of the household rather than
the law.--A querulous tone, a complaint, a slight word of dissention,
was met by that awful frown of my father's. Jove's thunder was to a
pagan believer but as a summer day's drifting cloud to it. It was not
so dreadful because it portended punishment,--it was punishment; it
was a token of suspension of the approbation and love that were our
life."

These passages have a twofold value. They tell us in what school Miss
Sedgwick was educated, and they give us a specimen of her literary
style. Language is to her a supple instrument, and she makes the
reader see what she undertakes to relate.

Judge Sedgwick died in Boston, in 1813, when Miss Sedgwick was
twenty-three. The biographical Dictionaries say he was a member of Dr.
Channing's church. As Miss Sedgwick relates the facts, he had long
desired to "make a public profession of religion," but had been
deterred because he could not conscientiously join the church of his
family, in Stockbridge, with its Calvinistic confession, and was too
tender of the feelings of his pastor to join another,--"unworthy
motives," says Miss Sedgwick. Briefly stated, he now sent for Dr.
Channing and received from him the communion. Later, Miss Sedgwick
followed him into the Unitarian fellowship. She, and two distinguished
brothers, were among the founders of the first Unitarian church in New
York city.

Miss Dewey calls her volume "The Life and Letters" of Miss Sedgwick,
but the Life is very scantily written. She has given us a picture
rather than a biography. Indeed, to write a biography of Miss Sedgwick
is no easy task, there was so much of worth in her character and so
little of dramatic incident in her career. Independent in her
circumstances, exempt from struggle for existence or for social
position, unambitious for literary fame and surprised at its coming,
unmarried and yet domestic in tastes and habits, at home in any one of
the five households of her married brothers and sisters, she lived for
seventy-seven years as a favored guest at the table of fortune. She
saw things happen to others, but they did not happen to her. It was
with her as with Whittier's sweet Quakeress:

"For all her quiet life flowed on
As meadow streamlets flow,
Where fresher green reveals alone
The noiseless ways they go."

Of her outward career, Miss Dewey truly says: "No striking incidents,
no remarkable occurrences will be found in it, but the gradual
u