CHAPTER II.

BEGINS TEACHING IN BOSTON.

FOR several years after the experiment with the child-school in Worcester, in 1816-17, Miss Dix appears to have lived with her grandmother in Boston, her leisure devoted to carrying on her own studies in preparation for opening a school for older pupils. Though then but a town of forty thousand inhabitants, Boston was already giving signs of an intellectual ferment in theology, philanthropy, philosophy, and literature, which was to inaugurate a new epoch in the spiritual history of New England. The day of provincialism was passing away. Higher ideals of God and of human destiny were breaking in, and young and ardent minds, emancipating themselves from the cramping traditions of the past, already felt that the long, weary sojourn in the wilderness was over, and that, standing at last on Pisgah, they could overlook a veritable Land of Promise. None entered more earnestly into certain phases of this spiritual rebirth, or hailed more rapturously its prophets of the type of Channing, than did Miss Dix.

Not, probably, before the year 1821 did she resume the actual work of teaching, beginning with classes of day-pupils, in a little house of her grandmother's in Orange Court, and only by degrees, raising the standard, till the modest beginning finally developed into a combined boarding and day school in the Dix Man

sion itself, to which children were sent from the most prominent families in Boston, as well as from towns as far away as then was Portsmouth, N. H. Later on she was to have her younger brothers with her under the same roof, and was to become practical mistress of the Dix Mansion. The increasing infirmities of the grandmother now kept her largely confined to her own room, an added care of no slight nature. Thus by degrees were devolved upon the never strong young woman the duties of housekeeper, teacher, motherly elder sister, and matron of the boarding-pupils, together with the necessity of carrying on her own as yet imperfect intellectual training, -duties which she assumed with unflinching spirit. Fond of responsibility, ambitious of success, and on fire with an ideal of what a teacher might prove, for time and for eternity, to the children committed to her care, she took no thought of flesh and blood.

Seemingly, responsibilities so arduous as these would have been enough to satisfy the most exacting conscience. In Miss Dix's case, however, there was one imperious element of her nature which they altogether failed to content. More and more evident will it grow, as this narrative proceeds, that the sense of pitiful compassion for the ignorant, degraded, and suffering was the strongest element in her being. She would work for herself now, for work she must; she would work for her younger brothers till they were ready to go forth and do for themselves; but the moment she should stand free, then beyond all things the nearest and dearest of God's privileges to her would be the championship of the outcast and ready to perish. Soon, therefore, besides the school already taxing to exhaustion her strength, she establishes

another in a room over the stable of the Dix Mansion, for poor and neglected children. How pitifully she had to plead for permission to do this comes out touchingly in the following letter, so full of the spirit of merciful humanity then first beginning its struggle with that older inflexible temper of Puritanism, which had submissively waited on adult conversion to repair in an hour the results of years of indifference and neglect. The letter is without date, but belongs early in the school-keeping days.

66

"MY DEAR GRANDMOTHER,

Had I the saint-like elo

quence of our minister, I would employ it in explaining all the motives, and dwelling on all the good, good to the poor, the miserable, the idle, and the ignorant, which would follow your giving me permission to use the barn chamber for a school-room for charitable and religious purposes. You have read Hannah More's life, you approve of her labors for the most degraded of England's paupers; why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt? . . . Do, my dear grandmother, yield to my request, and witness next summer the reward of your benevolent and Christian compliance.

"Your affectionate Granddaughter,

D. L. DIX."

cham

Like the feeble beginnings in another "upper ber in Judæa, this early attempt at stretching out a helping hand to outcast children, was to lead on to far-reaching results. The little barn-school proved the nucleus out of which, years later, was developed the beneficent work of the Warren Street Chapel, from which, as a centre, spread far and wide a new ideal of dealing with childhood. There first was interest. excited in the mind of Rev. Charles Barnard, a man of positive spiritual genius in charming and uplifting

the children of the poor and debased. With all the love of St. Vincent de Paul in his heart, and a fund of originality in devising happy ways and means, the words of Jesus, "Suffer the little children to come unto me," were the very breath of his life. And when the children gladly responded, it was not to find themselves tormented with rigid catechising and a cast-iron drill, but to be taken into open arms of love, and to be ushered into a new world of beauty and freedom.

In the year 1823, Miss Dix began a correspondence, to be continued at intervals for fifty years, with a dear friend, Miss Anne Heath, of Brookline, Mass., but for the preservation of which no adequate picture could be drawn of the early womanhood of the young teacher. It is to an endeared few alone that personalities of the inborn reticence of Miss Dix are ever able to reveal their inner life. And yet so very great is oftentimes the contrast between the maturer bearing of characters marked by commanding practical ability, and the life of the same persons in the romantic period of youth, that but for some such revelation the hidingplace of their power would go unsurmised. Indeed, the standing marvel of psychological history lies in the imperceptible steps by which so often the sighs and tears of sentimental feeling lead on to the masterly self-control and disciplined strength of advancing years. These letters furnish, then, but one more illustration of the fact that a certain even perilous excess of sensibility will be found at the root of all natures that ever achieve anything high and heroic in life.

Emphatically did all this hold true of the youth of the subject of this biography. Self-repressed and self

mastered as later on she outwardly fronted the world, inwardly her soul was in those days full to the brim of passion and heart-break, of poetic enthusiasm and religious exaltation. In truth, for some years to come, the chief faults of her character are directly traceable to this. Her demands on herself, her demands on her friends, her demands on her pupils, were out of all bounds. She herself must be pure spirit, taking no counsel of flesh and blood; her friends must be incarnations of every attribute of intellect and every grace of soul; in her pupils she must detect, in embryo at least, the prophecy of the coming ideal mothers and saintly helpers of the world. And so the inevitable reaction from such overwrought expectations was subjection to hours of bitter disillusion and even of passionate, unjust censure of average, commonplace mortality.

As tending to foster excess of sentimental feeling, it is here of importance to note the habit, in those days indulged in by young women, of voluminous, effusive correspondence with one another. Their letters, without date and without distinct reference to anything in time or space that would enable a future bewildered biographer to affix to them "a local habitation and a name," wandered off into realms of purely subjective poetry, philanthropy, philosophy, and religion. And yet what intensity of inward life these letters reveal! Anything was enough to start one of them. — the death of an infant, a peculiarly beautiful sunset, a new volume of poetry, an inspiring or heart-searching passage in the sermon of the previous Sunday; and then would they roll on through literally continental sheets of paper, to all the length and with all the vol ume of the Mississippi.