Her plain, cheap dress was glorified by the generous motive for which she
wore it. Whether in the crowded city among the sin-sick and starving, or
among the poor and afflicted in the neighborhood of her country home, no
story of suffering and need, capable of alleviation, ever reached her
without immediate sympathy and corresponding action. Lowell, one of her
warmest admirers, in his _Fable for Critics_ has beautifully portrayed
her abounding benevolence:--

"There comes Philothea, her face all aglow:
She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe,
And can't tell which pleases her most, to relieve
His want, or his story to hear and believe.
No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails,
For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales;
She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food,
And that talking draws off from the heart its black blood."

"The pole, science tells us, the magnet controls,
But she is a magnet to emigrant Poles,
And folks with a mission that nobody knows
Throng thickly about her as bees round a rose.
She can fill up the carets in such, make their scope
Converge to some focus of rational hope,
And, with sympathies fresh as the morning, their gall
Can transmute into honey,--but this is not all;
Not only for those she has solace; O, say,
Vice's desperate nursling adrift in Broadway,
Who clingest, with all that is left of thee human,
To the last slender spar from the wreck of the woman,
Hast thou not found one shore where those tired, drooping feet