she resembles, we hesitate not to say she greatly surpasses in grandeur
of conception and beauty of expression.

William Brown was a half-brother of the mother of the editor of this
book; consequently Emma and he are cousins. If, therefore, this sketch
should seem to exceed or fall short of the truth, the reader must
attribute its imperfections to the inability of the writer to do justice
to the subject, or to the great, but he hopes pardonable, admiration
which he has long entertained for his relative's literary productions.

The Brown family are of Scotch-Irish extraction, and trace their lineage
away back through a long line of ancestors to the time when the name was
spelled Brawn, because of the great muscular development of the rugged
old Scotch Highlander who founded it.

William Brown's early education was obtained at the common schools of
the neighborhood where he was born. He was endowed by nature with a
logical mind, a vivid imagination and great practical common sense; and
a memory so tenacious as to enable him to repeat a sermon almost, if not
quite, verbatim, a year after he had heard it delivered. Early in life
he became an exemplary member of the Methodist Church, and was ordained
as a Local Preacher in the Methodist Protestant persuasion, by the Rev.
John G. Wilson, very early in the history of that denomination, in the
old Harmony Church, not far south of Rowlandville. Subsequently he was
admitted to the Conference as a traveling minister and sent to
southeastern Pennsylvania, where he continued to preach the gospel with
much success until his death, which occurred when his daughter Emma was
a child about eight years of age.

Emma's education began on her father's knee, when she was little if any
more than three years old. Before she was four years old she could
repeat Anacreon's Ode to a Grasshopper, which her father had learned
from a quaint old volume of heathen mythology, and taught his little
daughter to repeat, by reciting it aloud to her, as she sat upon his
knee. Subsequently, and before she had learned to read, he taught her in
the same manner "Byron's Apostrophe to the Ocean," Campbell's "Battle of
Hohenlinden," and Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib," all of which
seem to have made a deep impression upon her infantile mind,
particularly the latter, in speaking of which she characterizes it as "a
poem whose barbaric glitter and splendor captivated my imagination even
at that early period