Judge Sedgwick died in Boston, in 1813, when Miss Sedgwick was twenty-three. The biographical Dictionaries say he was a member of Dr. Channing's church. As Miss Sedgwick relates the facts, he had long desired to "make a public profession of religion," but had been deterred because he could not conscientiously join the church of his family, in Stockbridge, with its Calvinistic confession, and was too tender of the feelings of his pastor to join another,—"unworthy motives," says Miss Sedgwick. Briefly stated, he now sent for Dr. Channing and received from him the communion. Later, Miss Sedgwick followed him into the Unitarian fellowship. She, and two distinguished brothers, were among the founders of the first Unitarian church in New York city.
Miss Dewey calls her volume "The Life and Letters" of Miss Sedgwick, but the Life is very scantily written. She has given us a picture rather than a biography. Indeed, to write a biography of Miss Sedgwick is no easy task, there was so much of worth in her character and so little of dramatic incident in her career. Independent in her circumstances, exempt from struggle for existence or for social position, unambitious for literary fame and surprised at its coming, unmarried and yet domestic in tastes and habits, at home in any one of the five households of her married brothers and sisters, she lived for seventy-seven years as a favored guest at the table of fortune. She saw things happen to others, but they did not happen to her. It was with her as with Whittier's sweet Quakeress:
"For all her quiet life flowed on
As meadow streamlets flow,
Where fresher green reveals alone
The noiseless ways they go."
Of her outward career, Miss Dewey truly says: "No striking incidents, no remarkable occurrences will be found in it, but the gradual unfolding and ripening amid congenial surroundings of a true and beautiful soul, a clear and refined intellect, and a singularly sympathetic social nature. She was born eighty years ago"—this was written in 1871,—"when the atmosphere was still electric with the storm in which we took our place among the nations, and, passing her childhood in the seclusion of a New England valley, while yet her family was linked to the great world without by ties both political and social, early and deep foundations were laid in her character of patriotism, religious feeling, love of nature, and strong attachment to home, and to those who made it what it was. And when in later life, she took her place among the acknowledged leaders of literature and society, these remained the central features of her character, and around them gathered all the graceful culture, the active philanthropy, the social accomplishment, which made her presence a joy wherever it came."
It is not singular if she began her existence at a somewhat advanced stage. She was quite sure she remembered incidents that took place before she was two years old. She remembered a dinner party at which Miss Susan Morton, afterward Madame Quincy, was present, and to which her father and her brother, Theodore, came from Philadelphia. If you are anxious to know what incidents of such an event would fix themselves in the mind of a child of two, they were these: She made her first attempt to say "Theodore," and "Philadelphia," and she tried her baby trick of biting her glass, for which she had doubtless been reproved, and watched its effect upon her father. "I recall perfectly the feeling with which I turned my eye to him, expecting to see that brow cloud with displeasure, but it was smooth as love could make it. That consciousness, that glance, that assurance, remained stamped indelibly."
"Education in the common sense," says Miss Sedgwick, "I had next to none." For schools, she fared like other children in Stockbridge, with the difference that her father was "absorbed in political life," her mother, in Catharine's youth an invalid, died early, and no one, she says, "dictated my studies or overlooked my progress. I remember feeling an intense ambition to be at the head of my class, and generally being there. Our minds were not weakened by too much study; reading, spelling, and Dwight's geography were the only paths of knowledge into which we were led;" to which accomplishments she adds as an after-thought, grammar and arithmetic.
Nevertheless, when in 1838, six of the Sedgwick family travelled together through France and Italy, doing much of those sunny lands on foot, Miss Sedgwick was interpreter for the party in both countries, apparently easy mistress of their respective languages. It is remarkable what fine culture seems to have been attainable by a New England child born more than a hundred years ago, when Harvard and Yale were, as we are told, mere High Schools, and Radcliffe and Wellesley were not even dreamed of. Instead of Radcliffe or Wellesley, Miss Sedgwick attended a boarding school in Albany, at the age of thirteen and, at the age of fifteen, another in Boston, the latter for six months, and the former could not have been more than two years. Both, according to her, gave her great social advantages, and did little for her scholarship. Miss Bell, the head of the Albany school, "rose late, was half the time out of the school, and did very little when in it."
Miss Paine's school in Boston, let us hope, was better; but "I was at the most susceptible age. My father's numerous friends in Boston opened their doors to me. I was attractive in my appearance"—she is writing this to a niece and it is probably all true—"and, from always associating on equal terms with those much older than myself, I had a mental maturity rather striking, and with an ignorance of the world, a romantic enthusiasm, an aptitude at admiring and loving that altogether made me an object of general interest. I was admired and flattered. Harry and Robert were then resident graduates at Cambridge. They were too inexperienced to perceive the mistake I was making; they were naturally pleased with the attentions I was receiving. The winter passed away in a series of bewildering gayeties. I had talent enough to be liked by my teachers, and good nature to secure their good will. I gave them very little trouble in any way. When I came home from Boston I felt the deepest mortification at my waste of time and money, though my father never said one word to me on the subject. For the only time in my life I rose early to read French, and in a few weeks learned more by myself than I had acquired all winter."
It will be seen that she had the ability to study without a teacher, and that is an art which, with time at one's disposal and the stimulus at hand, assures education. Intellectual stimulus was precisely what her home furnished. "I was reared in an atmosphere of high intelligence. My father had uncommon mental vigor. So had my brothers. Their daily habits and pursuits and pleasures, were intellectual, and I naturally imbibed from them a kindred taste. Their talk was not of beeves, nor of making money; that now universal passion had not entered into men and possessed them as it does now, or if it had, it was not in the sanctuary of our home,—there the money-changers did not come."
The more we know of her home life, the less wonder we have at her mental development. She says that "at the age of eight, my father, whenever he was at home, kept me up and at his side till nine o'clock in the evening, to listen to him while he read aloud to the family Hume, or Shakspere, or Don Quixote, or Hudibras. Certainly I did not understand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul, and I caught from his magnetic sympathy some elevation of feeling, and that love of reading which has been to me an education." A modern girl is liable to nervous prostration without being kept up till nine on such juvenile literature as Hume and Shakspere at the age of eight; but Miss Sedgwick was a country girl who, in youth, lived out of doors and romped like a boy and, at the age of fifty, led a party of young nieces through France, Switzerland, and Italy, much of the way on foot and always at their head. Always fortune's favorite, she enjoyed among other things remarkably good health.