Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/18

Rh backward, we find that Mrs. Ednah Hardy Parker, born in 1745, was the daughter of Captain Eliphalet* and Hannah (Platts) Hardy, grand-daughter of Jonas Platts and his wife, Anne' Bailey, and great-grand-daughter of Deacon Joseph' Bailey, of East Bradford, who was son of Richard^ and his wife Ednah. Richard Bailey was one of the company that set up in Rowley the first cloth-mill in America. Mrs. Ednah Bailey's maiden name is thought to have been Halstead.

Mrs. Cheney's birthplace was on Belknap Street, now Joy, about half-way up Beacon Hill from Cambridge Street. She was the third child born to her parents. Five children came after her, one a little brother; but only four — Ednah and three sisters, one a lifelong invalid—lived to adult age. When she was two years old, the family removed to Hayward Place, and six years later they took up their abode in a new house on Bowdoin Street. At the first school she attended, kept by the Misses Pemberton, she had good training in reading, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, and geography. The second was Mr. William B. Fowle's Monitorial School, which she entered with her elder sister. Mary Frances. Here she distinguished herself by her knowledge of grammar, as shown by her skill in " parsing," and her ready recitations in other studies that interested her, one of these being French, which was especially well taught. The attraction of a new and friendly acquaint- ance. Miss Caroline Healey, drew her to the school on Mount Vernon Street of Mr. Joseph H. Abbot. For a few terms she continued to advance in various ways of learning, more or less pleasurable, in the meantime successfully cultivating independence of thought, till, feeling herself not in harmony with the constituted authorities, she was as anxious to leave the Abbot school as she had been to enter it. Here ended her school-days — education still to be won. The home atmosphere was favorable to mental growth. Love of learning, with a taste for good literature, was an inheritance. The mother, "a beautiful type of woman, of good practical ability and great tenderness of heart, was very fond of reading." "Indeed," says Mrs. Cheney, "I can never remember seeing either her or my father sitting down to rest without a book in their hands." Mr. Littlehale had a good knowledge of history, especially American.

The period of time now arrived at, the vivifying dawn of New England Transcendentalism, brought golden opportunities to the young aspirant for intellectual culture. A great awakening and a new sense of the surpassing riches of life was the result to Ednah D. Littlehale of attending for three successive seasons the conversations of Margaret Fuller. Few teachers have shown to such a degree the power of personality.

Mrs. Cheney writes: "I absorbed her life and her thoughts, and to this day I am astonished to find how large a part of what I am when I am most myself I have derived from her. . . .She did not make us her disciples, her blind followers. She opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves."

Of Mr. Emerson, Mrs. Cheney says, "I never missed an opportunity of hearing him or read- ing his works"; and of Mr. Alcott, not all of whose theories she could accept, "But he gave me an insight into the life and thoughts of the old philosophers, and moreover gave me the constant sense of the spiritual, the supersensual life that is the most precious of all possessions."

It is significant that Mrs. Cheney and her elder sister, Mary F., were among the first parishioners of Theodore Parker when he came from West Roxbury to Boston, 1846. Inspirer, friend, and comforter in time of sorrow he ever remained.

For a year or two before her marriage Mrs. Cheney was the secretary of the School of Design for Women in Boston, of which she was one of the founders. Short-lived, the school yet served to show the existence of talent among American women, and is remembered as "one of the failures that enriched the ground for success."

Twin ambitions, art and literature, were native to Mrs. Cheney. Choosing the latter for her field of action, she ceased not to cultivate her taste for the former. As an artist's wife she made her first visit to Europe, sailing with her husband for Liverpool in August, 1854. The year following their return (in June, 1855)