Miss Maria McIntosh.
Miss McIntosh was born in the little village of Sunbury, Georgia, in 1804. She was educated by an old Oxford tutor who was teacher and pastor combined and she led the class of boys with whom she studied. After her mother's death, (her father had died in her infancy), she came to the north, wholly for the purpose of studying and improving herself.
Her first stories were for children. Then appeared two very successful tales for youth; "Conquest and Self-Conquest," and "Praise and Principle". "To Seem and To Be"; "Charms and Counter-Charms", and their successors followed on during a period of twenty years. Several of her books were translated into both French and German and all were widely read abroad, but the joy in her work lay in the rich harvest for good which was constantly made known to her. In the year before her death, many letters came to her from women then married and heads of families, thanking her for first impulses to better things arising from her words.
Not long ago, Marion Harland, (Mrs. Terhune), wrote to a dear friend of this author, that she owed to Miss McIntosh the strongest influences of her young life and those which had determined its bent and development.
Miss McIntosh was intensely interested in the maintenance of Republican simplicity and purity of morals and wrote a strong address, which was widely circulated, to the "Women of America" which led to a correspondence with the then Duchess of Sutherland and other English women who were interested in the elevation of women and of the family life.
She died in Morristown, at the residence of her devoted niece and namesake, Mrs. James Farley Cox, and soothed by her loving ministrations,—after a protracted illness, lasting over a year. Mrs. Cox tells us, "she loved Morristown and said amidst great pain, that her last year, was, despite all, the happiest of her life".
"Lofty and Lowly"; "Charms and Counter-Charms", and "To Seem and To Be", are all alike noble books. Miss McIntosh seems a woman of strong creative powers, with a delicacy of feeling and a fine touch of womanliness, united to a certain delicate perception of character. She did not write from what we now so grandly call types, or, for the sake of displaying a surgical dissection of character; but her books are groupings of individuals as real as those we meet in daily life. There are no strained situations, no fanciful make-ups, and no unnatural poses.
There are the lovely Alice Montrose with a strangely beautiful blending of delicate refinement and womanly strength, rising to meet every requirement of her varied life; Mr. Gaston, the New England merchant; Richard Grahame the hero of "Lofty and Lowly", with some telling contrasts in the way of villians and weaker characters. Beside this, Miss McIntosh has a strong sympathy for nature and all through her stories she stops, as it were to show us the flowering fields and summer skies and as she draws us to her, we feel the beatings of her own warm human heart going out as it does to the young and inexperienced.
Again, Miss McIntosh gives in her stories faithful representations of life both north and south, before the war, forty years ago. These pictures are of peculiar value as few books preserve pictorial records of that condition of life now passed away forever. She had a power in massing details and binding them by a thread of common interest and common action. She seemed in her writings, like one who had been spiritually "lifted higher" and like all such spirits she could not but draw others after her. Her books in past years have had wide and lasting influence and it is a pity they could not now be substituted for much of the miserable literature which only pleases a passing hour or teaches false views of life.