She was one of those children who take naturally to all kinds of culture.  Without ever having had a child’s book, she sought out, in the old-fashioned library of the house, everything which a child could understand.  Chance threw a novel in her way ("Mysteries of Udolpho"), which she devoured with rapture, and soon after, when she was but eight years of age, she began to write a novel.  Poetry, too, she read with singular pleasure, never weary of repeating her favorite pieces.  But the passion of her childhood was painting pictures.  Almost in her infancy she began to draw with a pin and lilac-leaf, and advanced from that to slate and pencil, and, by and by, to a lead-pencil and backs of letters.  When she had learned to draw pretty well, she was on fire to paint her pictures, but was long puzzled to procure the colors.  Having obtained in some way a cake of gamboge, she begged of a washerwoman a piece of indigo, and by combining these two ingredients she could make different shades of yellow, blue, and green.  The trunks of her trees she painted with coffee-grounds, and a mixture of India ink and indigo answered tolerably well for sky and water.  She afterwards discovered that the pink juice of chokeberry did very well for lips, cheeks, and gay dresses.  Mixed with a little indigo it made a very bad purple, which the young artist, for the want of a better, was obliged to use for her royal robes.  In sore distress for a better purple she squeezed the purple flowers of the garden and the field for the desired tint, but nothing answered the purpose, until, at dinner, one day, she found the very hue for which she longed in the juice of a currant and whortleberry tart.  She hastened to try it, and it made a truly gorgeous purple, but the sugar in it caused it to come off in flakes from her kings and emperors, leaving them in a sorry plight.  At length, to her boundless, inexpressible, and lasting joy, all her difficulties were removed by her father giving her a complete box of colors.

At school she was fortunate in her teachers.  One of them was the late Pelatiah Perit, who afterward won high distinction as a New York merchant and universal philanthropist.  Her first serious attempts at practical composition were translations from Virgil, when she was fourteen years of age.  After leaving school she studied Latin with much zeal under an aged tutor, and, later in life, she advanced far enough in Hebrew to read the Old Testament, with the aid of grammar and dictionary.  To these grave studies her parents added a thorough drill in dancing.  Often, when her excellent mother observed that she had sat too long over her books, she would get her out upon the floor of their large kitchen, and then, striking up a lively song, set her dancing until her cheeks were all aglow.