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SAYS

SARAH A. DORSEY.

AYS one who knows her intimately, and "none know her but to love her, none name her save to praise," alluding to the "Recollections of Henry W. Allen:

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"To comprehend the organization that gave being to this book, one must have known the author- a woman highly strung, and yet calm; nervous, and yet courageous; sensitive, and yet not susceptible; and strongly practical and considerate of the common usages of life. For one of such poetic taste, such ardent fancy, and withal devoted in no ordinary degree and with no common fidelity to her duties, her friends, her country, and her God, she possesses in an extraordinary degree the faculty of friendship, so to speakthat pure disinterestedness of soul which enables its possessor to put aside all selfish considerations in behalf of its objects of regard, and to separate from any warmer or more sentimental feeling the affection that may so legitimately exist between the sexes.

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'She had known Governor Allen from her childhood, is twenty years his junior, and was actuated in his service not only by friendship and zeal, but a sort of hero-worship, which our late disastrous struggle was well calculated to arouse in the Southern breast."

Sarah Anne Ellis was born on her father's plantation, just below Natchez. Her parents also had a residence in the suburbs of that city, where she was brought up. Her parents were both young and very wealthy, belonging to the oldest and most influential families in Mississippi and Louisiana. Her mother was Mary Routh; her father, Thomas George Percy Ellis. She was the eldest child, born before her mother was sixteen; therefore, being rather an earnest, grave sort of a child, her mother always declared "Sarah was much older than she was." Her parents were both gay, and much beloved in society. Her mother was a very lovely woman, and her father was very gifted and brilliant. He died very suddenly at an early age. Sarah was his idol, being the only daughter with two sons, until a girl was born three weeks before his death. She adored her father; his death made a deep and ineffaceable impression on her, even at the early age of nine years.

The dim outlines of the groundwork of "Agnes Graham's "* family story were Mrs. Dorsey's own. Her great-grandfather, grandmother, and aunts suffered in that terribly mysterious dispensation of God. The earliest recollection of Mrs. Dorsey recalls her grandmother, a beautiful, stately woman, with exquisite hands and moulded form, an inmate of her father's house, hopelessly melancholy, possessing everything that the prestige of birth, and rank, and wealth could give; but the "skeleton in the closet was always there, and for years this dreadful thought pursued her, even from childhood, as it had all of her family (her gifted aunts as well), making their inner lives deeper and more thoughtful than the life of most people.

Her mother married Gen. Charles G. Dahlgren, afterward of the C. S. A., brother to the now Federal Admiral. Sarah was passionately fond of books, and was most carefully educated by her mother and stepfather. She had every advantage that money could procure. Her youth was very gay at Natchez, noted as the "society town" of the South. We are told that Mrs. Dahlgren entertained charmingly, in true, open-hearted Southern manner. She died of disease of the heart,

in 1858.

In 1853, Miss Sarah Ellis was married to Samuel W. Dorsey, of Tensas Parish, La.

From earliest youth, in common with most thinking Southerners, she has been deeply interested in the laboring class, and can say honestly, in the face of Heaven, she has devoted every faculty she possesses to their improvement, so far as she could, while she owned them. This she did as a matter of duty. She now does what she can for them as a matter of humanity. Every Sunday, in her plantation-home in Tensas Parish, she has a class of from fifty to sixty scholars of negroes. She teaches them to read and write, and religion. She is an Episcopalian, and believes a full ritual the only way to interest or reach these masses. Her husband lost nearly a quarter of a million of dollars by the war. They took their negroes to Texas during the "struggle for Confederate independence." They are devoted to them, and are still with them. Some of the experiences of Louise Peyrault (in "Lucia Dare") were real. Indeed, most of the Southern incidents in this book are true, most of the characters from life. The scenes in Natchez are merely idealized; any old resident can locate them.

* Published serially in the "Southern Literary Messenger," 1864, and a revised edition in book-form is at this time (March, 1869) in press.

Mrs. Dorsey began to write for the press by accident,—a lucky one was it for the public. Writing on business to the New York Churchman, she ventured to answer a question propounded in that paper concerning the use of the choral service and full ritualism for negroes. She had adopted the full ritual, and had herself adapted the American liturgy to some of the cathedral services and music of the Anglican Church, and wrote her experience of five years' use of this musical science to the Churchman. The editor published her letter, and, in a subsequent number, another, signing the articles "Filia Ecclesiæ," daughter of the church. She liked the name and has ever since retained it.

Mrs. Dorsey has lived almost equally at Natchez and on Lake St. Joseph, where her family have had their plantations since the first settlement of the State.

All of Mrs. Dorsey's writings are Southern in tone and character, and have nationality, and are valuable, inasmuch as they are true pictures of that phase of Southern existence which is over and will soon be forgotten in the misery into which our unhappy country is plunged.

Mrs. Dorsey is passionately fond of study, but has necessarily been a woman of society and of the world, all her life. The friend, once before quoted, speaking of her memory of what she read, as illustrated in her "Recollections of Governor Allen," remarks:

"The writer of this book has so 'encyclopedic a mind,' so to speak, that her daily conversation is quite as much strewn with the result of her reading as are the pages here recorded. I have sometimes, when in her society, been reminded of Sidney Smith's remark about memory when he termed it a wondrous engine of social oppression. Yet is she frank, eager, and artless as a child."

Her married life has been smooth and unruffled. She recognizes all of God's goodness to her, having had more than "the fourteen happy days of the Moorish monarch."

During the war, Mrs. Dorsey spent two years in Texas. While there, she aided in nursing in a Confederate hospital, and did such work for the church as she could. She travelled twice from Texas to the Mississippi River by land, once with her husband, two overseers, and several hundred negroes. The measles broke out among them; they had a very distressing time, and buried the poor creatures all along the road. They were frequently compelled to encamp for days and weeks at a time. She had a tent made of a piece of carpet, but

it did not always protect them, as it was not water-tight. Mr. Dorsey had to leave her to go after some negroes in the northern part of the State, and she was alone with the overseers and negroes for ten days in the immense pine forests of Winn Parish.

In 1860, Mrs. Dorsey sent to New York, to be published for gratuitous distribution, the choral services she had arranged and used so successfully among her negroes for years. The now Bishop of Florida had charge of this for her, but the intended publisher failed, and the war came, and the service remained unpublished. She is an enthusiastic Episcopalian, and was a dear friend of the lamented BishopGeneral Leonidas Polk. She is very much interested in the establishment of an order of deaconesses, connected with the church in New Orleans, which was her reason for making Agnes Graham (in the novel heretofore alluded to) end as one. This effort she desires to make in obedience to a promise exacted from her by Bishop Polk, on his last visit to her, in 1860, "that she should do everything in her power, as long as she lived, toward the establishment of a Sisterhood of Mercy in New Orleans." The bishop considered this a matter of primary importance to the Church and Protestantism.

During the war, Mrs. Dorsey's house was burned in a skirmish, and several men killed in her flower-gardens.

She is a highly accomplished lady, reading six languages, though by no means a pedant-a musician, performing on the harp with the same exquisite taste as "Agnes Graham" is described as doing. We quote the passage:

...

"The young lady, after passing her fingers lightly over the strings of the harp, took her seat and played a brilliant, merry polka. . . . Striking a few modulations upon the strings, the music changed from the gay polka movement to a slow, plaintive measure. The red lips parted, and breathed most touchingly the exquisite melancholy strain of Schubert's 'Wanderer.' The song ended, the chords swelled on the air. She sang the scena and aria from Der Freischütz, Wie nahte mir der Schlummer bevor ich ihn gesehn.' It is a gem of music, and it was sung to perfection. The joyous allegro movement at the close, 'All meine Pulse schlagen,' was admirably rendered.”

She uses her pencil like a born artist!* And yet Mrs. Dorsey is by no means a "literary lady," as that term is often used, priding herself much upon her domestic qualities, being a capital nurse for the

*The vignette title-page of this volume was drawn and painted by Mrs. Dorsey.

sick, a good teacher, an excellent housekeeper, and, when it is necessary, a superb cook.

In 1866, Mrs. Dorsey published, through M. Doolady, New York, "Recollections of Henry Watkins Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana," of which volume the private secretary and friend of Governor Allen thus speaks:

"It is the most faithful and thorough portrait of him that could be drawn, the best word-likeness that has been produced this century. It is accurate in point of fact; it is full in materials; it is tasteful in arrangement. The coldest critic cannot deny it the merit of sincerity and strict adherence to truth. The most exacting literary critic would stultify himself if he were to say that he found no beauties in the style, no pathos."

Reading a copy of this volume after a friend of the author has read and wept over it, we find many passages "pencilled," with remarks made on the same. Speaking of the burial of a brother of Henry Allen on the prairie of Texas, the author says (pp. 26 & 27):

"It is a pleasant resting-place,- one of those Texan prairies, - they are so thick with bloom and verdure. In that dry atmosphere the wild flowers seem peculiarly fragrant. Bulbs abound-hibiscus, glowing crimson; narcissi, a sort of blue narcissus with a golden centre; ornithigalliums of finerayed corollas double as daisies, white, with chalices of tender lilac bordered with green, so delicate they droop in the plucking; crimson poppy mallows, hanging their heads heavily, as Clyte did hers in the Greek sculptor's thought, on their long, slender, hairy footstalks; purple iris, small, Tyriandyed, flecked with white and gold dots; larkspurs, pink, and white, and blue; pale, flesh-colored prairie-pinks; long, full racemes of straw-colored cassias; great bunches of light papilionaceous blossoms, set in ovate leaves of light olive-green; starry heleniums; coreopsis too, yellow, eight-cleft, darkening into brown-red disk florets; foxgloves, white and violet-spotted; pink and purple campanaulas, cymes of golden bloom, like English wallflowers; paniales of downy, azure, four-petalled blossoms, like Swiss forgetme-nots; bull-nettles, with prickly runcinate leaf, guarding a tender, snowwhite, soft bloom, which rivals the Indian jasmine in its exquisite fragrance and graceful beauty. All sorts of salvias, verbenas, mints, and wild balms grow profusely on those prairies, mingled with the delicate, fine-leaved, closecreeping vines of the lemon-colored and pink-blossomed, vanilla-scented sensitive plants (mimosas), and the rich green of the musquite and gamma grasses, making a lovely covering even over graves. And above all this blossoming earth stretches out a vast dome of clear blue sky, vast as the horizon on the 'wide, open sea.'"

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