Besides these well-known contributors, she also applied to other literary friends, whose response apparently never came. Among them was her old friend at Providence, Albert G. Greene, then the recognized head of the literary society of that city. To him she writes, October 2, 1840: “Where are the poems and essays, ‘Pumpkin Monodies,’ and ‘Militia Musters,’ we were promised? Send them, I pray, forthwith.” These were humorous poems, in which Mr. Greene was prolific, though only one of this class of his productions, “Old Grimes,” has survived to posterity. They would have been oddly out of place in the “Dial,” had they arrived.
In her first two years of editorship she brought into prominence a series of writers each of whom had his one statement to make, and, having made it, discreetly retired. Such were the Rev. W. D. Wilson, who wrote The Unitarian movement in New England; the Rev. Thomas T. Stone, who wrote “Man in the ages;” Mrs. Ripley, the gifted wife of the Rev. George Ripley, who wrote on “( Woman;” Professor John M. Mackie, now of Providence, R. I., who wrote of “Shelley ;” Dr. Francis Tuckerman, who wrote “Music of the winter;” John A. Saxton, father of the well-known military governor of South Carolina, who wrote “Prophecy — Transcendentalism — progress;” the Rev. W. B. Greene, a West Point graduate, and afterwards colonel of the Fourteenth Massachusetts Volunteers, who wrote “First principles.”
