August 18, 2025 • 30 mins
Step back into the 1800s and experience the life of a seaside country girl in New England. Discover her dreams, aspirations, and the realities of her education and opportunities as she navigates a world shaped by her familys needs. At just 11 years old, she begins working in the Lowell Textile Mills in Massachusetts to support her family—a journey that leads her to edit magazines, teach at Wheaton College, and pen enchanting books filled with her hopes, memories, poetry, and profound insights on life. As she beautifully reflects, “Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily... that we are entirely separate, while yet we entirely belong to the Whole, is a truth that we learn to rejoice in.” The preface, positioned at the end, serves as a fascinating historical afterward that enhances Lucys vivid narratives from the very first page. (Summary by Michele Fry, Book Coordinator)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter six of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A New England Girlhood, Chapter six
Glimpses of poetry. Our close relationship to Old England was
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sometimes a little misleading to us juvenals. The conditions of
our life were entirely different, but we read her descriptive
stories and sang her songs as if they were true
for us too. One of the first things I learned
to repeat, I think it was in the spelling book,
began with the verse I thank the goodness and the
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grace that on my birth has smiled and made me
in these latter days a happy English child. And some
lines of a very familiar hymn by doctor Watts ran
thus us, when e're I take my walks abroad, how
many poor I see? How many children in the street
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half naked I behold while I am clothed from head
to feet and sheltered from the cold. Now a ragged,
half clothed child, or one that could really be called
poor in the extreme sense of the word, was the
rarest of all sights in a thrifty New England town
fifty years ago. I used to look sharply for those children,
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but I never could see one. And a beggar. Oh,
if a real beggar would come along, like the one
described in Pity the Sorrows of a poor old Man,
What a wonderful event that would be. I believe I
had more curiosity about a beggar, and more ignorance, too,
than about a king. The poem read, a pampered menial
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drove me from the door. What sort of creature could
a pampered menial be? Nothing that had ever come under
our observation corresponded to the words, Nor was it easy
for us to attach any meaning to the word servant.
There were women who came in occasionally to do the
washing or to help about extra work. But they were
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decently clothed and had homes of their own, more or
less comfortable, and their quaint talk and free and easy
ways were often as much of a lift to the
household as the actual assistance they rendered. I settled down
upon the conclusion that rich and poor were book words,
only describing something far off and having nothing to do
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with our everyday experience. My mental definition of rich people
from home observation was something like this, people who live
in three story houses and keep their green blinds closed
and hardly ever come out and talk with the folks
in the street. Were a few such houses in Beverly,
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and a great many in Salem, where my mother sometimes
took me for a shopping walk. But I did not
suppose that any of the people who lived near us
were very rich like those in books. Everybody about us worked,
and we expected to take hold of our part. While young,
I think we were rather eager to begin, for we
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believed that work would make men and women of us. I, however,
was not naturally an industrious child, but quite the reverse.
When my father sent us down to wheat his vegetable
garden at the foot of the lane, I the youngest
of his weededers, liked to go with the rest, but
not for the sake of the work or the pay.
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I generally gave it up before I had weeded half
a bed. It made me so warm and my back
did ache. So I stole off into the shade of
the great apple trees and let the west wind fan
my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs and
listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to
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each other in a language of their own. What was
it they were saying? And why could not I understand it?
Perhaps I should some time. I had read of people
who did in fairy tales. When the others started homeward,
I followed. I did not mind their calling me lazy,
nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper scent,
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while Laida received two or three bright ones. I had
had what I wanted most. I would rather sit under
the apple trees and hear the birds sing than have
a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was well
for my father and his garden that his other children
were not like me. The work which I was born
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to but had not begun to do, was sometimes a
serious weight upon my small forecasting brain. One of my
hymns ended with the lines with books and work and
healthful play. May my first years be passed, that I
may give for every day some good account. At last.
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I knew all about the books and the play, But
the work, how should I ever learn to do it?
My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all
his children, girls as well as boys, should have some
independent means of self support by the labor of their hands.
That everyone should, as was the general custom, learn a trade.
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Taylor's work, the finishing of men's outside garments was the
trade learned most frequently by women in those days, and
one or more of my older sisters worked at it.
I think it must have been at home, for I,
somehow or somewhere got the idea while I was a
small child that the chief end of woman was to
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make clothing for mankind. This thought came over me with
a sudden dread one Sabbath morning, when I was a
toddling thing, led along by my sister behind my father
and mother as they walked arm in arm before me.
I lifted my eyes from my father's heels to his
head and mused, how tall he is, and how long
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his coat looks, and how many thousand thousand stitches there
must be in his coat and pantaloons. And I suppose
I have got to grow up and have a husband
and put all those little stitches into his coats and pantaloons. Oh,
I never, never can do it. A shiver of utter
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discouragement went through me with that task before me, it
hardly seemed to me as if life were worth living.
I went on to meeting, and I suppose I forgot
my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it
was real. It was not the only time in my
life that I have tired myself out with crossing bridges
to which I never came. Another trial confronted me in
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the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We
learned to sew patchwork at school while we were learning
the alphabet, and almost every girl large or small, had
a bed quilt of her own, begun with an eye
to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing,
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but I thought it best to begin mine early, so
I collected a few squares of calico and undertook to
put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction.
I liked assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth,
for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn,
and they reminded me of the persons who wore them.
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One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me.
It was a delicate pink and brown sea moss pattern
on a white, a piece of address belonging to my
married sister, who was to me bride and angel in
one I always saw her face before me when I
unfolded this scrap, a face with an expression truly heavenly
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in its loveliness. Heaven claimed her. Before my childhood was ended.
Her beautiful form was laid to rest in mid ocean,
too deep to be pillowed among the soft sea mosses.
But she lived long enough to make a heaven of
my childhood. Whenever she came home, one of the sweetest
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of our familiar hymns I always think of as belonging
to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her
spirit and mind. She had come back to us for
a brief visit soon after her marriage, with some deep
new experience of spiritual realities, which I, a child of
four or five years, felt in the very tones of
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her voice and in the expression of her eyes. My
mother told her of my fondness for the hymn book,
and she turned to me with a smile and said,
won't you learn one hymn for me, one hymn that
I love very much? Would I not? She could not
guess how happy she made me by wishing me to
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do anything for her sake. The hymn was whilst THEE
I seek protecting power. In a few minutes I repeated
the whole to her, and its own beauty, pervaded with
the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at
once indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it
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to her again, deepened with a lifetime's meaning. Beyond the
sea and beyond the stars. I could dream over my patchwork,
but I could not bring it into conventional shape. My sisters,
whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing gobblings. I
grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces,
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except the pretty sea moss pattern, which I was not
willing to see patched up with common calico. It was
evident that I should never conquer fate with my needle.
Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the
saying that every girl must have a pillowcase full of
stockings of her own knitting before she was married. Here
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was another mountain before me, for I took it for
granted that marrying was inevitable, one of the things that
everybody must do, like learning to read or going to meeting.
I began to knit my own stockings when I was
six or seven years old, and kept on until home
made stockings went out of fashion. The pillowcase full, however,
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was never attempted any more than the patchwork quilt. I
heard somebody say one day that there must always be
one old maid in every family of girls, and I
accepted the prophecy of some of my elders that I
was to be that one. I was rather glad to
know that freedom of choice in the matter was possible.
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One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my
golden haired and golden hearted sister Emily, teasing her with
wondering questions about our future, she announced to us she
had reached the mature age of fifteen years, that she
intended to be an old maid, and that we might
all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her,
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but she said, why if they fit themselves to be good, helpful,
cheerful old maids, they will certainly be better wives if
they ever are married, And that maxim I laid by
in my memory for future contingencies, for I believed in
every word she ever uttered. She herself, however, did not
carry out her girlish intention quote her children arise up
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and call her blessed. Her husband also and he, but
the little sisters she used to fondle as her babies
have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations
to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies. I regard
it as a great privilege to have been one of
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a large family, and nearly the youngest. We had strong
family resemblances, and yet no two seemed at all alike.
It was like rehearsing in a small world, each our
own part in the great one awaiting us. If we
little ones occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the
petting and praising and loving, that was wholesome for us
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and not at all to be regretted. Almost every one
of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her fingers.
One worked exquisite lace embroidery. Another had a knack at
cutting and fitting her doll's clothing so perfectly that the
wooden lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel
doll world. And another was an expert at fine stitching,
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so delicately done that it was a pleasure to see
or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had
none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and
sometimes tried to imitate, but my efforts usually ended in
defeat and mortification. I did like to knit, however, and
I could shape a stocking tolerably well. My fondness for
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this kind of work was chiefly because it did not
require much thought except when there was widening or narrowing
to be done. I did not need to keep my
eyes upon it at all. So I took a book
upon my lap and read and read while the needles
clicked on, comforting me with the reminder that I was
not absolutely unemployed. While yet I was having a good
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time reading. I began to know that I liked poetry,
and to think a good deal about it at my
childish work. Outside of the hymn book, the first rhyme
I committed to memory were in the old farmer's almanac,
files of which hung in the chimney corner and were
an inexhaustible source of entertainment to his younger ones. My
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father kept his newspapers, also carefully filed away in the garret,
but we made sad havoc among the Palladiums and other
journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures.
We valued the anecdote column and the poet's corner. Only
these we clipped unsparingly for our scrap books. A tattered
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copy of Johnson's Large Dictionary was a great delight to
me on account of the specimens of English versification which
I found in the introduction. I learned them as if
they were so many poems. I used to keep this
old volume close to my pillow, and I amused myself
when I awoke in the morning by reciting as jingling
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contrasts of iambic entochaic and dactylic meter, and thinking, what
a charming occupation it must be to make up verses.
I made my first rhymes when I was about seven
years old. My brother John proposed writing poetry as a
rainy day amusement one afternoon, when we two were sent
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up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family.
He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I
produced two stanzas, the first of which read, Thus, one
summer day, said little Jane. We were walking down a
shady lane when suddenly the wind blew high, and the
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red lightning flashed in the sky. The second stanza descended
in a dreadfully abrupt anti climax. But I was blissfully
ignorant of rhetorician's rules, and supposed that the rhyme was
the only important thing. It may amuse my child readers
if I give them this verse two. The peals of thunder,
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how they rolled, and I felt myself a little cooled,
for I before had been quite warm, but now around
me was a storm. My brother was surprised at my success,
and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too,
But I was rather sorry that I had written them,
for I had to say them over to the family,
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and then they sounded silly. The habit was formed, however,
and I went on writing little books of ballads, which
I illustrated with colors from my toy paint box, and
then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor
for fear that somebody would find them. My fame crept
out among the neighbors. Nevertheless, I was even invited to
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write some verses in a young lady's album, and Aunt
Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her, I
considered myself greatly honored by both requests. My fondness for
books began very early. At the age of four, I
had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp,
paper covered picture books, such as people give to babies. No,
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I wanted books with stiff covers that could stand up
side by side on a shelf and maintain their own
character as books. But I did not know how to
make a beginning for mine. Were all of the kind
manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better
fate than to be tossed about among my rag babies
and playthings. One day, however, I found among some rubbish
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in a corner a volume with one good stiff cover.
The other was missing. It did not look so very old,
nor as if it had been much read. Neither did
it look very inviting to me. As I turned its
leaves on its title page, I read the life of
John Calvin. I did not know who he was, but
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a book was a book to me, and this would
do as well as any to begin my library with.
I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make
sure of my claim, I took it down to my
mother and timidly asked if I might have it for
my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused yes,
and I ran back happy, and began my library by
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setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the Garret Eves,
my make believe bookcase shelf. I was proud of my
literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with
a row of books, every one of which should have
two stiff covers. But I found no more neglected volumes
that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a
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lonely fate, and I am afraid that at last the
mice devoured him before I had quite forgotten him. However,
I did pick up one other book of about his size,
and in the same one covered condition, and this attracted
me more because it was in verse rhyme had always
a so of magnetic power over me, whether I caught
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at any idea it contained or not. This was written
in the measure, which I afterwards learned was called Spensian.
It was Byron's vision of judgment, and Southeast also was
bound up with it. Southeast hexameters were too much of
a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled and apparently
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told a story about something. Saint Peter came into it,
and King George the third, neither of which names meant
anything to me. But the scenery seemed to be somewhere
up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence,
took it for a sort of semi biblical fairy tale.
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There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz,
pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting
on a cloud holding a bunch of keys. I put
the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane
to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem
an explanation of the counterpane for the stanza I liked
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best began with the words Saint Peter sat at the
celestial gate and nodded or his keys. I invented a
pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house
reciting grandly, Saint Peter sat at the calestical gate and
nodded o'er his keys. That volume, swept back to me
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with the rubbish of time, still reminds me forlorn and
half clad of my childish fondness for its mock magnificence.
John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination
as the foundation of an infant's library, But I was
not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me, they
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were two brother books, like each other in their refusal
to wear limp covers. It is amusing to recall the
rapid succession of contrast in one child's tastes. I felt
no incongruity between Doctor Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented
peabrock of dunaldu and Lochio Lochio Beware of the Day
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with the Yankee Doodle, and the diverting history of John Gilpin,
and with the glamor of some fairy tale I had
just read, still haunting me. I would run out of doors,
eating a big piece of bread and butter sweeter than
any has tasted since, and would jump up toward the crows,
cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half
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wishing I too were a crow, to make the sky
ring with my glee. After Doctor Watts's hymns, the first
poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the
pages of the American First Class Book handed down from
older pupils in the little private school which my sisters
and I attended, when Aunt Hannah had done all she
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could for us. That book was a collection of excellent
literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author
and a poet. It deserved to be called first class
in another sense than that which was understood by its title.
I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon
it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's plays,
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among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur,
whose appeal to have his eyes spared brought many a
tear to my own. Bryan's Waterfall and Thanatopsis were there also,
and Niels, There's a fierce gray bird with a bending
beak that the boys loved so dearly to declaim, And
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another poem by this last author, which we all liked
to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic,
and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement.
Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, and the forests
vanished before its path, and the rude cliffs bowed, and
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the waters fled, and the Valley of life was the
tomb of the dead. In reading this Swiss minstrel's Lament
over the Ruins of Goldau, I first felt my imagination
thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains, a terror
and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than
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it awed them. But the poem in which they burst
upon me as real presences, unseen yet known in their
remote splendor, as kingly friends before whom I could bow,
yet with whom I could aspire. For something like this,
I think mountains must always be to those who truly
love them was Coleridge's mont Blanc before Sunrise in this
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same first class book. I believe that poetry really first
took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards
I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring,
though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch
its subtler harmonies, This great Mountain poem struck some hidden
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keynote in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of
what it was to live in poetry, and to have
it live in me. Of course, I did not consider
my own foolish, little versifying poetry the child of eight
or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among
her many games and pastimes. But with this ideal picture
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of mountain scenery, there came to me a revelation of
poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach
out after, because I could not live without it. The
thought of it was to me like the thought of
God and of truth. To leave out poetry would be
to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this
very blindly and vaguely, no doubt, but the feeling was deep.
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It was as if mont Blanc stood visibly before me
while I murmured to myself in lonely places, motionless torrents,
silent cataracts, Who made you glorious as the gates of
heaven beneath the keen full moon, who bade the sun
clothe you with rainbows, who with lovely flowers of living blue,
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spread garlands at your feet. And then the pine groves,
with their soft and soul like sound, gave glorious answer
with the streams and torrents. And my child heart, in
its trance, echoed the poet's invocation. Rise like a cloud
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of incense from the earth and tell the stars and
tell the rising sun. Earth with her thousand voices calls
on God. I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely
saw the Alps with Coleridge in my childhood. And although
I never stood face to face with mountains until I
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was a mature woman, always after this vision of them,
they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure
and lofty in human possibilities, like a white ideal beckoning
me on. Since I am writing these recollections for the young,
I may say here that I regard a love for
poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements
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in the life outfit of a human being. It was
the greatest of blessings to me in the long days
of toil to which I was shut in much earlier
than most young girls are, that the poetry I held
in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and
around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.
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Hard work, however, has its own illumination, if as duty,
which worldliness has not, and worldliness seems to be the
greatest temptation and danger of young people in this generation,
Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive
out this sordid demon. If anything less than the power
of the highest can, But poetry is of the highest.
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It is the divine voice always that we recognize through
the poets, whenever he most deeply moves our souls. Reason
and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me
also that it is great poetry, even the greatest, which
the youngest crave and upon which they may be fed.
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Because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down
her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans
in some smaller style to suit the comprehension of little children.
They do not need any such delution. So I go
back to the American First Class Book and affirm it
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to have been one of the best of reading books,
because it gave us children a taste of the finest
poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue,
by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which
left a permanent impression upon my mind, I recall words
description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened
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in the forest Wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable
word portrait in which the very tones of the sightless
speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believed that the
first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those
contained in the grand brief sentence Socrates died like a philosopher,
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but Jesus Christ like a God. Very vivid too is
the recollection of the exquisite little prose Idol of moss
Side from Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. From the
few two short words with which it began, Gilbert Ainslie
was a poor man, and he had been a poor
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man all the days of his life, to the happy
waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever
sleep with which it ended. It was one sweet picture
of lowly life and honorable poverty, irradiated with sacred home affections,
and cheerful in his rustic homeliness, as the blossoms and
wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of
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Christopher North could make it. I thought, as I read,
how much pleasanter it must be to be poor than
to be rich, at least in Scotland. For I was
beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible
visitation to our own household, and that in our cape
and corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable
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nor picturesque. After my father's death, our way of living,
never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then
I heard mysterious allusions to the wolf at the door,
and it was whispered that to escape him, we might
all have to turn our backs upon the home where
we were born, and find our safety in the busy world,
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working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had
reached my tenth year, I began to have rather disturbed
dreams of what it might soon mean for me to
earn my own living. End of Chapter six, Glimpses of Poetry,
read by Caroline Seypharth, June two thousand, twenty three.
Chapter six of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. A New England Girlhood, Chapter six
Glimpses of poetry. Our close relationship to Old England was
(00:25):
sometimes a little misleading to us juvenals. The conditions of
our life were entirely different, but we read her descriptive
stories and sang her songs as if they were true
for us too. One of the first things I learned
to repeat, I think it was in the spelling book,
began with the verse I thank the goodness and the
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grace that on my birth has smiled and made me
in these latter days a happy English child. And some
lines of a very familiar hymn by doctor Watts ran
thus us, when e're I take my walks abroad, how
many poor I see? How many children in the street
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half naked I behold while I am clothed from head
to feet and sheltered from the cold. Now a ragged,
half clothed child, or one that could really be called
poor in the extreme sense of the word, was the
rarest of all sights in a thrifty New England town
fifty years ago. I used to look sharply for those children,
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but I never could see one. And a beggar. Oh,
if a real beggar would come along, like the one
described in Pity the Sorrows of a poor old Man,
What a wonderful event that would be. I believe I
had more curiosity about a beggar, and more ignorance, too,
than about a king. The poem read, a pampered menial
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drove me from the door. What sort of creature could
a pampered menial be? Nothing that had ever come under
our observation corresponded to the words, Nor was it easy
for us to attach any meaning to the word servant.
There were women who came in occasionally to do the
washing or to help about extra work. But they were
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decently clothed and had homes of their own, more or
less comfortable, and their quaint talk and free and easy
ways were often as much of a lift to the
household as the actual assistance they rendered. I settled down
upon the conclusion that rich and poor were book words,
only describing something far off and having nothing to do
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with our everyday experience. My mental definition of rich people
from home observation was something like this, people who live
in three story houses and keep their green blinds closed
and hardly ever come out and talk with the folks
in the street. Were a few such houses in Beverly,
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and a great many in Salem, where my mother sometimes
took me for a shopping walk. But I did not
suppose that any of the people who lived near us
were very rich like those in books. Everybody about us worked,
and we expected to take hold of our part. While young,
I think we were rather eager to begin, for we
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believed that work would make men and women of us. I, however,
was not naturally an industrious child, but quite the reverse.
When my father sent us down to wheat his vegetable
garden at the foot of the lane, I the youngest
of his weededers, liked to go with the rest, but
not for the sake of the work or the pay.
(03:43):
I generally gave it up before I had weeded half
a bed. It made me so warm and my back
did ache. So I stole off into the shade of
the great apple trees and let the west wind fan
my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs and
listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to
(04:03):
each other in a language of their own. What was
it they were saying? And why could not I understand it?
Perhaps I should some time. I had read of people
who did in fairy tales. When the others started homeward,
I followed. I did not mind their calling me lazy,
nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper scent,
(04:26):
while Laida received two or three bright ones. I had
had what I wanted most. I would rather sit under
the apple trees and hear the birds sing than have
a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was well
for my father and his garden that his other children
were not like me. The work which I was born
(04:48):
to but had not begun to do, was sometimes a
serious weight upon my small forecasting brain. One of my
hymns ended with the lines with books and work and
healthful play. May my first years be passed, that I
may give for every day some good account. At last.
(05:12):
I knew all about the books and the play, But
the work, how should I ever learn to do it?
My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all
his children, girls as well as boys, should have some
independent means of self support by the labor of their hands.
That everyone should, as was the general custom, learn a trade.
(05:36):
Taylor's work, the finishing of men's outside garments was the
trade learned most frequently by women in those days, and
one or more of my older sisters worked at it.
I think it must have been at home, for I,
somehow or somewhere got the idea while I was a
small child that the chief end of woman was to
(05:57):
make clothing for mankind. This thought came over me with
a sudden dread one Sabbath morning, when I was a
toddling thing, led along by my sister behind my father
and mother as they walked arm in arm before me.
I lifted my eyes from my father's heels to his
head and mused, how tall he is, and how long
(06:22):
his coat looks, and how many thousand thousand stitches there
must be in his coat and pantaloons. And I suppose
I have got to grow up and have a husband
and put all those little stitches into his coats and pantaloons. Oh,
I never, never can do it. A shiver of utter
(06:44):
discouragement went through me with that task before me, it
hardly seemed to me as if life were worth living.
I went on to meeting, and I suppose I forgot
my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it
was real. It was not the only time in my
life that I have tired myself out with crossing bridges
to which I never came. Another trial confronted me in
(07:08):
the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We
learned to sew patchwork at school while we were learning
the alphabet, and almost every girl large or small, had
a bed quilt of her own, begun with an eye
to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing,
(07:29):
but I thought it best to begin mine early, so
I collected a few squares of calico and undertook to
put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction.
I liked assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth,
for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn,
and they reminded me of the persons who wore them.
(07:51):
One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me.
It was a delicate pink and brown sea moss pattern
on a white, a piece of address belonging to my
married sister, who was to me bride and angel in
one I always saw her face before me when I
unfolded this scrap, a face with an expression truly heavenly
(08:15):
in its loveliness. Heaven claimed her. Before my childhood was ended.
Her beautiful form was laid to rest in mid ocean,
too deep to be pillowed among the soft sea mosses.
But she lived long enough to make a heaven of
my childhood. Whenever she came home, one of the sweetest
(08:35):
of our familiar hymns I always think of as belonging
to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her
spirit and mind. She had come back to us for
a brief visit soon after her marriage, with some deep
new experience of spiritual realities, which I, a child of
four or five years, felt in the very tones of
(08:57):
her voice and in the expression of her eyes. My
mother told her of my fondness for the hymn book,
and she turned to me with a smile and said,
won't you learn one hymn for me, one hymn that
I love very much? Would I not? She could not
guess how happy she made me by wishing me to
(09:19):
do anything for her sake. The hymn was whilst THEE
I seek protecting power. In a few minutes I repeated
the whole to her, and its own beauty, pervaded with
the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at
once indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it
(09:40):
to her again, deepened with a lifetime's meaning. Beyond the
sea and beyond the stars. I could dream over my patchwork,
but I could not bring it into conventional shape. My sisters,
whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing gobblings. I
grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces,
(10:03):
except the pretty sea moss pattern, which I was not
willing to see patched up with common calico. It was
evident that I should never conquer fate with my needle.
Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the
saying that every girl must have a pillowcase full of
stockings of her own knitting before she was married. Here
(10:25):
was another mountain before me, for I took it for
granted that marrying was inevitable, one of the things that
everybody must do, like learning to read or going to meeting.
I began to knit my own stockings when I was
six or seven years old, and kept on until home
made stockings went out of fashion. The pillowcase full, however,
(10:47):
was never attempted any more than the patchwork quilt. I
heard somebody say one day that there must always be
one old maid in every family of girls, and I
accepted the prophecy of some of my elders that I
was to be that one. I was rather glad to
know that freedom of choice in the matter was possible.
(11:08):
One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my
golden haired and golden hearted sister Emily, teasing her with
wondering questions about our future, she announced to us she
had reached the mature age of fifteen years, that she
intended to be an old maid, and that we might
all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her,
(11:31):
but she said, why if they fit themselves to be good, helpful,
cheerful old maids, they will certainly be better wives if
they ever are married, And that maxim I laid by
in my memory for future contingencies, for I believed in
every word she ever uttered. She herself, however, did not
carry out her girlish intention quote her children arise up
(11:56):
and call her blessed. Her husband also and he, but
the little sisters she used to fondle as her babies
have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations
to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies. I regard
it as a great privilege to have been one of
(12:16):
a large family, and nearly the youngest. We had strong
family resemblances, and yet no two seemed at all alike.
It was like rehearsing in a small world, each our
own part in the great one awaiting us. If we
little ones occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the
petting and praising and loving, that was wholesome for us
(12:39):
and not at all to be regretted. Almost every one
of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her fingers.
One worked exquisite lace embroidery. Another had a knack at
cutting and fitting her doll's clothing so perfectly that the
wooden lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel
doll world. And another was an expert at fine stitching,
(13:03):
so delicately done that it was a pleasure to see
or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had
none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and
sometimes tried to imitate, but my efforts usually ended in
defeat and mortification. I did like to knit, however, and
I could shape a stocking tolerably well. My fondness for
(13:27):
this kind of work was chiefly because it did not
require much thought except when there was widening or narrowing
to be done. I did not need to keep my
eyes upon it at all. So I took a book
upon my lap and read and read while the needles
clicked on, comforting me with the reminder that I was
not absolutely unemployed. While yet I was having a good
(13:49):
time reading. I began to know that I liked poetry,
and to think a good deal about it at my
childish work. Outside of the hymn book, the first rhyme
I committed to memory were in the old farmer's almanac,
files of which hung in the chimney corner and were
an inexhaustible source of entertainment to his younger ones. My
(14:12):
father kept his newspapers, also carefully filed away in the garret,
but we made sad havoc among the Palladiums and other
journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures.
We valued the anecdote column and the poet's corner. Only
these we clipped unsparingly for our scrap books. A tattered
(14:33):
copy of Johnson's Large Dictionary was a great delight to
me on account of the specimens of English versification which
I found in the introduction. I learned them as if
they were so many poems. I used to keep this
old volume close to my pillow, and I amused myself
when I awoke in the morning by reciting as jingling
(14:54):
contrasts of iambic entochaic and dactylic meter, and thinking, what
a charming occupation it must be to make up verses.
I made my first rhymes when I was about seven
years old. My brother John proposed writing poetry as a
rainy day amusement one afternoon, when we two were sent
(15:16):
up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family.
He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I
produced two stanzas, the first of which read, Thus, one
summer day, said little Jane. We were walking down a
shady lane when suddenly the wind blew high, and the
(15:38):
red lightning flashed in the sky. The second stanza descended
in a dreadfully abrupt anti climax. But I was blissfully
ignorant of rhetorician's rules, and supposed that the rhyme was
the only important thing. It may amuse my child readers
if I give them this verse two. The peals of thunder,
(16:01):
how they rolled, and I felt myself a little cooled,
for I before had been quite warm, but now around
me was a storm. My brother was surprised at my success,
and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too,
But I was rather sorry that I had written them,
for I had to say them over to the family,
(16:23):
and then they sounded silly. The habit was formed, however,
and I went on writing little books of ballads, which
I illustrated with colors from my toy paint box, and
then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor
for fear that somebody would find them. My fame crept
out among the neighbors. Nevertheless, I was even invited to
(16:45):
write some verses in a young lady's album, and Aunt
Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her, I
considered myself greatly honored by both requests. My fondness for
books began very early. At the age of four, I
had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp,
paper covered picture books, such as people give to babies. No,
(17:09):
I wanted books with stiff covers that could stand up
side by side on a shelf and maintain their own
character as books. But I did not know how to
make a beginning for mine. Were all of the kind
manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better
fate than to be tossed about among my rag babies
and playthings. One day, however, I found among some rubbish
(17:33):
in a corner a volume with one good stiff cover.
The other was missing. It did not look so very old,
nor as if it had been much read. Neither did
it look very inviting to me. As I turned its
leaves on its title page, I read the life of
John Calvin. I did not know who he was, but
(17:55):
a book was a book to me, and this would
do as well as any to begin my library with.
I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make
sure of my claim, I took it down to my
mother and timidly asked if I might have it for
my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused yes,
and I ran back happy, and began my library by
(18:17):
setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the Garret Eves,
my make believe bookcase shelf. I was proud of my
literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with
a row of books, every one of which should have
two stiff covers. But I found no more neglected volumes
that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a
(18:40):
lonely fate, and I am afraid that at last the
mice devoured him before I had quite forgotten him. However,
I did pick up one other book of about his size,
and in the same one covered condition, and this attracted
me more because it was in verse rhyme had always
a so of magnetic power over me, whether I caught
(19:02):
at any idea it contained or not. This was written
in the measure, which I afterwards learned was called Spensian.
It was Byron's vision of judgment, and Southeast also was
bound up with it. Southeast hexameters were too much of
a mouthful for me, but Byron's lines jingled and apparently
(19:24):
told a story about something. Saint Peter came into it,
and King George the third, neither of which names meant
anything to me. But the scenery seemed to be somewhere
up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence,
took it for a sort of semi biblical fairy tale.
(19:44):
There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz,
pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting
on a cloud holding a bunch of keys. I put
the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane
to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem
an explanation of the counterpane for the stanza I liked
(20:05):
best began with the words Saint Peter sat at the
celestial gate and nodded or his keys. I invented a
pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house
reciting grandly, Saint Peter sat at the calestical gate and
nodded o'er his keys. That volume, swept back to me
(20:28):
with the rubbish of time, still reminds me forlorn and
half clad of my childish fondness for its mock magnificence.
John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination
as the foundation of an infant's library, But I was
not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me, they
(20:50):
were two brother books, like each other in their refusal
to wear limp covers. It is amusing to recall the
rapid succession of contrast in one child's tastes. I felt
no incongruity between Doctor Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented
peabrock of dunaldu and Lochio Lochio Beware of the Day
(21:14):
with the Yankee Doodle, and the diverting history of John Gilpin,
and with the glamor of some fairy tale I had
just read, still haunting me. I would run out of doors,
eating a big piece of bread and butter sweeter than
any has tasted since, and would jump up toward the crows,
cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half
(21:35):
wishing I too were a crow, to make the sky
ring with my glee. After Doctor Watts's hymns, the first
poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the
pages of the American First Class Book handed down from
older pupils in the little private school which my sisters
and I attended, when Aunt Hannah had done all she
(21:58):
could for us. That book was a collection of excellent
literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author
and a poet. It deserved to be called first class
in another sense than that which was understood by its title.
I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon
it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's plays,
(22:24):
among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur,
whose appeal to have his eyes spared brought many a
tear to my own. Bryan's Waterfall and Thanatopsis were there also,
and Niels, There's a fierce gray bird with a bending
beak that the boys loved so dearly to declaim, And
(22:47):
another poem by this last author, which we all liked
to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic,
and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement.
Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, and the forests
vanished before its path, and the rude cliffs bowed, and
(23:08):
the waters fled, and the Valley of life was the
tomb of the dead. In reading this Swiss minstrel's Lament
over the Ruins of Goldau, I first felt my imagination
thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains, a terror
and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than
(23:29):
it awed them. But the poem in which they burst
upon me as real presences, unseen yet known in their
remote splendor, as kingly friends before whom I could bow,
yet with whom I could aspire. For something like this,
I think mountains must always be to those who truly
love them was Coleridge's mont Blanc before Sunrise in this
(23:54):
same first class book. I believe that poetry really first
took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards
I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring,
though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch
its subtler harmonies, This great Mountain poem struck some hidden
(24:15):
keynote in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of
what it was to live in poetry, and to have
it live in me. Of course, I did not consider
my own foolish, little versifying poetry the child of eight
or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among
her many games and pastimes. But with this ideal picture
(24:38):
of mountain scenery, there came to me a revelation of
poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach
out after, because I could not live without it. The
thought of it was to me like the thought of
God and of truth. To leave out poetry would be
to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this
very blindly and vaguely, no doubt, but the feeling was deep.
(25:03):
It was as if mont Blanc stood visibly before me
while I murmured to myself in lonely places, motionless torrents,
silent cataracts, Who made you glorious as the gates of
heaven beneath the keen full moon, who bade the sun
clothe you with rainbows, who with lovely flowers of living blue,
(25:28):
spread garlands at your feet. And then the pine groves,
with their soft and soul like sound, gave glorious answer
with the streams and torrents. And my child heart, in
its trance, echoed the poet's invocation. Rise like a cloud
(25:49):
of incense from the earth and tell the stars and
tell the rising sun. Earth with her thousand voices calls
on God. I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely
saw the Alps with Coleridge in my childhood. And although
I never stood face to face with mountains until I
(26:11):
was a mature woman, always after this vision of them,
they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure
and lofty in human possibilities, like a white ideal beckoning
me on. Since I am writing these recollections for the young,
I may say here that I regard a love for
poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements
(26:33):
in the life outfit of a human being. It was
the greatest of blessings to me in the long days
of toil to which I was shut in much earlier
than most young girls are, that the poetry I held
in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and
around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.
(26:56):
Hard work, however, has its own illumination, if as duty,
which worldliness has not, and worldliness seems to be the
greatest temptation and danger of young people in this generation,
Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive
out this sordid demon. If anything less than the power
of the highest can, But poetry is of the highest.
(27:20):
It is the divine voice always that we recognize through
the poets, whenever he most deeply moves our souls. Reason
and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me
also that it is great poetry, even the greatest, which
the youngest crave and upon which they may be fed.
(27:41):
Because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down
her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans
in some smaller style to suit the comprehension of little children.
They do not need any such delution. So I go
back to the American First Class Book and affirm it
(28:01):
to have been one of the best of reading books,
because it gave us children a taste of the finest
poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue,
by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which
left a permanent impression upon my mind, I recall words
description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened
(28:23):
in the forest Wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable
word portrait in which the very tones of the sightless
speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believed that the
first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those
contained in the grand brief sentence Socrates died like a philosopher,
(28:45):
but Jesus Christ like a God. Very vivid too is
the recollection of the exquisite little prose Idol of moss
Side from Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life. From the
few two short words with which it began, Gilbert Ainslie
was a poor man, and he had been a poor
(29:06):
man all the days of his life, to the happy
waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever
sleep with which it ended. It was one sweet picture
of lowly life and honorable poverty, irradiated with sacred home affections,
and cheerful in his rustic homeliness, as the blossoms and
wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of
(29:27):
Christopher North could make it. I thought, as I read,
how much pleasanter it must be to be poor than
to be rich, at least in Scotland. For I was
beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible
visitation to our own household, and that in our cape
and corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable
(29:49):
nor picturesque. After my father's death, our way of living,
never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then
I heard mysterious allusions to the wolf at the door,
and it was whispered that to escape him, we might
all have to turn our backs upon the home where
we were born, and find our safety in the busy world,
(30:13):
working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had
reached my tenth year, I began to have rather disturbed
dreams of what it might soon mean for me to
earn my own living. End of Chapter six, Glimpses of Poetry,
read by Caroline Seypharth, June two thousand, twenty three.
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