Many of her school compositions were written in verse, "Farewell Sixteen," "The Island of Dreams," and "My Mother," being of special mention.

The next year, she wrote the prize story "Mignonette," competing with such writers as Caroline Mehitable Fisher Sawyer and Jane Lippitt Patterson.

She was marked for succession with Sawyer, Julia Kinney Scott, Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo, Eliza Ann Bacon Lathrop, and Nancy T. Munroe.

By the first marriage of the father there were three children, Rosalie Martha (Hall); Lindley Murray, a Universalist clergyman; and John Quincy Adams.

It was quite often galling to her older brothers, who prided themselves on good scholarship, to have Bingham in their classes, and especially so when she had succeeded in solving some difficult problem, or unraveling some knotty construction in John Milton's Paradise Lost, which they had failed to fathom.

[5] She was quite fond of teaching at this time in her life, and devoted a part of every year (the summer) to that work, until her school education was finished.

He sent home such glowing accounts of the school, and entertained such high hopes of a liberal education, that Henrietta began to lay similar plans for her future.

[4] In Spring 1863, she received news from her half-sister, Mrs. Rosalie Hall, then living in Ohio, that her family was sick and needed her assistance.

Upon reaching the sister's home, she found two of her four children very sick with typhoid fever, and their father in the Army of Tennessee, fighting battles during the American Civil War.

Before the children had passed beyond the danger-point of their sickness, their mother became ill. Bingham, with the aid of neighbors and friends, nursed them to health.

[4] When the family had recovered, and her services were no longer needed, Bingham began to look around for some employment, as her sickness had greatly reduced her savings.

It was here that she formed the acquaintance which resulted in her marriage with Henry Lucius Bingham (1842-1866), March 29, 1866, a theological student in St. Lawrence University.

"The True Immortality", read at the first anniversary of the Zetagathean (seekers after truth) Society, of the Divinity School at Tufts College, was considered very able.

[4] Toward the close of 1868, Bingham, by invitation of the agent of the Publishing House, came to Boston, and in the January 1869, became editor of the Ladies' Repository.

Bingham was long acquiring the art and mastery which at length marked her out for succession in the line with Scott, Mayo, Bacon, Sawyer and Munroe.

A manuscript volume, containing pieces written at intervals from the age of sixteen until she took charge of the 'Repository,' bears witness to the long and diligent preparation to which her powers were subjected.

Like Lowell, most accurate and idiomatic of out poets, Mrs. Bingham never permitted her muse to run wild, but held it rigorously under the rein of understanding and disciplined taste.

Thus it came to pass that her work bore the stamp of quality, and when at length professional duty exacted of her a large amount of literary labor, its uniform high merit provoked general surprise.

Referring to the volumes of the Ladies' Repository between 1869 and 1875 for full memorials of her work, her most characteristic and perfectly finished poem, "L'Envoi" was a midnight meditation on the passing year.

The charm and naturalness of both her stories and verses in the Myrtle, a Universalist publication, during the period that she edited that juvenile, attracted the attention, and elicited the warm praise of hundreds of readers.

[7] Bingham was enfeebled long before any outward sign appeared, but she persisted in her literary work until her strength was nearly spent, before she decided to go to the home of the parents of her husband, in Columbus, Wisconsin.