Longfellow and Mrs. Sigourney

Abstract

IKE most ladies of her century, Mrs. Sigourney (I791I865) Hartford poetess, was punctilious about birthday greetings. Accompanied by more or less appropriate volumes selected from her own works, her kindly letters went forth, often to complete strangers. And at times when her feelings overflowed, there would go with them anywhere from a dozen to a hundred lines of verse expressing her good wishes. One of these effusions was provoked on February 27, I856, on occasion of Longfellow's forty-ninth birthday. At time he and Mrs. Sigourney were most popular American poets. Her fame had been longer established, for Longfellow was only a child of eight when in 1815 her Moral Pieces, in Prose and Verse1 endured the ordeal of publick.2 And although his reputation now overshadowed Mrs. Sigourney's, it should be remembered that her dilute and pious verses had created and fed for years enormous audience that welcomed Longfellow so heartily in forties and fifties. The American Hemans had done much to prepare way for him who struck lyre of Orpheus.3 Longfellow's first letter is dated March 7, I854.4 His sisterin-law's governess, it seems, was desirous of starting a school with help of her mother and two sisters. Knowing of Mrs. Sigourney's early experience in conducting one in Hartford, (for romantic story of how schoolmistress, Lydia Huntley, had married wealthy merchant, Charles Sigourney, was included in all biographical sketches of lady that enlivened magazines of period) he wrote to ask if he might