The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air | Page 4

until it sprung from her pen complete at a stroke. She wrote good English, of course, and would never sentimentalize, but went directly at the pith of the matter; and, if she had few thoughts on a subject, she made but few words. I don't think she did much by way of revising or recasting after her thought was once committed to paper. I think she wrote it as she would have said it, always with an imaginary child before her, to whose intelligence and sympathy it was addressed. Her habit of mind was to complete a thought before any attempt to convey it to others. This made her a very helpful and clear teacher and leader. She seemed always to have considered carefully anything she talked about, and gave her opinion with a deliberation and clear conviction which affected others as a verdict, and made her an oracle to a great many kinds of people. All her plans were thoroughly shaped before execution; all her work was true, finished, and conscientious in every department. She did a great deal of quiet, systematic thinking from her early school days onward, and was never satisfied until she completed the act of thought by expression and manifestation in some way for the advantage of others. The last time I saw her, which was for less than five minutes accorded me by her nurse during her last illness, she spoke of a new plan of literary work which she had in mind, and although she attempted no delineation of it, said she was thinking it out whenever she felt that it was safe for her to think. Her active brain never ceased its plans for others, for working toward the illumination of the mind, the purification of the soul, and the elevation and broadening of all the ideals of life. I remember her sitting, absorbed in reflection, at the setting of the sun every evening while we were at the House Beautiful of the Peabodys [We spent nearly all our time at West Newton in a little cottage on the hill, where Miss Elizabeth Peabody, with her saintly mother and father, made a paradise of love and refinement and ideal culture for us, and where we often met the Hawthornes and Manns; and we shall never be able to measure the wealth of intangible mental and spiritual influence which we received therefrom.] at West Newton; or, when at home, gazing every night, before retiring, from her own house-top, standing at her watchtower to commune with the starry heavens, and receive that exaltation of spirit which is communicated when we yield ourselves to the "essentially religious." (I use this phrase, because it delighted her so when I repeated it to her as the saying of a child in looking at the stars.)
No one ever felt a twinge of jealousy in Jane's easy supremacy; she never made a fuss about it, although I think she had no mock modesty in the matter. She accepted the situation which her uniform correctness of judgment assured to her, while she always accorded generous praise and deference to those who excelled her in departments where she made no pretence of superiority.
There were some occasions when her idea of duty differed from a conventional one, perhaps from that of some of her near friends; but no one ever doubted her strict dealing with herself, or her singleness of motive. She did not feel the need of turning to any other conscience than her own for support or enlightenment, and was inflexible and unwavering in any course she deemed right. She never apologized for herself in any way, or referred a matter of her own experience or sole responsibility to another for decision; neither did she seem to feel the need of expressed sympathy in any private loss or trial. Her philosophy of life, her faith, or her temperament seemed equal to every exigency of disappointment or suffering. She generally kept her personal trials hidden within her own heart, and recovered from every selfish pain by the elastic vigor of her power for unselfish devotion to the good of others. She said that happiness was to have an unselfish work to do, and the power to do it.
It has been said that Jane's only fault was that she was too good. I think she carried her unselfishness too often to a short-sighted excess, breaking down her health, and thus abridging her opportunities for more permanent advantage to those whom she would have died to serve; but it was solely on her own responsibility, and in consequence of her accumulative energy of temperament, that made her unconscious of the strain until too late.
Her brain was constitutionally sensitive and almost abnormally active; and she more than once overtaxed it by too continuous study,