[166] intellect, and of a good, well-ordered life. In my memory, she stands apart from all others,--wiser, purer, doing more, and living better, than any other woman.Phebe was born in 1825; and there were two younger sisters, of whom one died in youth, greatly beloved and lamented. A few weeks before her departure, and while she was still in fair health, she appeared for some minutes to be plainly visible in broad daylight to the whole family, across a little ravine from their residence, standing on the stoop of a new house they were then building, though she was actually asleep, at that moment, in a chamber of their old house, and utterly unconscious of this “counterfeit presentment” at some distance from her bodily presence. This appearance naturally connected itself with her death, when that occurred soon afterward; and thenceforth the family have lent a ready ear to narrations of spiritual (as distinguished from material) presence, which to many, if not most, persons are simply incredible. The youngest of the family, named Elmina, was a woman of signal beauty of mind and person, whose poetic as well as her general capacities were of great promise; but she married, while yet young, Mr. Swift, a Cincinnati merchant, and thenceforward, absorbed in other cares, gave little attention to literature. She was early marked for its victim by Consumption,--the scourge of this, with so many other families,--and yielded up her life while still in the bloom of early womanhood, three or four years since. I believe her marriage, and the consequent loss of her society, had a share in determining the elder sisters to remove to New York, which they did in 1850. Alice had begun to write verses at eighteen, Phebe at seventeen, years of age. Their father married a second time, and thence lived apart from, though near, the cottage wherein I first greeted the sisters in 1849; and, when the number
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S. M. Betts and Company. Hartford, Conn. 1871.
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