SARAH JANE LIPPINCOTT.
FAVORITE WRITER FOR LITTLE CHILDREN.
NE of the earliest papers devoted especially to young children was “The Little Pilgrim,” edited for a number of years under the name of “Grace Greenwood,” by Mrs. Lippincott. It had a very wide popularity, and its little stories, poems, and page of puzzles brought pleasure into very many home circles. Mrs. Lippincott is the daughter of Doctor Thaddeus Clarke. She was born in Pompey, New York, in September, 1823, and lived during most of her childhood in Rochester. In 1842 she removed with her father to New Brighton, Pennsylvania, and in 1853 she was married to Leander K. Lippincott, of Philadelphia. She had early begun to write verses, and, in 1844, contributed some prose articles to “The New York Mirror,” adopting the name “Grace Greenwood,” which she has since made famous. Besides her work upon “The Little Pilgrim,” she has contributed for many years to “The Hearth and Home,” “The Atlantic Monthly,” “Harper’s Magazine,” “The New York Independent,” “Times,” and “Tribune,” to several California journals, and to at least two English periodicals. She was one of the first women to become a newspaper correspondent, and her letters from Washington inaugurated a new feature in journalism. She has published a number of books: “Greenwood Leaves;” “History of My Pets;” “Poems;” “Recollections of My Childhood;” “Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe;” “Merrie England;” “Stories from Many Lands;” “Victoria, Queen of England,” and others.
Mrs. Lippincott has lived abroad a great deal, and has been made welcome in the best literary circles in England and on the continent. During the war she devoted herself to the cause of the soldiers, read and lectured to them in camps and hospitals, and won the appreciation of President Lincoln, who used to speak of her as “Grace Greenwood, the Patriot.” Although devoted to her home in Washington, she has spent much time in New York City, and has lived a life whose activity and service to the public are almost unequalled among literary women.
THE BABY IN THE BATH-TUB.[¹]
(FROM “RECORDS OF FIVE YEARS,” 1867.)
[¹] Copyright, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
NNIE! Sophie! come up quick, and see baby in her bath-tub!” cries a charming little maiden, running down the wide stairway of an old country house, and half-way up the long hall, all in a fluttering cloud of pink lawn, her soft dimpled cheeks tinged with the same lovely morning hue. In an instant there is a stir and a gush of light laughter in the drawing-room, and presently, with a movement a little more majestic and elder-sisterly, Annie and Sophie float noiselessly through the hall and up the soft-carpeted ascent, as though borne on their respective clouds of blue and white drapery, and take their way to the nursery, where a novel entertainment awaits them. It is the first morning of the eldest married sister’s first visit home, with her first baby; and the first baby, having slept late after its journey, is about to take its first bath in the old house.
“Well, I declare, if here isn’t mother, forgetting her dairy, and Cousin Nellie, too, who must have left poor Ned all to himself in the garden, lonely and disconsolate, and I am torn from my books, and Sophie from her flowers, and all for the sake of seeing a nine-month-old baby kicking about in a bath-tub! What simpletons we are!”
Thus Miss Annie, the proude layde of the family; handsome, haughty, with perilous proclivities toward grand socialistic theories, transcendentalism, and general strong-mindedness; pledged by many a saucy vow to a life of single dignity and freedom, given to studies artistic, æsthetic, philosophic and ethical; a student of Plato, an absorber of Emerson, an exalter of her sex, a contemner of its natural enemies.
“Simpletons, are we?” cries pretty Elinor Lee, aunt of the baby on the other side, and “Cousin Nellie” by love’s courtesy, now kneeling close by the bath-tub, and receiving on her sunny braids a liberal baptism from the pure, plashing hands of babyhood,—“simpletons, indeed! Did I not once see thee, O Pallas-Athene, standing rapt before a copy of the ‘Crouching Venus?’ and this is a sight a thousand times more beautiful; for here we have color, action, radiant life, and such grace as the divinest sculptors of Greece were never able to entrance in marble. Just look at these white, dimpled shoulders, every dimple holding a tiny, sparkling drop,—these rosy, plashing feet and hands,—this laughing, roguish face,—these eyes, bright and blue and deep as lakes of fairy-land,—these ears, like dainty sea-shells,—these locks of gold, dripping diamonds,—and tell me what cherub of Titian, what Cupid of Greuze, was ever half so lovely. I say, too, that Raphael himself would have jumped at the chance of painting Louise, as she sits there, towel in hand, in all the serene pride and chastened dignity of young maternity,—of painting her as Madonna.”
“Why, Cousin Nellie is getting poetical for once, over a baby in a bath-tub!”
“Well, Sophie, isn’t it a subject to inspire real poets, to call out and yet humble the genius of painters and sculptors? Isn’t it an object for the reverence of ‘a glorious human creature,’—such a pure and perfect form of physical life, such a starry little soul, fresh from the hands of God? If your Plato teaches otherwise, Cousin Annie, I’m glad I’ve no acquaintance with that distinguished heathen gentleman; if your Carlyle, with his ‘soul above buttons’ and babies, would growl, and your Emerson smile icily at the sight, away with them!”
“Why, Nellie, you goose, Carlyle is ‘a man and a brother,’ in spite of his ‘Latter-day Pamphlets,’ and no ogre. I believe he is very well disposed toward babies in general; while Emerson is as tender as he is great. Have you forgotten his ‘Threnody,’ in which the sob of a mortal’s sorrow rises and swells into an immortal’s pean? I see that baby is very lovely; I think that Louise may well be proud of her. It’s a pity that she must grow up into conventionalities and all that,—perhaps become some man’s plaything, or slave.”
“O don’t, sister!—‘sufficient for the day is the worriment thereof.’ But I think you and Nellie are mistaken about the pride. I am conscious of no such feeling in regard to my little Florence, but only of joy, gratitude, infinite tenderness, and solicitude.”
Thus the young mother,—for the first time speaking, but not turning her eyes from the bath-tub.
“Ah, coz, it won’t go! Young mothers are the proudest of living creatures. The sweetest and saintliest among you have a sort of subdued exultation, a meek assumption, an adorable insolence, toward the whole unmarried and childless world. I have never seen anything like it elsewhere.”
“I have, in a bantam Biddy, parading her first brood in the hen-yard, or a youthful duck, leading her first little downy flock to the water.”
“Ha, blasphemer! are you there?” cries Miss Nellie, with a bright smile, and a brighter blush. Blasphemer’s other name is a tolerably good one,—Edward Norton,—though he is oftenest called “Our Ned.” He is the sole male representative of a wealthy old New England family,—the pride and darling of four pretty sisters, “the only son of his mother, and she a widow,” who adores him,—“a likely youth, just twenty-one,” handsome, brilliant, and standing six feet high in his stockings. Yet, in spite of all these unfavorable circumstances, he is a very good sort of a fellow. He is just home from the model college of the Commonwealth, where he learned to smoke, and, I blush to say, has a cigar in hand at this moment, just as he has been summoned from the garden by his pet sister, Kate, half-wild with delight and excitement. With him comes a brother, according to the law, and after the spirit,—a young, slender, fair-haired man, but with an indescribable something of paternal importance about him. He is the other proprietor of baby, and steps forward with a laugh and a “Heh, my little water-nymph, my Iris!” and by the bath-tub kneeling, catches a moist kiss from smiling baby lips, and a sudden wilting shower on shirt-front and collar, from moister baby hands.
Young collegian pauses on the threshold, essaying to look lofty and sarcastic, for a moment. Then his eye rests on Nellie Lee’s blushing face, on the red, smiling lips, the braids of gold, sprinkled with shining drops,—meets those sweet, shy eyes, and a sudden, mysterious feeling, soft and vague and tender, floods his gay young heart. He looks at baby again. “’Tis a pretty sight, upon my word! Let me throw away my cigar before I come nearer; it is incense too profane for such pure rites. Now give me a peep at Dian-the less! How the little witch revels in the water! A small Undine. Jolly, isn’t it, baby? Why, Louise, I did not know that Floy was so lovely, such a perfect little creature. How fair she is? Why, her flesh, where it is not rosy, is of the pure, translucent whiteness of a water-lily.”
No response to this tribute, for baby has been in the water more than long enough, and must be taken out, willy, nilly. Decidedly nilly it proves; baby proceeds to demonstrate that she is not altogether cherubic, by kicking and screaming lustily, and striking out frantically with her little, dripping hands. But Madonna wraps her in soft linen, rolls her and pats her, till she grows good and merry again, and laughs through her pretty tears.
But the brief storm has been enough to clear the nursery of all save grandmamma and Auntie Kate, who draw nearer to witness the process of drying and dressing. Tenderly the mother rubs the dainty, soft skin, till every dimple gives up its last hidden droplet; then, with many a kiss, and smile, and coo, she robes the little form in fairy-like garments of cambric, lace, flannel, soft as a moth’s wing, and delicate embroidery. The small, restless feet are caught, and encased in comical little hose, and shod with Titania’s own slippers. Then the light golden locks are brushed and twined into tendril-like curls, and lo! the beautiful labor of love is finished. Baby is bathed and dressed for the day.
