University of Virginia Library

I.

HELEN MARIA FISKE, the daughter of Nathan Wiley and Deborah (Vinal) Fiske, was born at Amherst, Massachusetts, October 18, 1831. Her father was a native of Weston, Massachusetts, was a graduate of Dartmouth College, and, after being a tutor in that institution, became professor first of languages and then of philosophy in Amherst College, having been previously offered a professorship of mathematics at Middlebury College, — a combination of facts indicating the variety of his attainments. He was also a Congregationalist minister and an author, publishing a translation of Eschenburg's "Manual of Classical Literature," and one or two books for children. He died May 27, 1847, at Jerusalem, whither he had gone for the benefit of his health. His wife was a native of Boston, and is mentioned with affection by all who knew her; and the daughter used to say that her own sunny temperament came from the mother's side. She also had literary tastes, and wrote the "Letters from a Cat," which her daughter afterwards edited, and which show a genuine humor and a real power of expression. She died February 19, 1844, when her daughter Helen was twelve years old. Both parents held the strict Calvinistic faith, and the daughter was reared in it, though she did not long remain there.

Mr. and Mrs. Fiske had two sons, who died young, and two daughters, who lived to maturity; the younger of whom, Anne, is the wife of Everett C. Banfield, Esquire, at one time solicitor of the Treasury Department at Washington, and now a resident of Wolfboro, New Hampshire. The other, Helen, was a child of uncommon versatility and vivacity; and her bright sayings were often quoted, when she was but ten or twelve years old, in the academical circle of the little college town. She has herself described in a lively paper, "The Naughtiest Day of my Life" ("St. Nicholas," September-October, 1880), a childish feat of running away from home in company with another little girl, on which occasion the two children walked to Hadley, four miles, before they were brought back. The whole village had joined in the search for them, and two professors from the college finally reclaimed the wanderers. There is something infinitely characteristic of the mature woman in the description written by her mother, at the time, of the close of that anxious day: "Helen walked in at a quarter before ten o'clock at night, as rosy and smiling as possible, and saying in her brightest tone, 'Oh, mother, I've had a perfectly splendid time.'"

A child of this description may well have needed the discipline of a variety of schools; and she had the advantage of at least two good ones, — the well-known Ipswich (Massachusetts) Female Seminary, and the private school of Rev. J. S. C. Abbott in New York city. She was married in Boston, when just twenty-one (October 28, 1852), to Captain (afterwards

Major) Edward B. Hunt, United States Army, whom she had first met at Albany, New York, his brother, the Honorable Washington Hunt, being at that time Governor of the State. Captain and Mrs. Hunt led the usual wandering life of military households, and were quartered at a variety of posts. As an engineer officer he held high army rank, and he was also a man of considerable scientific attainments. Their first child, Murray, a beautiful boy, died of dropsy in the brain, when eleven months old, at Tarrytown, New York, in August, 1854. Major Hunt was killed, October 2, 1863, at Brooklyn, New York, while experimenting with an invention of his own, called a "sea-miner," for firing projectiles under water. Mrs. Hunt still had her second boy, named Warren Horsford, after her friends, General G. K. Warren and Professor Horsford, but commonly called "Rennie." He had, by testimony of all, a rare combination of gifts and qualities, but died suddenly of diphtheria at his aunt's home in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on April 13, 1865. Mrs. Hunt was thus left utterly bereaved, and the blow was crushing. It shows the strong relation between mother and child, and the precocious character of her boy, that he made her promise not to take her own life after he should be gone. She made him promise, in return, that if it were a possible thing he would overcome all obstacles and come back from the other world to speak to her; and the fact that this was never done kept her all her life a disbeliever in Spiritualism: what Rennie could not do, she felt must be impracticable. For months after his death she shut herself up from her nearest friends; and when she appeared among them at last, she was smiling, vivacious, and outwardly unchanged.

Up to this time, although her life had been full of variety and activity, it had been mainly domestic and social, and she had shown no special signs of a literary vocation. She loved society, was personally very attractive, dressed charmingly, and had many friends of both sexes. Through her husband she knew many superior men, but they belonged almost wholly to the military class, or were those men of science whom she was wont to meet at the scientific gatherings to which she accompanied Major Hunt. It was not till she went, at the age of thirty-four, to live in Newport, Rhode Island, that she was brought much in contact with people whose pursuits were literary; and it was partly, no doubt, through their companionship that a fresh interest and a few employment opened most unexpectedly before her. How wholly she regarded her life as prematurely ended at the close of its first phase may be seen by a letter written soon after establishing herself in Newport, when she had gone to West Point to superintend the removal of the remains of her husband and children to that spot. After speaking of the talents and acquirements whose career was finished, she bitterly added: "And I alone am left, who avail nothing." She had yet to learn how much her own life was to avail.