This is a composition by Josephine Park Cranston on “Friendship.” It is worth a good read and careful thought. ~ CC
This is a companion to the “Composition No. 1st” on Columbus—same young hand, same schoolroom exercise series, signed by Josephine. Here’s the transcription.
Friendship (decorative banner heading)
Friendship is one of the purest, strongest, and sweetest of ties! Divested of everything selfish or sensual, possessing all the warmth and tenderness of love, without any sullying admixture of passion, and thus by its very nature capacitated for a delightful abode, and a happy existence, based on harmonizing dispositions, and confirmed congenial pleasures, producing the most identifying union of interests, and the most endearing sympathy of feelings; in every vicissitude of joy or sorrow, friendship seems pre-eminently fitted for the happiness of man.
If you had friends possessed of wisdom, wealth, and power, who would allow you free access to them, and who received you with perfect kindness; if you were in perplexity, would you not go to them for advice, tell them your difficulties, and seek their counsel? If you were in sorrow, would you not go to them for comfort, to be soothed by their sympathies? If you had offended them, would you feel happy until you had obtained their forgiveness? If you wished anything within their power to give, would you not ask with the assurance that if they knew it was for your good, they would grant it; but if otherwise they would, in very faithfulness, refuse your request? Would you not delight daily to visit such friends, and in the language of glowing gratitude for all their love, and all their benefits, to pour forth the full feelings of a fond and thankful heart?
Composition. No. 4th J. P. Cranston
A few notes for the archive.
This is part of the same composition series as the Columbus essay. That one was “Composition No. 1st”; this is “No. 4th,” same signature (“J. P. Cranston”), same careful schoolgirl copperplate, same decorative banner-style title. So you have at least two surviving leaves from a sequence of school exercises—and the gap (1st, 4th) implies there were others (2nd, 3rd, and possibly beyond) that may yet turn up or be lost. Worth noting the series numbering in your finding aid so you can flag missing members.
Two telling revisions in the writer’s own hand. In the opening sentence she wrote “selfish or sensual,” then struck out “or sensual.” And near the end she revised “to pour the full” to “to pour forth the full” (the caret-inserted “forth”). These small self-corrections are charming evidence of a young writer refining her diction in real time—and the deletion of “sensual” in particular shows a girl being taught (or teaching herself) the decorous boundaries of mid-century female composition. They’re worth preserving in any transcription precisely because they reveal the schoolroom process.
The dating fits the same window as Composition No. 1st (roughly 1838–1842, by my earlier reasoning). If anything, the slightly more confident, more elaborate diction here—and the higher number in the series—might place it a touch later than No. 1st, but within the same period of schooling. This is the same Josephine who would grow into the family’s caregiver and genealogist.
The piece is almost certainly a “moral composition” on an assigned abstract theme. “Friendship” was one of the stock topics in nineteenth-century rhetoric and penmanship instruction, alongside subjects like Hope, Memory, Industry, and Gratitude. The closing turn—where earthly friends shade into an implied divine Friend one delights “daily to visit”—is a conventional pious move of the period, and it echoes the heavily religious idiom of the family’s Connecticut elders (the Dunworth and Tracy letters of 1820 and 1830 breathe the same air). So even her schoolwork sits inside the family’s devotional culture.
This doesn’t add new names or relationships to the tree, but it deepens the portrait of Josephine herself—and it confirms she left behind a small body of juvenile writing, not just the one Columbus essay. For your purposes it strengthens the case that Josephine was unusually literate and reflective from girlhood, which makes her later role as the family’s record-keeper and transatlantic correspondent feel continuous with the child who, at maybe fourteen, was composing polished little essays on friendship and copying them out in her best hand.
So the collection now holds, in Josephine’s hand alone: two school compositions (~1840), the 1858 account of her father’s death, the 1874 genealogy letter from Dansville, and the 1884 caregiving letter from Raymond—a span of roughly forty-five years of one woman’s handwriting, girlhood to old age.
