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20 bad the dramatic, vigorous intellect reflected in her daughter's stories. She was always efficient, sympathetic, brave, through a life that would have crushed or embittered any ordinary woman. Never swerving in practical devotion to her philosopher-husband, with his idealistic fancies which constantly proved futile for family support, she and her daughters must have realized, from years of patient endurance, Louisa Alcott's famous definition of a philosopher,—"a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down."

The spiritual Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with artistic and poetic tastes, always guarding her husband from a prurient world, exerted a subtle influence upon the Concord circle. Ellen Fuller, wife of the eccentric poet, Channing,—last survivor of this early literary group,—and her more famous sister, Margaret Fuller, contributed to the free intellectuality of the town. Elizabeth Hoar, with a mind of great breadth and beauty, wielded a strong influence for culture and democracy through her own personality and her family name. The wife and daughters of Edmund Hosmer well typified those early families of husbandry in which mental life received marked expansion. Mrs. Cheney, the friend of Daniel Webster, at her beautiful home on