Eminent Women of the Age: Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation

BY GRACE GREENWOOD.

SARA PAYSON WILLIS, daughter of Nathaniel and Sara Willis, was born in Portland, Maine, in midsummer of the year of our Lord 1811. In that fine old town, in that fine old State, where as she says, "the timber and the human beings are sound," she spent the first six years of her life. During those years, our country passed through a troublous time, -- a supplementary grapple with the old country, -- final, let us hope, and eminently satisfactory in its results, to one party at least. But it is not probable that the shock and tumult of war seriously disturbed the little Sara, sphered apart from its encounters, sieges, conflagrations, and unnatural griefs, in the fairy realm of a happy childhood. Whether we made a cowardly surrender at Detroit, or incarnadined Lake Erie with British blood, -- whether we conquered at Chippewa, or rehearsed Bull Run at Bladensburg, -- whether our enemy burned the Capitol at Washington, or was soundly thrashed at New Orleans, -- it was all the same to her. However the heart of the noble mother may have been pained by the tragedies, privations and mournings of that time, it brooded over the little baby-life in sheltering peace and love: -- as the robin, when her nest rocks in the tempest, shields her unfledged darlings with jealous care.

I have a theory, flanked by whole columns of biographical history, that no man or woman of genius was ever born of

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