ucy Stone, however, could have felt more horror at the
institution of slavery. The Compromise Measures of 1850 made her
shudder: "my hands are cold as ice; the blood has curdled in my
heart; that word _compromise_ has a bad savor when truth and right are
in question." When the Civil War came, in her seventieth year, she had
"an intense desire to live to see the conclusion of the struggle," but
could not conjecture "how peace and good neighborhood are ever to
follow from this bitter hate." "It is delightful to see the gallantry
of some of our men, who are repeating the heroic deeds that seemed
fast receding to fabulous times." Some of these young heroes were very
near to her. Maj. William Dwight Sedgwick, who fell on the bloody
field of Antietam was her nephew, Gen. John Sedgwick, killed at the
battle of Spottsylvania, was her cousin.

As she was not in the Anti-Slavery crusade, so she was not in the
Woman's Rights crusade. She wished women to have a larger sphere, and
she did much to enlarge the sphere of her sex, but it was by taking it
and making it, rather than by talking about it. "Your _might_ must be
your _right_," she says in a chapter on The Rights of Women, in "Means
and Ends." Voting did not seem to her a function suited to women: "I
cannot believe it was ever intended that women should lead armies,
harangue in halls of legislation, bustle up to ballot-boxes, or sit
on judicial tribunals." The gentle Lucy Stone would not have
considered this argument conclusive, but it satisfied Miss Sedgwick.

In 1857, after a silence of twenty-two years, in which only short
stories and one or two biographies came from her hand, she published
another two-volume novel entitled, "Married or Single." It is perhaps
her best work; at least it has been so considered by many readers. She
was then sixty-seven and, though she had ten more years to live, they
were years of declining power. These last years were spent at the home
of her favorite niece, Mrs. William Minot, Jr., in West Roxbury,
Mass., and there tenderly and reverently cared for, she died in 1867.

Bryant, who was her life-long friend, and who, at her instance wrote
some of his hymns, gives this estimate of her character: "Admirable as
was her literary life, her home life was more so; and beautiful as
were the examples set forth in her writings, her own example was, if
possible, still more beautiful. Her unerring sense of rectitude, her
love of truth, her ready sympathy