Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/306

 EEBECCA S. NICHOLS. "With young women just completing their teens, poetry very often becomes an absorbing passion and a power of no small account ; which passion gradually gives way to the demands of domestic duties, and which power, though it may ripen into a mature intellectual force, becomes less and less exercised, as the crown of motherhood opens a new empire for the affectional dominion of the woman-soul. With few excep- tions, this is the universal truth of female authorship, which exceptions are generally in favor of those women who marry late in life, or not at all. The active literary career of Mrs. Nichols is embraced within the period of twelve years, from about 1840, though some of her riper productions are sparsely scattered over the five years subsequent to this period, while for the last few years she seems to have withdrawn almost entirely from the field of belle-lettres. Rebecca S. Reed was born in Greenwich, New Jersey. "While she was yet a child, her father, E. B. Reed, a physician, removed with his family to the "West, which has since been her home, with the exception of two or three years following 1852, when she resided at Philadelphia and in New Jersey. While residing at Louisville, Kentucky, in the year 1838, Miss Reed was married to Willard Nichols, whom she accompanied to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1840, where Mr. N. embarked in the publication of a daily news and miscellaneous paper, in the editing of which, Mrs. Nichols assisted her husband, though she was yet almost a child in years and expe- rience. In 1841 Mr. Nichols and wife left St. Louis to take up their abode in Cin- cinnati, where they continued to reside most of the time until 1851. This was a period of considerable literary activity in that region, which eventuated in the bring- ing out of some of the best writers the West has ever produced. Cotemporary with these, Mrs. Nichols ripened into the acknowledged mistress of song, with a popularity in advance of all her lady competitors of that day. Mrs. Nichols's earliest poems were published in the Louisville A^eics Letter, and Louisville Journal, over the signature of Ellen. In 1844 she published a small volume entitled "Berenice, or the Curse of Minna, and other Poems." The princi- pal poem in this volume is a respectable girl-tragedy, of the school that has since blossomed into the sensational literature of the Eastern periodical press. Several of the minor pieces are of decided merit. Only a small edition of this book was printed, and it is now rarely to be met with. In 1846 Mrs. Nichols conducted a literary periodical in Cincinnati, called The Guest, which attained to considerable popularity, and in which she published many of her poetical compositions of that period. She was also a contributor to Graham's Maga- zine, The Knickerbocker, and other Eastern periodicals. Early in her Cincinnati cai-eer, Mrs. Nichols contributed to the Cincinnati Herald, conducted b}' the late Gamaliel Bailey, a series of sprightly papers under the nom de plume of Kate Cleaveland. ( 2<)0 )