nder cover of one to Governor
Wise, asking permission to go and nurse and care for him. The expected
arrival of Captain Brown's wife made her generous offer unnecessary. The
prisoner wrote her, thanking her, and asking her to help his family, a
request with which she faithfully complied. With his letter came one
from Governor Wise, in courteous reproval of her sympathy for John Brown.
To this she responded in an able and effective manner. Her reply found
its way from Virginia to the New York Tribune, and soon after Mrs. Mason,
of King George's County, wife of Senator Mason, the author of the
infamous Fugitive Slave Law, wrote her a vehement letter, commencing with
threats of future damnation, and ending with assuring her that "no
Southerner, after reading her letter to Governor Wise, ought to read a
line of her composition, or touch a magazine which bore her name in its
list of contributors." To this she wrote a calm, dignified reply,
declining to dwell on the fierce invectives of her assailant, and wishing
her well here and hereafter. She would not debate the specific merits or
demerits of a man whose body was in charge of the courts, and whose
reputation was sure to be in charge of posterity. "Men," she continues,
"are of small consequence in comparison with principles, and the
principle for which John Brown died is the question at issue between us."
These letters were soon published in pamphlet form, and had the immense
circulation of 300,000 copies.

In 1867 she published _A Romance of the Republic_, a story of the days of
slavery; powerful in its delineation of some of the saddest as well as
the most dramatic conditions of master and slave in the Southern States.
Her husband, who had been long an invalid, died in 1874. After his death
her home, in winter especially, became a lonely one, and in 1877 she
began to spend the cold months in Boston.

Her last publication was in 1878, when her _Aspirations of the World_, a
book of selections, on moral and religious subjects, from the literature
of all nations and times, was given to the public. The introduction,
occupying fifty pages, shows, at threescore and ten, her mental vigor
unabated, and is remarkable for its wise, philosophic tone and felicity
of diction. It has the broad liberality of her more elaborate work on
the same subject, and in the mellow light of life's sunset her words seem
touched with a tender pathos and beauty. "All we poor mortals," she