E.P.  Whipple, the Boston critic and essayist, when reviewing her poems, spoke of their “exceeding readableness”; and George Ripley, then of the New York Tribune, said: 

One charm of her writings is the frankness with which she takes the reader into her personal confidence.  She is never formal, never a martyr to artificial restraint, never wrapped in a mantle of reserve; but, with an almost childlike simplicity, presents a transparent revelation of her inmost thoughts and feelings, with perfect freedom from affectation.

She might have distinguished herself on the stage in either tragedy or comedy, but was dissuaded from that career by family friends.  I remember seeing her at several receptions, reciting the rough Pike County dialect verse of Bret Harte and John Hay in costume.  Standing behind a draped table, with a big slouch hat on, and a red flannel shirt, loose at the neck, her disguise was most effective, while her deep tones held us all.  Her memory was phenomenal, and she could repeat today stories of good things learned years ago.

Her recitation was wonderful; so natural, so full of soul and power.  I have heard many women read, some most execrably, who fancied they were famous elocutionists; some were so tolerable that I could sit and endure it; others remarkably good, but I was never before so moved as to forget where I was and merge the reader in the character she assumed.

Grace Greenwood probably made more puns in print than any other woman, and her conversation was full of them.  It was Grace Greenwood who, at a tea-drinking at the New England Woman’s Club in Boston, was begged to tell one more story, but excused herself in this way:  “No, I cannot get more than one story high on a cup of tea.”

Her conversation was delightful, and what a series of reminiscences she could have given; for she knew, and in many cases intimately, most of the leading authors, artists, politicians, philanthropists, agitators, and actors of her time in both her own land and abroad.  In one of her letters she describes the various authors she saw while lounging in Ticknor’s old bookstore in Boston.

Here, many a time, we saw Longfellow, looking wonderfully like a ruddy, hearty, happy English gentleman, with his full lips and beaming blue eyes.  Whittier, alert, slender and long; half eager, half shy in manner; both cordial and evasive; his deep-set eyes glowing with the tender flame of the most humane genius of our time.

Emerson’s manner was to her “a curious mingling of Athenian philosophy and Yankee cuteness.”

Saxe was “the handsome, herculean punster,” and so on with many others.

She resided with Miss Cushman in Rome, and in London she saw many lions—­Mazzini, Kossuth, Dickens and Talfourd, Kingsley, Lover, the Howellses, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Muloch Craik, George Eliot, etc.