ily
when Mr. Child was away. Whatever other period in the life of Mrs.
Child may have been the most satisfactory, this must have been the
most trying.

Under date of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort of
widowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life.
If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I should
have thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few years
ago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What with
constant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining and
cheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almost
always in a state of serene contentment. In summer, my once
extravagant love of beauty satisfies itself in watching the birds, the
insects, and the flowers in my little patch of a garden." She has no
room for her vases, engravings, and other pretty things; she keeps
them in a chest, and she says, "when birds and flowers are gone, I
sometimes take them out as a child does its playthings, and sit down
in the sunshine with them, dreaming over them."

We need not think of her spending much time dreaming over her little
hoard of artistic treasures. Her real business in this world is
writing the history of all religions, or "The Progress of Religious
Ideas in Successive Ages." It was a work begun in New York, as early
as 1848, finished in Wayland in 1855, published in three large octavo
volumes and, whatever its merits or success, was the greatest literary
labor of her life.

Under date of July 14, 1848, she writes to Dr. Francis: "My book gets
slowly on.... I am going to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, as
clearly as I can understand it, and let Christians and Infidels,
Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics, Protestants, and Swedenborgians
growl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for each
will want his own theory favored, and the only thing I have
conscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all." She may
have failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "In
her religious speculations," says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in the
very van." In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr.
Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister," but she was
somewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much nearer akin
to those of Theodore Parker. Only a Unitarian of that type could
perhaps at this early period have conceived the history of religion as
an