For eleven years, Mary E. Hawes, afterwards Mrs. Van Lennep, was an attentive and interested listener to the instructions given to the children at our quarterly meetings—­and it is interesting to know that her mother regards the influence of those meetings as powerfully aiding in the formation of her symmetrical Christian character.

An eminent painter once said to us, that he always disliked to attempt the portrait of a woman; it was so difficult to give to such a picture the requisite boldness of feature and distinctness of individual expression, without impairing its feminine character.  If this be true in the delineation of the outer and material form, how much more true is it of all attempts to portray the female mind and heart!  If the words and ways, the style of thinking and the modes of acting, all that goes to make up a biography, have a character sufficiently marked to individualize the subject, there is a danger that, in the relating, she may seem to have overstepped the decorum of her sex, and so forfeit the interest with which only true delicacy can invest the woman.

It is strange that biography should ever succeed.  To reproduce any thing that was transient and is gone, not by repetition as in a strain of music, but by delineating the emotions it caused, is an achievement of high art.  An added shade of coloring shows you an enthusiast, and loses you the confidence and sympathy of your cooler listener.  A shade subtracted leaves so faint a hue that you have lost your interest in your own faded picture, and of course, cannot command that of another.  Even an exact delineation, while it may convey accurately a part of the idea of a character, is not capable of transmitting the more volatile and subtle shades.  You may mix your colors never so cunningly, and copy never so minutely every fold of every petal of the rose, and hang it so gracefully on its stem, as to present its very port and bearing, but where is its fragrance, its exquisite texture, and the dewy freshness which was its crowning grace?

So in biography, you may make an accurate and ample statement of facts,—­you may even join together in a brightly colored mosaic the fairest impressions that can be given of the mind of another—­his own recorded thoughts and feelings—­and yet they may fail to present the individual.  They are stiff and glaring, wanting the softening transition of the intermediate parts and of attending circumstances.

And yet biography does sometimes succeed, not merely in raising a monumental pile of historical statistics, and maintaining for the friends of the departed the outlines of a character bright in their remembrance; but in shaping forth to others a life-like semblance of something good and fair, and distinct enough to live with us thenceforward and be loved like a friend, though it be but a shadow.