the deepest and most sacred concerns of life, which were looked upon as
subjects to be rigidly tabooed. Susan came into the world in a cold,
dreary season. The event was looked forward to with dread by the
mother, but when the little one arrived she received a warm and loving
welcome. She was born into a staid and quiet but very comfortable home,
where great respect and affection existed between father and mother.

William Cullen Bryant, whose birth-place was but twenty miles distant,
wrote of this immediate locality:

I stand upon my native hills again,
Broad, round and green, that in the summer sky,
With garniture of waving grass and grain,
Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie;
While deep the sunless glens are scooped between,
Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen.

Each night in early childhood she watched the sun set behind the great
dome of "Old Greylock," that noble mountain-peak so famed in the
literature of Berkshire, from whose lofty summit one looks across four
States. "It lifts its head like a glorified martyr," said Beecher, and
Julia Taft Bayne wrote:

Come here where Greylock rolls
Itself toward heaven; in these deep silences,
World-worn and fretted souls,
Bathe and be clean.

To the child's idea its top was very close against the sky, and its
memory and inspiration remained with her through life.