“However, this is not quite the point, after all; but here it is. I have a pen—not a gold one, I don’t think I could write with one, but a nice, little, feather-tipped pen, that rests in the curve of my finger as contentedly as in its former pillow of down. (Shocking! how that line did run down hill! and this almost as crooked! dear me!) Then I have little messengers racing ‘like mad’ through the galleries of my head; spinning long yarns, and weaving fabrics rich and soft as the balzarine which I so much covet, until I shut my eyes and stop my ears and whisk away, with the ‘wonderful lamp’ safely hidden in my own brown braids. Then I have Dr. Johnson’s dictionary—capital London edition, etc., etc.; and after I use up all the words in that, I will supply myself with Webster’s wondrous quarto, appendix and all. Thus prepared, think you not I should be able to put something in the shops of the literary caterers? something that, for once in my life, would give me a real errand into Broadway? May be you of the _New Mirror_ PAY for acceptable articles—may be not. _Comprenez-vous?_
“O, I _do_ hope that beautiful balzarine like Bel’s will not be gone before another Saturday! You will not forget to answer me in the next _Mirror_; but pray, my dear Editor, let it be done very cautiously, for Bel would pout all day if she should know what I had written. Till Saturday,
“Your anxiously-waiting friend, “FANNY FORESTER.”
This letter attracted the attention of Mr. Willis, and drew from him a characteristic reply:
“Well, we give in! On _condition_ that you are under twenty-five, and that you will wear a rose (recognizably) in your bodice the first time you appear in Broadway with the hat and balzarine, we will pay the bills. Write us thereafter a sketch of Bel and yourself, as cleverly done as this letter, and you may ‘snuggle down’ on the sofa, and consider us paid, and the public charmed with you.”
Mr. Willis at once introduced her through his columns to the American public, and, though they never saw each other but once, he became from this time on her life-long literary adviser and friend. And so, after the long struggle with poverty and ill-health, this woman, by dint of an imperious will and an unmistakable genius, began to take her place among the foremost literary characters of America. We quote from her biographer, Dr. Kendrick, who is well qualified by his intellectual acumen and fine poetic nature to judge of the quality of her mind:
“Those who now turn over the stories of Alderbrook will, I think, be at no loss to explain the popularity which they attained. They will find in them a truth to nature—a freshness and raciness of thought and diction—a freedom from the hackneyed conventionalisms of ordinary story-telling, a descriptive and dramatic power, which lend to them an unfailing charm. The language is ever plain and simple. They never affect ‘big’ words, nor deck themselves out in fripperies of expression. If there are occasional conceits of thought—and such are almost inevitable in a young woman’s first converse with the public—the style is almost wholly free from them. It delights in that plain Anglo-Saxon that comes freighted with home associations to every heart; and yet this simple style, under her delicate handling, has all the grace of ornament.