Louisa Alcott’s life, like that of so many famous women, has been full of obstacles.  She was born in Germantown, Pa., Nov. 29, 1832, in the home of an extremely lovely mother and cultivated father, Amos Bronson Alcott.  Beginning life poor, his desire for knowledge led him to obtain an education and become a teacher.  In 1830 he married Miss May, a descendant of the well-known Sewells and Quincys, of Boston.  Louise Chandler Moulton says, in her excellent sketch of Miss Alcott, “I have heard that the May family were strongly opposed to the union of their beautiful daughter with the penniless teacher and philosopher;” but he made a devoted husband, though poverty was long their guest.

For eleven years, mostly in Boston, he was the earnest and successful teacher.  Margaret Fuller was one of his assistants.  Everybody respected his purity of life and his scholarship.  His kindness of heart made him opposed to corporal punishment, and in favor of self-government.  The world had not come then to his high ideal, but has been creeping toward it ever since, until whipping, both in schools and homes, is fortunately becoming one of the lost arts.

He believed in making studies interesting to pupils; not the dull, old-fashioned method of learning by rote, whereby, when a hymn was taught, such as, “A Charge to keep I have,” the children went home to repeat to their astonished mothers, “Eight yards to keep I have,” having learned by ear, with no knowledge of the meaning of the words.  He had friendly talks with his pupils on all great subjects; and some of these Miss Elizabeth Peabody, the sister of Mrs. Hawthorne, so greatly enjoyed, that she took notes, and compiled them in a book.

New England, always alive to any theological discussion, at once pronounced the book unorthodox.  Emerson had been through the same kind of a storm, and bravely came to the defence of his friend.  Another charge was laid at Mr. Alcott’s door:  he was willing to admit colored children to his school, and such a thing was not countenanced, except by a few fanatics(?) like Whittier, and Phillips, and Garrison.  The heated newspaper discussion lessened the attendance at the school; and finally, in 1839, it was discontinued, and the Alcott family moved to Concord.

Here were gifted men and women with whom the philosopher could feel at home, and rest.  Here lived Emerson, in the two-story drab house, with horsechestnut-trees in front of it.  Here lived Thoreau, near his beautiful Walden Lake, a restful place, with no sound save, perchance, the dipping of an oar or the note of a bird, which the lonely man loved so well.  Here he built his house, twelve feet square, and lived for two years and a half, giving to the world what he desired others to give,—­his inner self.  Here was his bean-field, where he “used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon,” and made, as he said, an intimate acquaintance with weeds, and a pecuniary profit of eight dollars seventy-one and one-half cents!  Here, too, was Hawthorne, “who,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, “brooded himself into a dream-peopled solitude.”