stem became actually
saturated with malaria." Invalid as she almost always was, she had
left her foot-prints in most of the states of the Union and had
carried the war into the British Provinces, where she had been the
means of establishing three insane hospitals: one in Toronto, one in
Halifax, one at St. John, Newfoundland, besides providing a fleet of
life-boats at Sable Island, known as "The Graveyard of Ships," off the
coast of Nova Scotia.

In the United States, during these twelve years, she "promoted and
secured," to use her own phrase, the enlargement of three asylums: at
Worcester, Mass., at Providence, R. I., and at Utica, N. Y., and the
establishment of thirteen, one in each of the following states: New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and
Maryland, with the Hospital for Insane Soldiers and Sailors, at
Washington, D. C.

In 1850, Miss Dix proposed a larger scheme of philanthropy than was
ever before projected by any mortal. What is more, but for one man,
she would have carried it out. She petitioned Congress to appropriate
12,000,000 acres of public lands for the benefit of the indigent
insane, deaf and dumb, and blind. A bill to that effect was
introduced, watched by her through two sessions, and finally passed by
both Houses. She was inundated with congratulations from far and near;
but the bill was vetoed on constitutional grounds by President Pierce.
The day for giving away the public lands in sheets had not come.

The blow seems to have been more than Miss Dix could endure. She went
abroad for change and rest. What rest meant to her, she expresses in
a letter to a friend at home:

"Rest is not quitting the active career:
Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere."

These lines, borrowed from John S. Dwight have been, not unnaturally,
attributed to her. She wrote many things perhaps quite as poetical.

Not much of the verse, which came from her prolific pen, was
considered even by herself to deserve publication, but verse-writing
is said to had been the never-failing diversion of her leisure hours.
Mrs. Caroline A. Kennard credits her with the following lines which,
though very simple, are quite as good as much that has been
immortalized in our hymn books:

"In the tender, peaceful moonlight,
I am from the world apart,
While a flood of golden glory
Fills alike my room and heart.