he anticipated, but
she knew very well that she was abjuring riches. Two years before her
marriage, her brother had written her: "Mr. Alcott's mind and heart
are so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do not
seem to concern him much." She had known Mr. Alcott three years and
had enjoyed ample opportunity to make this observation herself.
Indeed, two months after her marriage, she wrote her brother, "My
husband is the perfect personification of modesty and moderation. I am
not sure that we shall not blush into obscurity and contemplate into
starvation." That she had not repented of her choice a year later, may
be judged from a letter to her brother on the first anniversary of her
marriage: "It has been an eventful year,--a year of trial, of
happiness, of improvement. I can wish no better fate to any sister of
my sex than has attended me since my entrance into the conjugal
state."

That Mr. Alcott, then in his young manhood, had qualities which, for a
young lady of refinement and culture, would compensate for many
privations is evident. Whether he was one of the great men of his
generation or not, there is no doubt he seemed so. When, in 1837, Dr.
Bartol came to Boston, Mr. Emerson asked him whom he knew in the
city, and said: "There is but one man, Mr. Alcott." Dr. Bartol seems
to have come to much the same opinion. He says: "Alcott belonged to
the Christ class: his manners were the most gentle and gracious, under
all fair or unfair provocation, I ever beheld; he had a rare inborn
piety and a god-like incapacity in the purity of his eyes to behold
iniquity."

These qualities were not visible to the public and have no commercial
value, but that Mr. Alcott had them is confirmed by the beautiful
domestic life of the Alcotts, by the unabated love and devotion of
Mrs. Alcott to her husband in all trials, and the always high and
always loyal appreciation with which Louisa speaks of her father, even
when perhaps smiling at his innocent illusions. The character of Mr.
Alcott is an important element in the life of Louisa because she was
his daughter, and because, being unmarried, her life and fortunes were
his, or those of the Alcott family. She had no individual existence.

Two years after the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, Louisa, their
second daughter was born in Germantown, Pa., where Mr. Alcott was in
charge of a school belonging to the Society of Friends, or Quakers.
The date was November 29, 1832,