JANE H. SPOFFORD

CHAPTER I.

Ancestry, home and childhood.

1550-1826.

Among the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts is a very beautiful place in which to be born.  It is famed in song and story for the loveliness of its scenery and the purity of its air.  It has no lofty peaks, no great canyons, no mighty rivers, but it is diversified in the most picturesque manner by the long line of Green Mountains, whose lower ranges bear the musical name of “Berkshire Hills;” by rushing streams tumbling through rocky gorges and making up in impetuosity what they lack in size; by noble forests, gently undulating meadows, quaint farmhouses, old bridges and bits of roadway which are a never-ending delight to the artist.  Writers, too, have found inspiration here and many exquisite descriptions in prose and verse commemorate the beauties of this region.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the first woman in America to make a literary reputation on two continents, was born at Stockbridge, and her stories and sketches were located here.  That old seat of learning, Williams College, is situated among these foothills.  In his summer home at Pittsfield, Longfellow wrote “The Old Clock on the Stairs”; at Stockbridge, Hawthorne builded his “House of the Seven Gables”; and Lydia Sigourney poetically told of “Stockbridge Bowl” with “Its foot of stone and rim of green.”  It was at Lenox that Henry Ward Beecher created “Norwood” and “Star Papers.”  Here Charlotte Cushman and Fanny Kemble came for many summers to rest and find new life.  Harriet Hosmer had her first dreams of fame at the Sedgwick school.  The Goodale sisters, Elaine and Dora, were born upon one of these mountainsides and both embalmed its memory in their poems.  Dora lovingly sings: 

  Dear Berkshire, dear birthplace, the hills are thy towers,
    Those lofty fringed summits of granite and pine;
  No valley’s green lap is so spangled with flowers,
    No stream of the wildwood so crystal as thine. 
  Say where do the March winds such treasures uncover,
    Such maple and arrowwood burn in the fall,
  As up the blue peaks where the thunder-gods hover
    In cloud-curtained Berkshire who cradled us all?

Henry Ward Beecher said: 

This county of valleys, lakes and mountains is yet to be as celebrated as the lake district of England and the hill country of Palestine....  Here is such a valley as the ocean would be if, when its waves were running tumultuous and high, it were suddenly transformed and solidified....  The endless variety never ceases to astonish and please....  It is indeed like some choice companion, of rich heart and genial imagination, never twice alike in mood, in conversation, in radiant sobriety or half-bright sadness; bold, tender, deep, various.

One has but to come into the midst of these hills