untrue: her poems were not confined to the sea, as will be remembered with the story of "A Faded Glove," "Remonstrance," "Piccola," and scores of other verses giving land pictures; not to mention her musical sonnets on Beethoven and other great masters of composition. Thaxter was happy to have attracted, very early in her literary career, the sympathy and admiration of some of the best writers and critics of the day: among the most enthusiastic of her admirers, was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a scholar, who was also a lover of the sea, and one of the most competent judges of ocean nature painting of literati from that time. He failed to discover any lack of versatility in her work, and those who study her works as a whole, will note that there is hardly a moral idea, a practical point in ethics, or an emotion of the human heart, which has not been the subject of her pen, touched upon at least, with more or less freedom. Style In her prose writing, the picturesque prevails, though with some marked exceptions; in all is a moral undercurrent which crops out more or less prominently in all of her productions—prose or poetry. She wrote some charming poems for children, with such an exquisite blending of the didactic with the scenic and emotional, that the intended lesson was conveyed without exciting the natural repulsion of children to "morals," too obviously conveyed. Selected works The lost bell. A legend of the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. Good bye, sweet day. (music, with Kate Vannah & Elsie Baker) The sandpiper Land-locked, 1861 A poppy seed, 187? A memorable murder, 1875 Among the Isles of Shoals, 1878 The Nursery for youngest readers, 1878 Idyls and pastorals, a home gallery of poetry and art., 1886 The cruise of the Mystery and other poems, 1886 My lighthouse, and other poems, 1890 An island garden, 1894 Stories and Poems for Children Woman's heartlessness, 1900 References Attribution Bibliography External links A Memorable Murder Childe Hassam: American Impressionist, a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on Celia Thaxter 1835 births 1894 deaths 19th-century American women writers 19th-century American short story writers 19th-century American poets American women short story writers American women poets People from Kittery, Maine Poets from Maine Poets from New Hampshire Writers from Maine Writers from Portsmouth, New Hampshire Wikipedia