to write so often, whicb arrangement was continued for some time, to the honor of the publishers and a just recognition of the worth of the writer. A collection of these and other later poems, with a selection from her previous publications, would furnish material for a new volume, which would add largely to the reputation of the author as a writer of lofty and impassioned verse. The two published volumes do not contain any thing of soulful eloquence equal to some of these later pieces, which are as yet only the waifs of newspaper broidery. From her first entrance into literary life, Mrs. Nichols has been tossed upon the waves of circumstance. The untimely death of children, and the fluctuations of business, were throwing their shadows over her young years, and though of a most buoyant and hopeful spirit, she was forced to mingle many tears with the sunniest experiences of her life. Her natural buoyancy, and a high-bred personal pride — not an offensive gaud, but a nice perception of the proprieties of civilized society — have been the inner props to sustain her, where ordinary character would have broken down hopelessly long before. The strongest and brightest phase of her character is that of a Christian mother, and the wail of bereaved maternity is the most touching utterance of her pen. Next to this, are the infinite yearnings of a soul that would find its perfect complement in a love as deep and holy as its own. Add to these, an instinctive leaning toward the quiet of domestic life, and if fortune had vouchsafed her a permanent and prosperous home with husband and children, the world would have heard little of her minstrelsy, after the first flush of her girlish exuberance, " in her life's exultant time." With these qualifications, it is not to be expected that the poetry of Mrs. Nichols should exhibit imagination so much as emotion, or that it should deal as eloquently with visible nature, as with the reflective pulses of passion ; and that her chastened strains should have been born of a sorrow that sits above the tomb, as was written of her by a poet friend. Of seven children, only two remain, whose pleasant portraits she has given us, in the lines to "Wee Willie" and "Lily Bell." Of all her cotem- poraries in the bright galaxy of song, who clustered in unenvious rivalry at that day,
