." Again, she
writes to an American friend: "I should be much obliged to you if you
would give in my name twenty-five dollars to some charity in Boston.
I should prefer such a one as does not belong to any party in
particular, such as a city infirmary or orphan school. I do not like
to draw money from your country, and give none in charity."

Miss Ingelow is very fond of children, and herein is, perhaps, one
secret of her success. In Off the Skelligs she says: "Some people
appear to feel that they are much wiser, much nearer to the truth and
to realities, than they were when they were children. They think of
childhood as immeasurably beneath and behind them. I have never been
able to join in such a notion. It often seems to me that we lose quite
as much as we gain by our lengthened sojourn here. I should not at all
wonder if the thoughts of our childhood, when we look back on it after
the rending of this vail of our humanity, should prove less unlike
what we were intended to derive from the teaching of life, nature, and
revelation, than the thoughts of our more sophisticated days."

Best of all, this true woman and true poet as well, like Emerson, sees
and believes in the progress of the race.

"Still humanity grows dearer,
Being learned the more,"

she says, in that tender poem, _A Mother showing the Portrait of her
Child._ Blessed optimism! that amid all the shortcomings of human
nature sees the best, lifts souls upward, and helps to make the world
sunny by its singing.

* * * * *

Jean Ingelow died at her home in Kensington, London, July 19, 1897, at
the age of sixty-seven, having been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in
1830. Her long illness ended in simple exhaustion, and she welcomed
death gladly.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Lives of Girls Who Became Famous
by Sarah Knowles Bolton

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