to church filled
with people in their fine summer clothes, and heard a magnificent
sermon from Dr. Dewey, and thought of the streets and dens through
which I had just walked, I could have cried out, Why are ye here?"

A fellow-member of the Prison Association, who often accompanied her
on her visits to hospitals and prisons, "especially the Tombs,
Blackwell's, and Randall's Island," says, "In her visitations, she was
called upon to kneel at the bedside of the sick and dying. The
sweetness of her spirit, and the delicacy of her nature, felt by all
who came within her atmosphere, seemed to move the unfortunate to ask
this office of her, and it was never asked in vain."

Always a philanthropist, Miss Sedgwick was not a "reformer" in the
technical sense; that is, she did not enlist in the "movements" of her
generation, for Temperance, or Anti-Slavery, or Woman's Rights. She
shrunk from the excesses of the "crusaders," but she was never slow in
striking a blow in a good cause. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in
1852, but its indictment of slavery is not more complete than Miss
Sedgwick made in "Redwood," her second novel, twenty-five years
before. A planter's boy sees a slave starved to famishing and then
whipped to death. It hurt his boy heart, but he afterward became
hardened to such necessary severity and he tells the story to a fellow
planter with apologies for his youthful sentimentality. Does "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" show more clearly the two curses of slavery: cruelty to
the slave and demoralization to the master?

She sympathized with the abolitionists in their purpose but not always
with their methods: "The great event of the past week has been the
visit of the little apostle of Abolitionism--Lucy Stone." This was in
1849 when Mrs. Stone was thirty-one. "She has one of the very sweetest
voices I ever heard, a readiness of speech and grace that furnish the
external qualifications of an orator--a lovely countenance too--and
the intensity, entire forgetfulness and the divine calmness that fit
her to speak in the great cause she has undertaken." But in spite of
this evident sympathy with the purpose of the Abolitionists, Miss
Sedgwick declined to attend a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society,
saying: "It seemed to me that so much had been intemperately said, so
much rashly urged, on the death of that noble martyr, John Brown, by
the Abolitionists, that it was not right to appear among them as one
of them."

Not even L