Those are beautiful, Evan. And how wonderful that your great great grandmother Elizabeth's "Coronation Day" verses came into the hands of Queen Victoria and received the Queen's happy response.

Thank you so much for sharing these. Thanks also for your other input on the Beagle Log and the North America Board & no doubt Don will replying back to you on those soon. In the meantime, there's a little welcome message to you >> here >>

Carole

PS: have changed the link at the end of your topic above, into a text hyperlink -
to replace the long URL, which might have become distorted.

Those are very moving and descriptive poems Evan. Your great great grandmother was a very very talented writer.

Daz.

It is twenty-one years since Henry Boynton Smith fin­ished his brilliant and too brief career. The death of her whose life was so inseparably intertwined with his, re­touches for the moment the outlines of his portrait for those who knew them both. Yet her departure has a significance wholly its own. She is not remembered and mourned simply as the wife of a prince in Israel. In the happy welding of the two lives, in the quiet and potent ministry of the less conspicuous to the strong and brill­iant public career, there is a distinct personal and indi­vidual fibre which is not absorbed.

It is a pleasant task to write of her, yet it is, none the less, a difficult and delicate one. That which was finest and most characteristic in her eludes definition and analysis.

To her, character was more than antecedents, and genealogy was despised when employed merely as a mask for degeneracy; but she was too wise to be insensible to the value of good ancestry, and she justly prized her own. In the closing lines of a little volume prepared by her for private circulation, and entitled "Family Records for Six Generations," she wrote: "And now let us rever­ently and devoutly thank God for him (her father), and for our mother, and for all those godly ancestors through so many generations. Yea, we have a goodly heritage. Let us keep the line unbroken, and be followers of them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises."

On her mother's side she was of French Huguenot de­scent. Behind her were the devotion, blood, and exile of martyrdom, the associations of a court, the discipline of intellectual culture, and the graces of polished society. Her grandmother, Maria Suhm, born in St. Thomas in 1758, was educated partly at Copenhagen, and partici­pated in the life of the Danish court. Later she returned to America, and became an inmate of the Moravian school at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, afterwards rejoin­ing her family circle at the homestead of Beverwyck in New Jersey, which had been purchased by her step­father, General Von Beverhoudt. In this aristocratic mansion many of the prominent Revolutionary characters were guests-Washington, La Fayette, Knox, and others. In 1786 she was married to John Wheelock, the second president of Dartmouth College. Among the literary and religious associations of a New England college, Maria Malleville Wheelock, the mother of Mrs. Smith, was reared, and became in 1813 the wife of William Allen, a Harvard graduate of high rank. Mr. Allen, for several years after his graduation, served as Proctor at Cambridge, and was ordained in 1804, and settled at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It has been said of him that he was beautiful in person, refined and gentle in manners, distinguished in scholarship, and of a lovely and exalted character. His father, the Reverend Thomas Allen, was the first minister of Pittsfield, and led in person two hundred and fifty of his parishioners to the battle of Bennington, where he fired the first shot at the enemy. His mother, Elizabeth Lee, was directly descended from Governor William Bradford of Plymouth.

William Allen was called in 1817 to be his father-in­law's successor in the presidency of Dartmouth Uni­versity, which was believed by his friends to be the legitimate heir to the original rights and franchises of Dartmouth College. This claim was set aside by the verdict in the celebrated Dartmouth College case, in which Daniel Webster figured. Elizabeth Lee Allen was born in 1817. Not long after, her father was elected to the presidency of Bowdoin College, and removed to Brunswick, Maine, where Mrs. Allen died. President Allen, after leaving Brunswick in 1839, continued to re­side in Northampton, Mass., until his death in 1868. Mrs. Smith writes of him: "With a poet's eye he enjoyed the handiwork of God in nature, and delighted in the 'precious things' of the earth and seas and of the' last­ing hills.' . . . He had wide interests in all that con­cerned the welfare of humanity and the advancement of the kingdom of Christ upon the earth. More than all, he lived in daily communion with God, and in unclouded Christian faith and hope and peace.

From amid such influences, at once religious, scholarly, and aesthetic, Elizabeth Allen passed into the life of a country parsonage. In 1842 she became the wife of the young Henry Boynton Smith, whose brilliant intellectual qualities were already beginning to attract the notice of the best minds of New England. Her marriage took place soon after Mr. Smith's installation over the Con­gregational Society of West Amesbury, Massachusetts, now known as Merrimac. The village was small, and the congregation was composed mostly of farmers and mechanics; but the student and philosopher threw him­self with ardor into his pastoral work, and by his love for children, his deference to age, his quick sympathy for infirmity and sorrow, his simple and unaffected bear­ing, and his efforts for the improvement of the village and the education of the youth, quickly won the admira­tion and warm affection of the people. In the record of his pastoral labors we see little of the young wife, but hints are not wanting which go to show the large place which she held in his life and ministry. In a letter to his life-long friend, Dr. George L. Prentiss, on the oc­casion of the latter's marriage, he writes: "I rejoice with you, remembering my own joy, so full, so calm­- entire, wanting nothing. We catch charming glimpses of the parsonage life, as, for instance, "the transference of the baby from a state of nature to a state of condi­tionally covenanted grace," the said baby "behaving very well, and looking up into her father's eyes as he administered holy baptism." What a delicious blending of the father and the theologian. Or the donation visit, with its gifts of butter, cheese, and apples, and the visit of the entire body of the parish children to the par­sonage, where they were entertained with cake and apples, and a romp in field, barn-chamber, and study. His published letters to his wife indicate that she was the sharer, not only of his domestic life, but of his studies and mental problems.

In 1847 the home was transferred to Amherst, on Dr. Smith's acceptance of the call to the Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy in Amherst College, and again, after three years, to New York, on his appointment to the Professorship of Church History in Union Theological Seminary, where the great work of his life was done and ended.

Although I had been for some years acquainted with Dr. Smith, my closer acquaintance with him and my first acquaintance with Mrs. Smith were in my pastorate of the Church of the Covenant, which began in 1873. They had been identified with that church from its organiza­tion. I found in Mrs. Smith a true and loyal friend, an intelligent and sympathetic hearer, and an efficient co­operator in church work, so far as her numerous and engrossing cares would permit. Dr. Smith's impaired health, which already threatened the final and fatal break, was the shadow which hovered continually over the threshold of the home; but this shadow never clouded her intercourse with her friends. She lived ever in the presence, in the very vortex of the fearful struggle of that great intellect with sleeplessness and exhaustion, but, for all that any save her children and her closest intimates could detect, she dwelt wholly in an atmos­phere of peace. She was none the less practical and spirited for her fine culture. With her clear insight and firm mental grasp, she was intensely and thoroughly womanly. She read widely and wrote much, but she never was at pains to assert either her intellectual power or her acquisitions. Both her natural endowment and her culture were too real for that. She left them to make their own impression, if indeed she ever concerned herself in the least about making an impression. But one could not converse with her for even a few minutes without recognizing a mind of rare quality, and an appre­ciativeness of all that was best in the realm of thought. There hung about her the atmosphere of a fine reserve, a genuine modesty, and a keen sensitiveness to intellect­ual sympathy. The degree to which she gave herself out to others, depended largely upon her instinct or assurance of sympathetic response. There was in her an element of moral downrightness. Naturally and habit­ually gentle, she could say a very plain and telling thing on occasion, with a dash of causticity. She was capable of strong indignation at wrong, pretense, or shallow sen­timent. She hated a sham as intensely as her husband did, and that is saying much. I shall never forget her quiet remark on one occasion, when a well-meaning but very wealthy couple had been expressing what seemed to strike her as a conventional sympathy in some matter which had deeply stirred her own heart: "They know nothing about it; they are so prosperous."

She kept herself informed on subjects of current in­terest, and her talk was at once appreciative and stimu­lating. She wrote not a little, in an easy, lucid style, and from time to time gave to the press contributions which, though deserving a wider circulation, were in­tended chiefly for her family and her immediate friends. There lies before me a thin volume of poems, gathered up and issued for private circulation, and entitled "Out of the Past:" Many of these are very choice. Some of them were written early in her life. She was deeply moved by the succession of the young Victoria to the throne of England, and the verses addressed "To Queen Victoria on her Coronation Day" are remarkable alike for their insight, and their fine and deep feeling. I select two verses:



The poem, without Mrs. Smith's knowledge, came into the hands of the Queen, who said: "If it will give the writer of these verses any pleasure to know that they have given me pleasure, let her know it."

Continued...

...continued:

Another is entitled "Maternity":


The Memoir of her Husband, published in 1880, is, as might be expected, more deeply and subtly characteristic than any other product of her pen. Few essays in the field of biography could have been more hazardous. Its subject was a man not easily measured, and still less easy to portray. The close intimacy of a lifetime too often converts biography into indiscriminate panegyric; and the affection which essays to reproduce the linea­ments of departed greatness or goodness, sometimes, by its very ardor, invades the sanctity which clothes it and its sister sorrow. In this case, it is more than doubtful if these temptations were even felt.

At any rate they were without power. An unerring tact and delicacy guided the composition throughout. Perhaps the most notable feature of the book was its exquisite reserve. The writer and the writer's sorrow are never obtruded, indeed are well nigh kept out of sight; yet, from first to last, there is revealed an insight into the finest fibre of the character of her husband, which could only have been the gift of love with its vision clarified by sorrow. Equally there is apparent the power to appreciate the range of his attainment and the scope of his work; yet her material is so selected and arranged as to let the facts tell their own story. The book is graphic, lucid, vivacious, sustained in inter­est, and pervaded with a something incapable of analysis or definition, which removes it from the category of mere chronicles, and makes it the living record of a life. How beautiful are her lines which open the volume:



The years succeeding Dr. Smith's death were passed chiefly at Lakewood, in the household of her youngest daughter. She lived in the companionship of her chil­dren, her books, and the numerous old friends who visited Lakewood in the winter. Her pen was not idle. A sug­gestive poem, entitled "The New Logion," appeared in The Evangelist of April 21St, 1898. On the fifth of December, shortly after she had celebrated a happy Thanksgiving with her children, she fell on sleep. She was in the eighty-second year of her age. All that was mortal of her rests beside the grave of her husband, in the beautiful old cemetery of Northampton.






Dr. Henry Boynton Smith was so closely and promi­nently identified with the early history of Union Semi­nary, that the death of his wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Lee Smith, calls for the special recognition of its Faculty.

As the wife of one whose distinguished services to this institution can never be forgotten, as his efficient and intelligent sympathizer and helper in all his labors for the Church of Christ, as the one who, in her graceful and vivid biography, has perpetuated for all present and future friends of Union Seminary the picture of his personality and work, as a woman of large native gifts and generous culture, of rare personal and social quali­ties, and of winning Christian graces-this Faculty de­sires to place on record its high appreciation of her character, attainments, and services, and to tender to her family its cordial sympathy in their bereavement.

Evan, all this really is wonderful. and fascinating to read the background. Thank you so much for sharing it.

I shall be calling back at this topic often, to reflect on your great-grandmother's poems and the memorials to this remarkable lady.

Carole

Hi Evan,

Sorry its taken a while to get back to you again, after the limited access week.

That's a beautiful photograph - I wonder if that is your grand-daughter with the lovely red hair?

Really pleased that you decided to digitise it all at Smith Chat. Your input is wonderful and we're honoured to have it all here, and I'm sure most of our Users will find it all really interesting too.

About the "pesky ­"andshysemicolon­" characters" - yes I had noticed that too, & sent you some info about how you might be able to correct it. Hope you received that.

Quote:

"Her children rise up and call her blessed" and I s'pose that's what's happening...

Yes, I think so too Evan. Will catch up with you again soon, once I've been back to your "Smith" Topics, sometime during the next few days.

Bye for now,
Carole

Hope everyone had a nice holiday.

Thanks for the editing option Carole -- FWIW, I tried to edit it but those strange characters only show up in the 'sent' version, they don't appear while 'previewing'...

(The child 'rising up' is one of ELS' many Great-Great-Great Grandchildren).

Thanks again,
ES