(This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)
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Phoebe Hinsdale Brown was born on May 1, 1783 in Canaan, New York, the seventh and youngest child of George and Phoebe (Allen) Hinsdale. She was of New England ancestry. It is commonly stated that when two years old she was left an orphan, but the sketch of her life in the Hinsdale Genealogy (1906), based on an autobiography then in the hands of her granddaughter, gives the date of her father's death as March 20, 1784, and that of her mother as April 17, 1791.
From her ninth till her eighteenth year she lived with her married sister, Chloe Noyes. The latter's husband proved a hard taskmaster, and Phoebe was deprived of instruction, forbidden books, and made to work like a slave. Later she got a few months' schooling, and on June 1, 1805, at Canaan, New York.
Mrs. Brown's life was one of comparative poverty and some hardship. Unkind interpretations of this habit led her to write "Apology for My Twilight Rambles Addressed to a Lady. " From this was taken one of her best known hymns, still sung in the churches, "I Love to Steal Awhile Away. " It appeared with three others by her in Nettleton's Village Hymns (1824). In 1853 it was incorporated in the Leeds Hymn Book, and thus came into use in England.
Two additional hymns from her pen were published in Hastings's Spiritual Songs (1831). Others appeared in Mother's Hymn Book (1834), Linsley and Davis, Select Hymns (1836), and Parish Hymns (1843).
Some of these have had wide use in this country and abroad. Two now forgotten prose works were also written by her and published in 1836; The Tree and Its Fruits, a collection of little homilies, directed against intemperance, gambling, and infidelity; and The Village School, describing the religious instruction given by a teacher, and its effects.
(This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)
Phoebe was early taken in charge by a pious grandmother, Mrs. Allen, who gave her religious instruction, and before she was nine, it is said, she had read the Bible through three times. Later in life she became a member of the Congregational Church.
Her deep religious devotion found expression in simple but sincere verse. At Ellington she was accustomed at each day's close to make her escape from household cares and repair to a quiet spot for meditation.
Quotes from others about the person
Dr. Brown later said of his mother: “Her record is on high and she is with the Lord whom she loved and served as faithfully as any person I ever knew; nay, more than any other. To her I owe all I am; and if I have done any good in the world, to her, under God, it is due. She seems even now to have me in her hands, holding me up for work for Christ and His cause with a grasp I can feel. ”
She married Timothy Hill Brown, a carpenter and painter. They removed to Connecticut where they lived at East Windsor for eight years, then at Ellington for five. Four children were born to them, one of them, Samuel Robbins Brown, destined to become a well-known educator and missionary. She was widowed in 1854.
