[2] Douglas received the greater part of her education in private schools, of which it is probable that Bradford Academy, Haverhill, Massachusetts, was one.

[2] Her first published poem appeared, when she was fifteen, in the Southern Literary Messenger, whose editor, John Reuben Thompson, the poet of Virginia, showed much interest in her early verses.

In 1861 and 1862, she, for a time, sent, weekly, a poem to the Boston Transcript, one of them, "The Soldier's Mother", being nearly as widely copied by the papers of the South as by those of the North.

[1] A small book in prose, Peter and Polly, a story of child-life in the American Revolution, appeared in 1876, and this, likewise, was favorably noticed by the reviewers.

Since her first volume, however, Douglas allowed her verses to remain uncollected, and they became widely scattered, some of those originally appearing in The Atlantic, Scribner's Magazine, The Galaxy, and elsewhere.

Many of her later poems were brief, like "The Rose" and "The Yellow Leaf", and found place in Harper's Bazar, to which paper she was an occasional contributor for many years.