Author, poet and philanthropist, born in Amherst, Mass., 18th October, 1831, and died in San Francisco, Cal., 12th August, 1885. She was the daughter of Professor Nathan W. Fiske, of Amherst College. She was educated in the female seminary in Ipswich, Mass. In 1852 she became the wife of Captain Edward B. Hunt, of the United States Navy. She lived with him in various military posts until his death, in October, 1863. In 1866 she removed to Newport, R. I., where she lived until 1872. Her children died, and she was left desolate. Alone in the world, she turned to literature. In early life she had published some verses in a Boston newspaper, and aside from that she had shown no signs of literary development up to 1865. In that year she began to contribute poems to the New York “Nation.” Then she sent poems and prose articles to the New York “Independent” and the “Hearth and Home.” She signed the initials “H. H.” to her work, and its quality attracted wide and critical attention. In 1873 and 1874 she lived in Colorado for her health. In 1875 she became the wife of William S. Jackson, a merchant of Colorado Springs. In that town she made her home until her death. She traveled in New Mexico and California, and spent one winter in New York City, gathering facts for her book in behalf of the Indians, “A Century of Dishonor,” which was published in 1881. Her Indian novel, “Ramona,” was published in 1884. That is her most powerful work, written virtually under inspiration. Her interest in the Indians was profound, and she instituted important reforms in the treatment of the Red Men by the Government. Her other published works are: “Verses by H. H.” (1870, enlarged in 1874), “Bits of Travel” (1873), “Bits of Talk About Home Matters” (1873), “Sonnets and Lyrics” (1876), several juvenile books and two novels in the “No Name” series, “Mercy Philbrick’s Choice” (1876), and “Hetty’s Strange History” (1877).

Personal

  Five hundred feet above the level of the top of Mt. Washington is Mrs. Jackson’s home. Its driveway is a steep but excellent carriage road, several miles in length, at whose entrance you will pay toll of admiration and wonder to a little brook that deliberately runs up hill before you…. On Cheyenne, high as you are, you still seem on level ground, beautiful with green grass and trees and brooks and flowers; while mountains on which, perhaps, the snow is lying in August, range around you, and you gaze down, not on lower mountains, but down, down to the very plains, stretching miles upon miles, level as a parlor floor, away to an almost limitless horizon. It is no wonder that we linger. But an hour before sunset our host re-harnesses the horses; for Mrs. Jackson, though most “at home” on Cheyenne Mt., where she has been known to picnic thirteen Sundays in succession, has a House Beautiful in the little town of Colorado Springs which contains her kitchen, dining-room and sleeping apartments. And it is a house well worth description as the home of a poet; not because it is one of the æsthetic palaces such as have recently been described as the homes of London poets and artists, in whose majestic halls and apartments we are told that “the silence is like a throne;” but because it is a wonderful illustration of what the poetic and artistic instinct can make of the average American house.

  Whoever knew her beautiful personality, whoever saw her fair and still youthful face—a face that would never have grown old,—heard her winning voice, or felt the warm charm of her cordial, sincere, unaffected manner, has something to be glad of, and to remember always. The writer of this met her but once, but that once can never be forgotten. To the great multitude who knew her as “H. H.” only, whatever relates to her is interesting. Few women of this generation, or any other, have gone down to the grave followed by truer or more grateful love from countless hearts that their written words have inspired or comforted.

  If it be the supreme achievement of a life to grow into larger and larger mastery of itself and of the materials with which it works, to match increasing and widening opportunities with true vision and more adequate performance, Helen Jackson was surely near the goal when she vanished from the race. The eager intentness of eye and ear, the wide and ever widening applause, sweet with that recognition of what is best in one which all earnest workers crave, were hers, also, the consciousness of having wrought with no uncertain hand for those whose hands are bound, and spoken with no uncertain voice for those who are dumb…. Of her generous friendship, her noble faculty of recognizing and admiring purpose and gifts in others, her deep, full sympathy with men and women in all their trials and aspirations, her apt and often glowing speech, the charm and quality of her striking personality, one has no heart to speak while the sense of loss is so deep and immediate. Among the letters which came from the deathbed there were several, sent in the writer’s care, to women who are striving with high purpose in the field which she has left. In every instance these brief and painfully written notes were words of generous praise, of unstinted admiration, of stimulus and hope for the future.

  She was the author to the many—a woman to only a few, and this few of mixed constituency. For conventional people, people of the polite world who become rigid by conformity, she cared very little; they bored her, though her sense of courtesy probably checked any expression of it. On the other hand, with people in humble life, with eccentric personages or strong individualities, with artists, with earnest workers in any department, she was always in a pleased and eager sympathy…. Her demeanor towards strangers was that of an amiable woman of the world, fenced with a certain reserve, which thawed in an instant under the assurance of sympathy, and became something finer than cordiality. No one could have had a greater dislike of being remarked or lionized, and perhaps the apprehension of such a result had made her more than commonly shy and guarded; but her surrender to a favorable impression was immediate and complete.

Ramona, 1884

  The story of two decaying civilizations seen in the light of a fresher and stronger social, political, and religious development which tramples them ruthlessly, because unconsciously, into the dust of a new but half-appreciated realm. Hitherto fiction had treated California only as the seat of a new civilization. It had been delineated as the gold-digger’s paradise, the adventurer’s Eden, the speculator’s El Dorado. “Ramona” pictures it as the Indian’s lost inheritance and the Spaniard’s desolated home.

  I have often thought that no one enjoyed the sensation of living more than Mrs. Jackson, or was more alive to all the influences of nature and the contact of mind with mind, more responsive to all that was exquisite and subtle either in nature or in society, or more sensitive to the disagreeable. This is merely saying that she was a poet; but when she became interested in the Indians and especially in the hard fate of the Mission Indians in California, all her nature was fused for the time in a lofty enthusiasm of pity and indignation, and all her powers seemed to her consecrated to one purpose. Enthusiasm and sympathy will not make a novel, but all the same they are necessary to the production of a work that has in it real vital quality; and in this case all previous experience and artistic training became the unconscious servants of Mrs. Jackson’s heart. I know she had very little conceit about her performance; but she had a simple consciousness that she was doing her best work, and that if the world should care much for anything she had done, after she was gone, it would be for “Ramona.” She had put herself into it. And yet I am certain that she could have had no idea what the novel would be to the people of Southern California, or how it would identify her name with all that region and make so many scenes in it places of pilgrimage and romantic interest for her sake.

  A book instinct with passionate purpose, intensely alive and involving the reader in its movement, it yet contains an idyl of singular loveliness, the perfection of which lends the force of contrast to the pathetic close. A novel of reform, into which a great and generous soul poured its gathered strength, it none the less possesses artistic distinction. Something is, of course, due to the charm of atmosphere, the beauty of the background against which the plot naturally placed itself; more, to the trained hand, the pen pliant with long and free exercise; most, to the poet-heart. “Ramona” stands as the most finished, though not the most striking, example that what American women have done notably in literature they have done nobly.

  This was the expiring effort of her genius, and is by far its most powerful and memorable illustration. The story is deeply interesting, the literary skill is adequate, and the burning purpose of the book does not lead the writer to forget the obligations of art. It marks the worthy close of a noble career, and insures Mrs. Jackson a place in the literature of our country which few of her sex can be held to have attained.

  The name of Helen Hunt Jackson deservedly stands first in the literary world as connected with modern effort by women for the deliverance of our native American Indians from oppression and injustice, as shameful as have been endured in any civilized land or by any race under the guardianship or power of any civilized government…. To this resolve her facile pen, her poetic fire, and her genius for graphic delineation and clear, strong statement were given, and the story of “Ramona,” the data of which were procured among the Indians of California while she was a government inspector among them, was given to idyllic, classic romance, to the American conscience, and to the humane of all civilized society. She poured her heart into the story and her heart’s blood out through its pages. She put the labor of the working years of an average life-time into that half-decade of toil for a hunted race, and so it was again, as not infrequently in this world’s story, that the righteous zeal and the intense compassion of a quick spirit “ate up” the life, and another consecrated genius fell, another great heart broke.

  Pathetic romance is best typified by the “Ramona” of Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson—a tale full of poetic insight as well as of poetic beauty, in behalf of the Indian. Its author is the greatest representative of a large school of modern writers, characterized by extreme sensitiveness, artistic perception, poetic aspirations, and a somewhat sentimental but a very genuine love for the suffering and the oppressed. Their chief fault is, that while they soften the heart they never invigorate the will.

  The most original and picturesque novel of American life with the exception of Hawthorne’s two greatest romances…. She was too true an artist to intrude herself into her picture.

  There was no need to employ “artistic license” in working up the sketches for publication, fact, in this particular instance, being so much richer than fiction; and in this shaping and assorting of material gathered so long ago, I have merely tried to follow the path laid out by the author herself; which was to handle all detail in such manner as would best conduce to the artistic unison of the whole. As for the characters themselves, I have now in my possession sketches and studies made from life at the time of my meeting the originals,—a meeting that was often as much fraught with meaning for me as it was for Mrs. Jackson. All the dramatic incidents of the story were familiar to me long before I saw the book, as they are either literal descriptions of events which took place in the course of our travels, or they are recollections of anecdotes told when I, as well as Mrs. Jackson, was among the group of listeners.

Poems

  The selections from American writers are necessarily confined to the present century; but some of them have secured a wide fame. Some of them are recent, and have yet to earn their laurels…. The poems of a lady who contents herself with the initials H. H. in her book published in Boston (1874) have rare merit of thought and expression, and will reward the reader for the careful attention which they require.

  Mrs. Hunt’s poems are stronger than any written by women since Mrs. Browning, with the exception of Mrs. Lewes’s.

  Perhaps the finest recent examples of exquisitely subtile imagination working under the impulse of profound sentiment are to be found in the little volume entitled “Poems by H. H.”

  The woman who has come nearest in our day and tongue to the genius of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and who has made Christina Rossetti and Jean Ingelow appear but second-rate celebrities. When some one asked Emerson a few years since whether he did not think “H. H.” the best woman-poet on this continent, he answered in his meditative way, “Perhaps we might as well omit the woman;” thus placing her, at least in that moment’s impulse, at the head of all…. As the most artistic among her verses I should class the “Gondoliers,” in which all Venice seems reflected in the movement and cadence, while the thought is fresh and new and strong. Then there are poems which seem to hold all secrets of passion trembling on the lips, yet forbear to tell them; and others, on a larger scale, which have a grander rhythmical movement than most of our poets have dared even to attempt. Of these the finest, to my ear, is “Resurgam;” but I remember that Charlotte Cushman preferred the “Funeral March,” and loved to read it in public…. “H. H.” reaches the popular heart best in a class of poems easy to comprehend, thoroughly human in sympathy; poems of love, of motherhood, of bereavement; poems such as are repeated and preserved in many a Western cabin, cheering and strengthening many a heart.

  The verse of the brilliant and devoted “H. H.” (the sense of whose loss is fresh upon us) is more carefully finished, though perhaps it sings the less for its union of intellectuality with a subtile feeling whose intenseness is realized only by degrees. Her pieces, mostly in a single key, and that grave and earnest, have won the just encomiums of select critics, but certainly lack the variety of mood which betokens an inborn and always dominant poetic faculty.

  Mrs. Jackson had the characteristics of the “Dial” group at its best; deep and sincere thought, uttered for its own sake in verse not untinged by the poetic inspiration and touch. In her poems the influence of the mind is felt before that of the heart; they are reflective and suggestive, sometimes concisely argumentative. Certain phases and senses of spirit, brain, and nature lay long in the poet’s thought, and at length found deliberate and apt expression in word and metre. The character of H. H.’s product is explained by the frequency with which she chose single words—often abstract nouns—as titles. It is meditative not lyrical; it lacks spontaneity and outbursts; the utter joyance of the poetry of nature and humanity, that will sing itself, is seldom present, even when nature and man are the themes. Large creative impulse is also absent. It is therefore poetry that never rises above the second class, but its place in that class is high.

  “H. H.” were long while familiar and welcome initials with the Transatlantic reading public, and both as a woman and a writer Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson exercised a widespread and beneficent influence. Her “Freedom” is an especially noble sonnet, though its rhythmic strength unfortunately flags somewhat in the last line. The greatest charm of her work, both in prose and verse, is her keen sense of colour. For flowers she had what could not be called other than a passion, and her friends have delighted in recalling her eagerness and joy over every bloom and blossom in the neighbourhood of her home, near Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado. In personality she was the most poetic of poets, and in her love of physical beauty more “Greek than the Greeks.” It is probable that no woman of her time exercised such a sway over the admiration and sympathies of the younger American writers. Her “Ramona” is a prose idyl which deserves a place among the memorable works of imaginative fiction. Much of Mrs. Jackson’s poetry, however, is void of its subtlest charm to those who never met her; it has the common fault of Transatlantic verse, a too nervous facility, a diffuseness which palls rather than attracts. When, a few years hence, some sympathetic but sternly critical hand shall give us a selection of all that is best in the writings of “H. H.,” her name will rest on a surer basis.

  Nature was bountiful to her. She was what is called a natural poet, human in sympathies, and with a fine lyric touch…. The broad human heart shows itself from one end of her writing to the other. She is essentially human, and she has eminently the faculty of creating an interest for she chooses bright, picturesque metres, and uses picturesque expressions. It was said of Longfellow that no one will deny that the world is better for his having been born. This is true also of “H. H.” She was a sort of feminine Longfellow, inferior to him, as one would expect a woman to be, in scholarship and learning,—like him in striking the keynote of home.

  As a poet Mrs. Jackson’s range was not a wide one, but within her limits she sang surpassingly well. She was not a creator; she simply read her own heart. The awfulness of her affliction cut her off for a time from the world, and like a great storm it cleared the atmosphere about her so that she looked far into the mysteries that encompass mortal life. It was her raptness, her mysticism, that appealed so strongly to Emerson. An intensity of feeling and expression characterizes all of her lyrics. Some of her conceits are almost startling in their vividness and originality…. Mrs Jackson ranks with the four or five Americans who have succeeded with the sonnet. Nearly half of her poems are written in this difficult measure.

General

  Mrs. Jackson soars to your estimate lawfully as a bird.

  Up to the time when she espoused the cause of the Indians all her productions sprang from a purely artistic impulse, independent of any extrinsic force; afterwards, the plastic sense was subordinated to the larger interest she had come to find in humanity. Thenceforward her simple delight in form and color and cadence are regulated by her moral convictions. It is all the difference there is between her volume of poems and “Ramona.” Upon the latter, her maturest production, in spite of the spontaneity of its birth, there seems to me the seal of deliberation and effort. Yet even here I hesitate for fear of overstating; for it was when examining the proof-sheets of that charming Indian pastoral, I remember, the present writer ventured to praise the purity of its literary workmanship, to the author’s evident distress. With a writer who was already a veteran, she said, that was a matter of course, and she proceeded to rebuke him gently for his insensibility to the sad reality which the picture nearly reflected. It was impossible to reply at that moment that the whole tragedy was made what it was only by her exquisitely simple and lucid art of narration, which she had come to count second to her ultimate purpose. No doubt if she had lived her art and her philanthropy would have come more into equilibrium, and mingled to produce a more perfect work than “Ramona” even.

  The winning and humorous side of her character appeared in her prose descriptions of travel and phases of existence, collected under the title of “Bits of Travel.” It would be difficult to speak too highly of the style and spirit of these narrations. The humor is all-pervading, and carries pathos with it: a lovely, human light irradiates the pages, and makes the foibles of the characters as charming as their virtues. A broad, charitable, human mind is at work, with the delicate insight of a woman, and a steady healthfulness of mood that we are more accustomed to expect from the masculine genius.

  Essential charm of womanhood, frank, generous, passionate, clings to the poems of Helen Hunt Jackson. The daughter of an Amherst professor, she poured forth in song the heart-break and the healing of her widowed youth. The new interests of the new life that came to her beneath the majestic beauty of the Rockies are largely expressed in prose,—in her burning pleas for the Indian, “A Century of Dishonor” and “Ramona.”