These extracts will suffice to show the quality and extent of her reading.  What sort of fruit her reading and study bore may be seen by her articles on Claudius and Goethe, in the New York Review.  No abler discussion of the genius and writings of Goethe had at that time appeared in this country; while the article on Claudius was probably the first to make him known to American readers.

During many of the later years of her life Mrs. Hopkins was a martyr to ill-health.  The story of her sufferings, both physical and mental, as artlessly told in little diaries which she kept, is “wondrous pitiful;” no pen of fiction could equal its simple pathos.  Again and again, as she herself knew, she was on the very verge of insanity; nothing, probably, saving her from it but the devotion of her husband, who with untiring patience and a mother’s tenderness ministered, in season and out of season, to her relief.  Often would he steal home from his beloved Observatory, where he had been teaching his students how to watch the stars, and pass a sleepless night at her bedside, reading to her and by all sorts of gentle appliances trying to soothe her irritated nerves.  And this devotion ran on, without variableness or shadow of turning, year after year, giving itself no rest until her eyes were closed in death. [5]

Let us now resume our narrative.  A portion of the summer of 1862 was passed by Mrs. Prentiss at Newport.  Her season of rest was again invaded by severe illness among her children.  Under date of August 3d, she writes to Mrs. Smith: 

I can see that our landlady, who has good sense and experience, thinks G. will not get well.  Sometimes, in awful moments, I think so too; but then I cheer up and get quite elated.  Last night as I lay awake, too weary to sleep, I heard a harsh, rasping sound like a large saw.  I thought some animal unknown to me must be making it, it was so regular and frequent.  But after a time I found it was a dying young soldier who lives farther from this house than Miss H. does from our house in New York.  His fearful cough!  Oh, this war! this war!  I never hated and revolted against it as I did then.  I had heard some one say such a young man lay dying of consumption in this street, but till then was too absorbed with my own incessant cares to hear the cough, as the rest had done.  I never realised how I felt about our country till I found the terror of losing, a link out of that little golden chain that encircles my sweetest joys, was a kindred suffering.  Have the times ever looked so black as they do now?  We seem to be drifting round without chart or pilot.

Two weeks later, August 17th, she writes to her cousin, Miss Shipman: