August 18, 2025 • 36 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):
A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom. This is a
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LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Read by Dana Kovar, A New England Girlhood, Chapter seven,
Beginning to work. Though I had looked upon my father's
still pale face in his coffin, the impression that left
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upon me was of sleep, more peaceful and sacred than
common slumber. Yet only sleep. My dreams of him were,
for a long time so vivid that I would say
to myself, he was here yesterday, he will be here
again tomorrow, with a feeling that amounted to expectation. We
missed him, we children large and small, who made up
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the yet untrained home crew, as a ship misses the
man at the helm, his grave, clear perception of what
was best for us, His brief words that decided once
for all the worse we were to take, had been
far more to us than we knew. It was hardest
of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to
depend entirely upon him, left with her eight children, the eldest,
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a boy of eighteen years and with no property, except
the roof that sheltered us in a small strip of land.
Her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones
could not at all understand. To be fed like the
ravens and clothed like the grass of the field seemed
to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing, And I
often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.
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I knew that she believed in God and in the
promises of the Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to
forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness. I felt
almost like preaching to her, but I was too small
a child to do that, I well knew, so I
did the next best thing I could think of. I
sang hymns as if singing to myself while I meant
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them for her, sitting at the window with my book
and my knitting, while she was preparing dinner or supper
with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision
to which she had been accustomed. I would go from
him to him, selecting those which I thought would be
most comforting to her out of the many that my
memory book contained, and taking great care to pronounce the
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words distinctly. I was glad to observe that she listened
to come ye disconsolate, and how firm a foundation, and
that she grew more cheerful, though I did not feel
sure that my singing cheered her so much as some
happier thought that had come to her out of her
own heart. Nobody but my mother indeed would have called
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my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased,
I went on a little more confidently with some hymns
that I loved for their starry suggestions when marshaled on
the nightly plain and brightest and best of the suns
of the morning, and watchmen tell us of the the
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most beautiful picture in the Bible. To me, certainly, the
loveliest in the Old Testament had always been that one
painted by prophecy, of the time when wild and tame
creatures should live together in peace, and children should be
their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf poverty would be
pleasant and neighborly. Then, no doubt a little child among
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them leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft
sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness
of the world. Oh it would be so much better
than the Garden of Eden. Yes, and it would be
a great deal better, I thought, to live in the
millennium than even to die and go to heaven, although
so many people around me talked as if that were
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the most desirable thing of all. But I could never
understand why, if God sent us here, we should be
in haste to get away, even to go to a
pleasanter place. I was perplexed by a good many matters. Besides,
I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself.
But I did venture to ask about the resurrection. How
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it was that those who had died and gone straight
to heaven and had been singing there for thousands of
years could have any use for the dust to which
their bodies had returned, were they not already as alive
as they could be. I found that there were different
ideas of the resurrection among Orthodox people. Even then. I
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was told, however, that this was too deep a matter
for me, and so I ceased asking questions. But I
pondered the matter of death, What did it mean? The
Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than
any of the ministers did, and as usual, a poem
helped me. It was Pope's owed beginning with vital spark
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of heavenly flame, which I learned out of a reading book.
To die was to languish into life. That was the
meaning of it. And I love to repeat to myself
the words hark, they whisper, Angels say, sister spirit, come away.
The world recedes, it disappears, Heaven opens on my eyes,
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my ears with sounds seraphic ring. A hymn that I
learned a little later expressed to me the same satisfying thought.
For strangers into life we come, and dying is but
going home. The Apostle's words with which the song of
the dying Christian to his soul ends left the whole
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cloudy question lit up with sunshine to my childish thoughts.
O grave, where is thy victory? O death? Where is
thy sting? My father was dead, but that only meant
that he had gone to a better home than the
one he lived in with us, and by and bye
we should go home too. Meanwhile, the millennium was coming,
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and some people thought it was very near. And what
was the millennium? Why? The time when everybody on earth
would live just as they do in heaven, nobody would
be selfish, nobody would be unkind. No, not so much
as in a single thought, what a delightful world this
would be to live in. Then heaven itself could scarcely
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be much better. Perhaps people would not die at all,
but when the right time came, would slip quietly away
into heaven, just as Enoch did. My father had believed
in the near millennium. His very last writing in his
sick room was a penciled computation from the prophets of
a time when it would begin. The first minister who
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preached in our church, long before I was born, had
studied the subject much and had written books upon this
his favorite theme. The thought of it was continually breaking out,
like bloom and sunshine from the stern doctrines of the period.
One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal.
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Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves,
whether they wanted to or not? And what would be
done with the bad ones if there were any left.
I did not like to think of their being killed off.
And yet everybody must be good, or it would not
be a true millennium. It certainly would not matter much
who was rich and who was poor. If goodness and
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not money was the thing everybody cared for, Oh, if
the millennium would only begin now. I felt as if
it were hardly fair to me that I should not
be here during those happy thousand years when I wanted
to so much. But I had not lived even my
short life in the world without learning something of my
own faults and perversities. And when I saw that there
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was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart,
I had to conclude that it might be a great
way off after all. Yet the very thought of it
brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day and
by night. It was coming some time, and the people
who were in heaven would be as glad of it
as those who remained on earth. That it was a
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hard world for my mother and her children to live
in at present, I could not help seeing the older
members of the family found occupations by which the domestic
burdens were lifted a little, But with only the three
youngest to clothe and to keep at school, there was
still much more outgo than income, and my mother's discouragement
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every day increased. My eldest brother had gone to see
with a relative who was master of a merchant vessel
in the South American trade. His inclination led him that way.
It seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable business,
and my mother looked upon him as her future stay
and support. One day she came in among us children,
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looking strangely excited. I heard her tell someone afterwards that
she had just been to hear Father Taylor Preach, sailor's minister,
whose coming to our town must have been a rare occurrence.
His words had touched her personally, for he had spoken
to mothers whose first born had left them to venture
upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands. He had
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even given to the wanderer he described the name of
her own absent son, Benjamin. As she left the church,
she met a neighbor who informed her that the Brig
Mexican had arrived at Salem in trouble. It was the
vessel in which my brother had sailed only a short
time before, expecting to be absent for months. Pirates was
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the only word we children caught as she hastened away
from the house, not knowing whether her son was alive
or not. Fortunately, the news hardly reached the town before
my brother himself did. She met him in the street
and brought him home with her, forgetting all her anxieties
in her joy at his safety. The Mexican had been
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attacked on the high seas by the piratical craft Panda,
robbed of twenty thousand dollars in specie, set on fire,
and abandoned to her fate. With the crew fastened down
in the hold, one small skylight had accidentally been overlooked
by the freebooters. The captain discovered it, and making his
way through it to the deck, succeeded in putting out
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the fire. Else vessel and sailors would have sunk together
and their fate would never have been known. Breathlessly we
listened to whenever my brother would relate the story, which
he did not at all enjoy doing, for a cutlass
had been swung over his head and his life threatened
by the pirate's boatswain demanding more money after all had
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been taken. A Genoese messmate, Iachimo, shortened to plane jack
by the Mexican's crew, came to see my brother one day,
and at the dinner table he went through the whole
adventure in pantomime, which we children watched with wide eyed
terror and amusement, for there was some comedy mixed with
what had been so nearly a tragedy. And Jack made
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us see the very whites of the black cook's eyes,
who favored by his color, had hidden himself all except
that dilated whiteness between two great casks in the hold.
Jack himself had fallen through a trap door, was badly hurt,
and could not extricate himself. It was very ludicrous. Jack
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crept under the table to show us how he and
the cook made eyes at each other down there in
the darkness, not daring to speak. The pantomime was necessary,
for the Genoese had very little English at his command.
When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial,
my brother had the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the
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courtroom the ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life.
This boatswain and several others of the crew were executed
in Boston. The boy found his brief sailor experience quite
enough for him, and afterwards settled down quietly to the
trade of a carpenter. Changes thickened in the air around us,
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not the least among them was the burning of our
meetinghouse in which we had all been baptized. One Sunday morning,
we children were told when we woke that we could
not go to meeting that day because the church was
a heap of smoking ruins. It seemed to me almost
like the end of the world. During my father's life,
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a few years before my birth, his thoughts had been
turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the
banks of the Merrimac. He had once taken a journey
there with the possibility in his mind of making the
places home, his limited income furnishing no adequate promise of
a maintenance for his large family of daughters. From the beginning,
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Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety,
and all that was dear to the old fashioned New
Englander's heart. After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed
the direction his he had taken, and, seeing no other
opening for herself, she sold her small estate and moved
to Lowell with the intention of taking a corporation house
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for mill girl boarders. Some of the family objected, for
the old world traditions about factory life were anything but attractive,
and they were current in New England until the experiment
at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably
give their own character to their occupation. My mother had
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visited Lowell, and she was willing and glad, knowing all
about the place to make it our home. The change
involved a great deal of work. Borders signified a large house,
many beds, and an indefinite number of people. Such piles
of sewing accumulated before us. A sewing bee volunteered by
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the neighbors reduced the quantity a little, and our child
fingers had to take their part. But the seams of
those sheets did look to me as if they were
miles long. My sister Lyda and I had our stint
so much to do. Every day it was warm weather,
and that made it the more tedious, for we wanted
to be running about the fields we were so soon
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to leave. One day, in sheer desperation, we dragged a
sheet up with us into an apple tree in the
yard and sat and sewed there through the summer afternoon,
beguiling the irksomeness of our task by telling stories and
guessing riddles. It was hardest for me to leave the
garret in the garden. In the old houses, the garret
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was the children's castle, the rough rafters. It was always
an unfinished room, otherwise not a true garret. The music
of the rain on the roof, the worn sea chests
with their miscellaneous treasures, the blue roofed cradle that had
sheltered ten blue eyed babies, the tape looms and reels
and spinning wheels, the herbie smells, and the delightful dream corners.
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These could not be taken with us to the new home.
Wonderful people had looked out upon us from under those
garret eaves. Sindbad the sailor and Baron Munchausen had sometimes
strayed in and told us their unbelievable stories, and we
had there made acquaintance with the great Caliph Haroon al Rashid.
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To go away from the little garden was almost as bad.
Its lilacs and peonies were beautiful to me, And in
a corner of it was one tiny square of earth
that I called my own, where I was at liberty
to pull up my pinks and ladies delights every day
to see whether they had taken root, and where I
could give my lazy morning glory seeds a poke morning
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after morning to help them get up and begin their climb. Oh,
I should miss the garden very much. Indeed, it did
not take long to turn over the new leaf of
our home experience. One sunny day, three of us children,
my youngest sister, my brother John, and I took with
my mother the first stagecoach journey of our lives, across
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Lynfield Plains and over andover hills to the banks of
the Merrimac. We were set down before an empty house
in a yet unfinished brick block, where we watched for
the big wagon that was to bring our household goods.
It came at last, and the novelty of seeing our
old furniture settled in new rooms kept us from being homesick.
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One after another they appeared bedsteads, chairs, tables, and to me,
most welcome of all, the old mahogany secretary with brass
handle drawers that had always stood in the front room
at home. With it came the barrel full of books
that had filled its shelves, and they took their places
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as naturally as if they had always lived in this
strange town. There they all stood again, side by side
on their shelves, the dear, dull, good old volumes that
all my life I had tried in vain to take
a sincere Sabbathday interest in Scott's Commentaries on the Bible,
Hervey's Meditations, Young's Night Thoughts, Edward's on the Affections, and
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the writings of Baxter and Doddridge. Besides these, there were
bound volumes of the repository Tracts which I had read
and re read, and the delightfully miscellaneous Evangelicana, containing an
account of Gilbert Tennant's wonderful trance. Also the history of
the Spanish Inquisition, with some painfully realistic illustrations, a German dictionary,
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whose outlandish letters and words I like to puzzle myself over.
And a descriptive history of Hamburg, full of fine steal engravings,
which last two of three volumes my father had brought
with him from the countries to which he had sailed
in his seafaringaring days. A complete set of the Missionary Herald, unbound,
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filled the upper shelves. Other familiar articles journeyed with us.
The brass headed Shovel and Tongs that it had been
my special task to keep bright, the two card tables
which were as unacquainted as ourselves, with ace face and trump,
the two China mugs with their eighteenth century lady and
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gentlemen figures, curiosities brought from over the sea and reverently
laid away by my mother with her choicest relics in
the secretary desk, my father's miniature painted at Antwerp, a
treasure only shown occasionally to us children as a holiday treat.
And my mother's easy chair. I should have felt as
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if I lost her had that been left behind. The
earliest unexpressed ambition of my infancy had been to grow
up and wear a cap and sit in an easy chair,
knitting and look comfortable, just as my mother did. Filled
up with these things, the little one windowed sitting room
easily caught the home feeling and gave it back to us.
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Inanimate objects do gather into themselves something of the character
of those who live among them through association, and this
alone makes heirlooms valuable. They are family treasures because they
are part of the family life, full of memories and inspirations.
Bought are sold, they are nothing but old furniture. Nobody
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can buy the old associations and nobody who has really
felt how everything that has been in a home makes
part of it, can willingly bargain away the old things.
My mother never thought of disposing of her best furniture,
whatever her need. It traveled with her in every change
of her abiding place as long as she lived, so
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that to us children home seemed to accompany her wherever
she went, and remaining yet in the family, it often
brings back to me pleasant reminders of my childhood. No
other Bible seems quite so sacred to me as the
old family Bible, out of which my father used to
read when we were all gathered around him for worship.
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To turn its leaves and look at its pictures was
one of our few Sabbath Day indulgences, and I cannot
touch it now, except with feelings of profound reverence. For
the first time in our lives, my little sister and
I became pupils in a grammar school for both girls
and boys, taught by a man. I was put with
her into the sixth class, but was sent the very
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next day into the first. I did not belong in either,
but somewhere in between, and I was very uncomfortable with
my promotion for though the reading and spelling, and grammar
and geography were perfectly easy. I had never studied anything
but mental arithmetic, and did not know how to do
a sum. We had to show when called up to
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recite a slateful of sums done and proved. No explanations
were ever asked of us. The girl who sat next
to me saw my distress and offered to do my
sums for me. I accepted her proposal, feeling, however, that
I was a miserable cheat. But I was afraid of
the master, who was tall and gaunt, and used to
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stalk across the schoolroom, right over the desktops, to find
out if there was any mischief going on. Once, having
caught a boy annoying a seat mate with a pin,
he punished the offender by pursuing him around the schoolroom,
sticking a pin into his shoulder whenever he could overtake him.
And he had a fearful leather strap which was sometimes
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used even upon the shrinking palm of a little girl.
If he should find out that I was a pretender
and deceiver, as I knew that I was, I could
not guess what might happen to me. He never did, however,
I was unmolested in the ignorance, which I deserved. But
I never liked the girl who did my sums, and
I fancied she had a decided contempt for me. There
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was a friendly looking boy always sitting at the master's desk.
They called him the Monitor. It was his place to
assist scholars who were in trouble about their lessons, but
I was too bashful to speak to him, or to
ask assistance of anybody. I think that nobody learned much
under that regime, and the whole school system was soon
after entirely reorganized. Our house was quickly filled with a
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large feminine family. As a child, the gulf between little
girlhood and young womanhood had always looked to me very wide.
I supposed we should get across it by some sudden jump,
by and by. But among these new companions of all
ages from fifteen to thirty years, we slipped into womanhood
without knowing when or how. Most of my mother's boarders
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were from New Hampshire and Vermont, and there was a fresh,
breezy sociability about them, which made them seem almost like
a different race of beings from any we children had
hitherto known. We helped a little about the housework before
and after school, making beds, trimming lamps, and washing dishes.
The heaviest work was done by a strong Irish girl,
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my mother, always attending to the cooking herself. She was, however,
a better caterer than the circumstances required or permitted. She
liked to make nice things for the table, and, having
been accustomed to an abundant supply, could never learn to economize.
At a dollar and a quarter a week for board,
the price allowed for mill girls by the corporations, great
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care and expenditure was necessary. It was not in my
mother's nature closely to calculate costs, and in this way
there came to be a continually increasing leak in the
family purse. The older members of the family did everything
they could, but it was not enough. I heard it
said one day, in a distressed tone, the children will
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have to leave school and go into the mill. There
were many pros and cons between my mother and sisters
before this was positively decided. The mill agent did not
want to take us two little girls, but consented on
condition we should be sure to attend school the full
number of months prescribed each year. I the younger one
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was then between eleven and twelve years old. I listened
to all that was said about it very much, fearing
that I should not be permitted to do the coveted work,
for the feeling had already frequently come to me that
I was the one too many in the overcrowded family nest.
Once before we left her old home, I had heard
a neighbor condoling with my mother because there were so
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many of us, and her emphatic reply had been a
great relief to my mind. There isn't one more that
I want. I could not spare a single one of
my children, but her difficulties were increasing, and I thought
it would be a pleasure to feel that I was
not a trouble or burden or expense to anybody. So
I went to my first day's work in the mill
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with a light heart. The novelty of it made it
seem easy, and it really was not hard, just to
change the bobbins on the spinning frames every three quarters
of an hour or so with half a dozen other
little girls who were doing the same thing. When I
came back at night, the family began to pity me
for my long, tiresome day's work, but I laughed and said, why,
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it is nothing but fun. It is just like play,
And for a little while it was only a new amusement.
I liked it better than going to school and making
believe I was learning when I was not. And there
was a great deal of play mixed with it. We
were not occupied. More than half the time. The intervals
were spent frolicking around among the spinning frames, teasing and
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talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games
and stories in a corner, or exploring, with the overseers permission,
the mysteries of the carting room, the dressing room, and
the weaving room. I never cared much for machinery. The
buzzing and hissing and whizzing of pulleys and rollers and
spindles and fliers around me often grew tiresome. I could
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not see into their complications or feel interested in them.
But in a room below us, we were sometimes allowed
to peer in through a sort of blind door. At
the great water wheel that carried the works of the
whole mill, it was so huge that we could only
watch a few of its spokes at a time, and
part of its dripping rim moving with a slow, measured
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strength through the darkness that shut it in. It impressed
me with something of the awe which comes to us
in thinking of the great power which keeps the mechanism
of the universe in motion. Even now, the remembrance of
its large, mysterious movement, in which every little motion of
every noisy little wheel was involved, brings back to me
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a verse from one of my favorite hymns. Our lives,
through various scenes are drawn and vexed by trifling cares,
while Thine eternal thought moves on thy undisturbed affairs. There
were compensations for being shut into daily toil so early.
The mill itself had its lessons for us, but it
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was not, and could not be, the right sort of
life for a child, and we were happy in the
knowledge that, at the longest our employment was only to
be temporary. When I took my next three months at
the grammar school, everything there was changed, and I too
was changed. The teachers were kind and thorough in their instruction,
and my mind seemed to have been plowed up during
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that year of work, so that knowledge took root in
it easily. It was a great delight to me to study,
and at the end of the three months. The master
told me that I was prepared for high school, but
alas I could not go. The little money I could
earn one dollar a week. Besides, the price of my
board was needed in the family, and I must return
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to the mill. It was a severe disappointment to me,
though I did not say so at home. I did
not at all accept the conclusion of a neighbor whom
I heard talking about it with my mother. His daughter
was going to the high school, and my mother was
telling him how sorry she was that I could not go. Oh,
he said, in a soothing tone, My girl hasn't got
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any such head piece as yours has. Your girl doesn't
need to go. Of course, I knew that whatever sort
of a head piece I had, I did need and
want just that very opportunity to study. I think the
resolution was then formed inwardly that I would go to
school again some time. Whatever happened, I went back to
my work, but now without enthusiasm. I had looked through
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an open door that I was not willing to see
shut upon me. I began to reflect upon life rather
seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was
I here for? What could I make of myself. Must
I submit to be carried along with the current and
do just what everybody else did? No, I knew I
should not do that, for there was a certain myself
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who was always starting up with her own original plan
or aspiration before me, and who was quite indifferent as
to what people generally thought. Well, I would find out
what this myself was good for and that she should be.
It was but the presumption of extreme youth. How gladly
would I know, now, after all these long years, just
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why I was sent into the world, and whether I
have in any degree fulfilled the purpose of my being.
In the older times, it was seldom said to little girls,
as it always has been said to boys, that they
ought to have some definite plan while they were children
what to be and do when they were grown up.
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There was usually but one path open before them, to
become good wives and housekeepers, and the ambition of most
girls was to follow their mother's footsteps in this direction,
a natural and laudable ambition. But girls as well as
boys must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities.
Must I have desired to cultivate and make use of
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their individual powers? When I was growing up they had
already begun to be encouraged to do so. We were
often told that it was our duty to develop any
talent we might possess, or at least to learn how
to do some one thing which the world needed or
which would make it a pleasanter world. When I thought
what I should best like to do, my first dream,
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almost a baby's dream about it, was that it would
be a fine thing to be a school teacher like
Aunt Hannah. Afterward, when I heard that there were artists,
I wished I could sometime be one. A slate and
pencil to draw pictures was my first request whenever a
day's ailment kept me at home from school, and I
rather enjoyed being a little ill for the sake of
amusing myself in that way. The wish grew up with me.
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But there were no good drawing teachers in those days,
and if there had been, the cost of instruction would
have been beyond the family means. My sister Emily, however,
who saw my taste and shared it herself, did her
best to assay, furnishing me with pencil and paper and
paint box. If I could only make a rose bloom
on paper, I thought I should be happy, or if
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I could at least succeed in drawing the outline of
winter stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky.
It seemed to me that I should be willing to
spend years in trying. I did try a little, and
very often. Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher. His
sketches on the bedroom window pane and cold mornings were
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my ideal studies of Swiss scenery. Crags and peaks, and
chalets and fir trees and graceful tracery of ferns like
those that grew in the woods where we went huckleberrying,
all blended together by his touch of enchantment. I wondered
whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely work.
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The taste has followed me all my life through but
I could never indulge it except as a recreation. I
was not to be an artist, and I'm ither glad
that I was hindered, for I had even stronger inclinations
in other directions, and art, really, noble art requires the
entire devotion of a lifetime. I seldom thought seriously of
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becoming an author, although it seemed to me that anybody
who had written a book would have a right to
feel very proud. But I believed that a person must
be exceedingly wise before presuming to attempt it. Although now
and then I thought I could feel ideas growing in
my mind that it might be worth while to put
into a book if I lived and studied until I
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was forty or fifty years old. I wrote my little
verses to be sure, but that was nothing. They just grew.
They were the same as breathing or singing. I could
not help writing them, and I thought and dreamed a
great many that were never put on paper. They seemed
to fly into my mind and away again, like birds
going with a carol through the air. It seemed strange
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to me that people should notice them, or should think
my writing verses anything peculiar, For I supposed that they
were in everybody's mind, just as they were in mine,
and that anybody could write them who chose. One day
I heard a relative say to my mother, keep what
she writes till she grows up, and perhaps she will
get money for it. I have heard of someone who
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earned a thousand dollars by writing poetry. It sounded so
absurd to me money for writing verses. One dollar would
be as ridiculous as a thousand. I should as soon
have thought of being paid for thinking. My mother, fortunately
was sensible enough never to flatter me or let me
be flattered about my scribbling. It never was allowed to
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hinder any work I had to do. I crept away
into a corner to write what came into my head,
just as I ran away to play, and I looked
upon it only as my most agreeable amusement, never thinking
of preserving anything which did not of itself stay in
my memory. This, too, was well for the time did
not come when I could afford to look upon verse
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writing as an occupation. Through my life, it has only
been permitted to me as an aside from other more
pressing employments. Whether I should have written better verses had
circumstances left me free to do what I chose, It
is impossible now to know. All My thoughts about my
future set me back to my aunt Hannah and my
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first infantile idea of being a teacher. I foresaw that
I should be that before I could be or do
anything else. It had been impressed upon me that I
must make myself useful in the world, and certainly one
could be useful who could keep school as Aunt Hannah did.
I did not see anything else for a girl to
do who wanted to use her brains as well as
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her hands. So the plan of preparing myself to be
a teacher gradually and almost unconsciously shaped itself in my
mind as the only practicable one I could earn my
living in that way and all important consideration. I liked
the idea of self support, but I would have chosen
some artistic or beautiful work if I could. I had
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no especial aptitude for teaching and no absorbing wish to
be a teacher, but it seemed to me that I
might succeed if I tried. What I did like about
it was that one must know something first. I must
acquire knowledge before I could impart it, and that was
just what I wanted. I could be a student wherever
I was, and whatever else I had to be or do,
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and I would. I knew I should write. I could
not help doing that, for my hands seemed instinctively to
move toward pen and paper in moments of leisure. But
to write anything worth while I must have mental cultivation.
So in preparing myself to teach, I could also be
preparing myself to write. This was the plan that indefinitely
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shaped itself in my mind as I returned to my
work in the spinning room, and which I followed out
not without many breaks, in hindrances and neglects, during the
next six or seven years to learn all I could
so that I should be fit to teach or to write.
As the way opened, and it turned out that fifteen
or twenty of my best years were given to teaching.
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End of chapter seven, Beginning to Work, read by Dana Kovar, Tampa, Florida,
April second, twenty twenty three.
A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom. This is a
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LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Read by Dana Kovar, A New England Girlhood, Chapter seven,
Beginning to work. Though I had looked upon my father's
still pale face in his coffin, the impression that left
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upon me was of sleep, more peaceful and sacred than
common slumber. Yet only sleep. My dreams of him were,
for a long time so vivid that I would say
to myself, he was here yesterday, he will be here
again tomorrow, with a feeling that amounted to expectation. We
missed him, we children large and small, who made up
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the yet untrained home crew, as a ship misses the
man at the helm, his grave, clear perception of what
was best for us, His brief words that decided once
for all the worse we were to take, had been
far more to us than we knew. It was hardest
of all for my mother, who had been accustomed to
depend entirely upon him, left with her eight children, the eldest,
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a boy of eighteen years and with no property, except
the roof that sheltered us in a small strip of land.
Her situation was full of perplexities which we little ones
could not at all understand. To be fed like the
ravens and clothed like the grass of the field seemed
to me, for one, a perfectly natural thing, And I
often wondered why my mother was so fretted and anxious.
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I knew that she believed in God and in the
promises of the Bible, and yet she seemed sometimes to
forget everything but her troubles and her helplessness. I felt
almost like preaching to her, but I was too small
a child to do that, I well knew, so I
did the next best thing I could think of. I
sang hymns as if singing to myself while I meant
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them for her, sitting at the window with my book
and my knitting, while she was preparing dinner or supper
with a depressed air because she missed the abundant provision
to which she had been accustomed. I would go from
him to him, selecting those which I thought would be
most comforting to her out of the many that my
memory book contained, and taking great care to pronounce the
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words distinctly. I was glad to observe that she listened
to come ye disconsolate, and how firm a foundation, and
that she grew more cheerful, though I did not feel
sure that my singing cheered her so much as some
happier thought that had come to her out of her
own heart. Nobody but my mother indeed would have called
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my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased,
I went on a little more confidently with some hymns
that I loved for their starry suggestions when marshaled on
the nightly plain and brightest and best of the suns
of the morning, and watchmen tell us of the the
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most beautiful picture in the Bible. To me, certainly, the
loveliest in the Old Testament had always been that one
painted by prophecy, of the time when wild and tame
creatures should live together in peace, and children should be
their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf poverty would be
pleasant and neighborly. Then, no doubt a little child among
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them leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft
sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness
of the world. Oh it would be so much better
than the Garden of Eden. Yes, and it would be
a great deal better, I thought, to live in the
millennium than even to die and go to heaven, although
so many people around me talked as if that were
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the most desirable thing of all. But I could never
understand why, if God sent us here, we should be
in haste to get away, even to go to a
pleasanter place. I was perplexed by a good many matters. Besides,
I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself.
But I did venture to ask about the resurrection. How
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it was that those who had died and gone straight
to heaven and had been singing there for thousands of
years could have any use for the dust to which
their bodies had returned, were they not already as alive
as they could be. I found that there were different
ideas of the resurrection among Orthodox people. Even then. I
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was told, however, that this was too deep a matter
for me, and so I ceased asking questions. But I
pondered the matter of death, What did it mean? The
Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than
any of the ministers did, and as usual, a poem
helped me. It was Pope's owed beginning with vital spark
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of heavenly flame, which I learned out of a reading book.
To die was to languish into life. That was the
meaning of it. And I love to repeat to myself
the words hark, they whisper, Angels say, sister spirit, come away.
The world recedes, it disappears, Heaven opens on my eyes,
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my ears with sounds seraphic ring. A hymn that I
learned a little later expressed to me the same satisfying thought.
For strangers into life we come, and dying is but
going home. The Apostle's words with which the song of
the dying Christian to his soul ends left the whole
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cloudy question lit up with sunshine to my childish thoughts.
O grave, where is thy victory? O death? Where is
thy sting? My father was dead, but that only meant
that he had gone to a better home than the
one he lived in with us, and by and bye
we should go home too. Meanwhile, the millennium was coming,
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and some people thought it was very near. And what
was the millennium? Why? The time when everybody on earth
would live just as they do in heaven, nobody would
be selfish, nobody would be unkind. No, not so much
as in a single thought, what a delightful world this
would be to live in. Then heaven itself could scarcely
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be much better. Perhaps people would not die at all,
but when the right time came, would slip quietly away
into heaven, just as Enoch did. My father had believed
in the near millennium. His very last writing in his
sick room was a penciled computation from the prophets of
a time when it would begin. The first minister who
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preached in our church, long before I was born, had
studied the subject much and had written books upon this
his favorite theme. The thought of it was continually breaking out,
like bloom and sunshine from the stern doctrines of the period.
One question in this connection puzzled me a good deal.
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Were people going to be made good in spite of themselves,
whether they wanted to or not? And what would be
done with the bad ones if there were any left.
I did not like to think of their being killed off.
And yet everybody must be good, or it would not
be a true millennium. It certainly would not matter much
who was rich and who was poor. If goodness and
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not money was the thing everybody cared for, Oh, if
the millennium would only begin now. I felt as if
it were hardly fair to me that I should not
be here during those happy thousand years when I wanted
to so much. But I had not lived even my
short life in the world without learning something of my
own faults and perversities. And when I saw that there
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was no sign of an approaching millennium in my heart,
I had to conclude that it might be a great
way off after all. Yet the very thought of it
brought warmth and illumination to my dreams by day and
by night. It was coming some time, and the people
who were in heaven would be as glad of it
as those who remained on earth. That it was a
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hard world for my mother and her children to live
in at present, I could not help seeing the older
members of the family found occupations by which the domestic
burdens were lifted a little, But with only the three
youngest to clothe and to keep at school, there was
still much more outgo than income, and my mother's discouragement
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every day increased. My eldest brother had gone to see
with a relative who was master of a merchant vessel
in the South American trade. His inclination led him that way.
It seemed to open before him a prospect of profitable business,
and my mother looked upon him as her future stay
and support. One day she came in among us children,
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looking strangely excited. I heard her tell someone afterwards that
she had just been to hear Father Taylor Preach, sailor's minister,
whose coming to our town must have been a rare occurrence.
His words had touched her personally, for he had spoken
to mothers whose first born had left them to venture
upon strange seas and to seek unknown lands. He had
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even given to the wanderer he described the name of
her own absent son, Benjamin. As she left the church,
she met a neighbor who informed her that the Brig
Mexican had arrived at Salem in trouble. It was the
vessel in which my brother had sailed only a short
time before, expecting to be absent for months. Pirates was
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the only word we children caught as she hastened away
from the house, not knowing whether her son was alive
or not. Fortunately, the news hardly reached the town before
my brother himself did. She met him in the street
and brought him home with her, forgetting all her anxieties
in her joy at his safety. The Mexican had been
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attacked on the high seas by the piratical craft Panda,
robbed of twenty thousand dollars in specie, set on fire,
and abandoned to her fate. With the crew fastened down
in the hold, one small skylight had accidentally been overlooked
by the freebooters. The captain discovered it, and making his
way through it to the deck, succeeded in putting out
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the fire. Else vessel and sailors would have sunk together
and their fate would never have been known. Breathlessly we
listened to whenever my brother would relate the story, which
he did not at all enjoy doing, for a cutlass
had been swung over his head and his life threatened
by the pirate's boatswain demanding more money after all had
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been taken. A Genoese messmate, Iachimo, shortened to plane jack
by the Mexican's crew, came to see my brother one day,
and at the dinner table he went through the whole
adventure in pantomime, which we children watched with wide eyed
terror and amusement, for there was some comedy mixed with
what had been so nearly a tragedy. And Jack made
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us see the very whites of the black cook's eyes,
who favored by his color, had hidden himself all except
that dilated whiteness between two great casks in the hold.
Jack himself had fallen through a trap door, was badly hurt,
and could not extricate himself. It was very ludicrous. Jack
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crept under the table to show us how he and
the cook made eyes at each other down there in
the darkness, not daring to speak. The pantomime was necessary,
for the Genoese had very little English at his command.
When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial,
my brother had the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the
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courtroom the ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life.
This boatswain and several others of the crew were executed
in Boston. The boy found his brief sailor experience quite
enough for him, and afterwards settled down quietly to the
trade of a carpenter. Changes thickened in the air around us,
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not the least among them was the burning of our
meetinghouse in which we had all been baptized. One Sunday morning,
we children were told when we woke that we could
not go to meeting that day because the church was
a heap of smoking ruins. It seemed to me almost
like the end of the world. During my father's life,
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a few years before my birth, his thoughts had been
turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the
banks of the Merrimac. He had once taken a journey
there with the possibility in his mind of making the
places home, his limited income furnishing no adequate promise of
a maintenance for his large family of daughters. From the beginning,
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Lowell had a high reputation for good order, morality, piety,
and all that was dear to the old fashioned New
Englander's heart. After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed
the direction his he had taken, and, seeing no other
opening for herself, she sold her small estate and moved
to Lowell with the intention of taking a corporation house
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for mill girl boarders. Some of the family objected, for
the old world traditions about factory life were anything but attractive,
and they were current in New England until the experiment
at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably
give their own character to their occupation. My mother had
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visited Lowell, and she was willing and glad, knowing all
about the place to make it our home. The change
involved a great deal of work. Borders signified a large house,
many beds, and an indefinite number of people. Such piles
of sewing accumulated before us. A sewing bee volunteered by
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the neighbors reduced the quantity a little, and our child
fingers had to take their part. But the seams of
those sheets did look to me as if they were
miles long. My sister Lyda and I had our stint
so much to do. Every day it was warm weather,
and that made it the more tedious, for we wanted
to be running about the fields we were so soon
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to leave. One day, in sheer desperation, we dragged a
sheet up with us into an apple tree in the
yard and sat and sewed there through the summer afternoon,
beguiling the irksomeness of our task by telling stories and
guessing riddles. It was hardest for me to leave the
garret in the garden. In the old houses, the garret
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was the children's castle, the rough rafters. It was always
an unfinished room, otherwise not a true garret. The music
of the rain on the roof, the worn sea chests
with their miscellaneous treasures, the blue roofed cradle that had
sheltered ten blue eyed babies, the tape looms and reels
and spinning wheels, the herbie smells, and the delightful dream corners.
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These could not be taken with us to the new home.
Wonderful people had looked out upon us from under those
garret eaves. Sindbad the sailor and Baron Munchausen had sometimes
strayed in and told us their unbelievable stories, and we
had there made acquaintance with the great Caliph Haroon al Rashid.
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To go away from the little garden was almost as bad.
Its lilacs and peonies were beautiful to me, And in
a corner of it was one tiny square of earth
that I called my own, where I was at liberty
to pull up my pinks and ladies delights every day
to see whether they had taken root, and where I
could give my lazy morning glory seeds a poke morning
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after morning to help them get up and begin their climb. Oh,
I should miss the garden very much. Indeed, it did
not take long to turn over the new leaf of
our home experience. One sunny day, three of us children,
my youngest sister, my brother John, and I took with
my mother the first stagecoach journey of our lives, across
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Lynfield Plains and over andover hills to the banks of
the Merrimac. We were set down before an empty house
in a yet unfinished brick block, where we watched for
the big wagon that was to bring our household goods.
It came at last, and the novelty of seeing our
old furniture settled in new rooms kept us from being homesick.
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One after another they appeared bedsteads, chairs, tables, and to me,
most welcome of all, the old mahogany secretary with brass
handle drawers that had always stood in the front room
at home. With it came the barrel full of books
that had filled its shelves, and they took their places
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as naturally as if they had always lived in this
strange town. There they all stood again, side by side
on their shelves, the dear, dull, good old volumes that
all my life I had tried in vain to take
a sincere Sabbathday interest in Scott's Commentaries on the Bible,
Hervey's Meditations, Young's Night Thoughts, Edward's on the Affections, and
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the writings of Baxter and Doddridge. Besides these, there were
bound volumes of the repository Tracts which I had read
and re read, and the delightfully miscellaneous Evangelicana, containing an
account of Gilbert Tennant's wonderful trance. Also the history of
the Spanish Inquisition, with some painfully realistic illustrations, a German dictionary,
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whose outlandish letters and words I like to puzzle myself over.
And a descriptive history of Hamburg, full of fine steal engravings,
which last two of three volumes my father had brought
with him from the countries to which he had sailed
in his seafaringaring days. A complete set of the Missionary Herald, unbound,
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filled the upper shelves. Other familiar articles journeyed with us.
The brass headed Shovel and Tongs that it had been
my special task to keep bright, the two card tables
which were as unacquainted as ourselves, with ace face and trump,
the two China mugs with their eighteenth century lady and
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gentlemen figures, curiosities brought from over the sea and reverently
laid away by my mother with her choicest relics in
the secretary desk, my father's miniature painted at Antwerp, a
treasure only shown occasionally to us children as a holiday treat.
And my mother's easy chair. I should have felt as
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if I lost her had that been left behind. The
earliest unexpressed ambition of my infancy had been to grow
up and wear a cap and sit in an easy chair,
knitting and look comfortable, just as my mother did. Filled
up with these things, the little one windowed sitting room
easily caught the home feeling and gave it back to us.
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Inanimate objects do gather into themselves something of the character
of those who live among them through association, and this
alone makes heirlooms valuable. They are family treasures because they
are part of the family life, full of memories and inspirations.
Bought are sold, they are nothing but old furniture. Nobody
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can buy the old associations and nobody who has really
felt how everything that has been in a home makes
part of it, can willingly bargain away the old things.
My mother never thought of disposing of her best furniture,
whatever her need. It traveled with her in every change
of her abiding place as long as she lived, so
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that to us children home seemed to accompany her wherever
she went, and remaining yet in the family, it often
brings back to me pleasant reminders of my childhood. No
other Bible seems quite so sacred to me as the
old family Bible, out of which my father used to
read when we were all gathered around him for worship.
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To turn its leaves and look at its pictures was
one of our few Sabbath Day indulgences, and I cannot
touch it now, except with feelings of profound reverence. For
the first time in our lives, my little sister and
I became pupils in a grammar school for both girls
and boys, taught by a man. I was put with
her into the sixth class, but was sent the very
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next day into the first. I did not belong in either,
but somewhere in between, and I was very uncomfortable with
my promotion for though the reading and spelling, and grammar
and geography were perfectly easy. I had never studied anything
but mental arithmetic, and did not know how to do
a sum. We had to show when called up to
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recite a slateful of sums done and proved. No explanations
were ever asked of us. The girl who sat next
to me saw my distress and offered to do my
sums for me. I accepted her proposal, feeling, however, that
I was a miserable cheat. But I was afraid of
the master, who was tall and gaunt, and used to
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stalk across the schoolroom, right over the desktops, to find
out if there was any mischief going on. Once, having
caught a boy annoying a seat mate with a pin,
he punished the offender by pursuing him around the schoolroom,
sticking a pin into his shoulder whenever he could overtake him.
And he had a fearful leather strap which was sometimes
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used even upon the shrinking palm of a little girl.
If he should find out that I was a pretender
and deceiver, as I knew that I was, I could
not guess what might happen to me. He never did, however,
I was unmolested in the ignorance, which I deserved. But
I never liked the girl who did my sums, and
I fancied she had a decided contempt for me. There
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was a friendly looking boy always sitting at the master's desk.
They called him the Monitor. It was his place to
assist scholars who were in trouble about their lessons, but
I was too bashful to speak to him, or to
ask assistance of anybody. I think that nobody learned much
under that regime, and the whole school system was soon
after entirely reorganized. Our house was quickly filled with a
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large feminine family. As a child, the gulf between little
girlhood and young womanhood had always looked to me very wide.
I supposed we should get across it by some sudden jump,
by and by. But among these new companions of all
ages from fifteen to thirty years, we slipped into womanhood
without knowing when or how. Most of my mother's boarders
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were from New Hampshire and Vermont, and there was a fresh,
breezy sociability about them, which made them seem almost like
a different race of beings from any we children had
hitherto known. We helped a little about the housework before
and after school, making beds, trimming lamps, and washing dishes.
The heaviest work was done by a strong Irish girl,
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my mother, always attending to the cooking herself. She was, however,
a better caterer than the circumstances required or permitted. She
liked to make nice things for the table, and, having
been accustomed to an abundant supply, could never learn to economize.
At a dollar and a quarter a week for board,
the price allowed for mill girls by the corporations, great
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care and expenditure was necessary. It was not in my
mother's nature closely to calculate costs, and in this way
there came to be a continually increasing leak in the
family purse. The older members of the family did everything
they could, but it was not enough. I heard it
said one day, in a distressed tone, the children will
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have to leave school and go into the mill. There
were many pros and cons between my mother and sisters
before this was positively decided. The mill agent did not
want to take us two little girls, but consented on
condition we should be sure to attend school the full
number of months prescribed each year. I the younger one
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was then between eleven and twelve years old. I listened
to all that was said about it very much, fearing
that I should not be permitted to do the coveted work,
for the feeling had already frequently come to me that
I was the one too many in the overcrowded family nest.
Once before we left her old home, I had heard
a neighbor condoling with my mother because there were so
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many of us, and her emphatic reply had been a
great relief to my mind. There isn't one more that
I want. I could not spare a single one of
my children, but her difficulties were increasing, and I thought
it would be a pleasure to feel that I was
not a trouble or burden or expense to anybody. So
I went to my first day's work in the mill
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with a light heart. The novelty of it made it
seem easy, and it really was not hard, just to
change the bobbins on the spinning frames every three quarters
of an hour or so with half a dozen other
little girls who were doing the same thing. When I
came back at night, the family began to pity me
for my long, tiresome day's work, but I laughed and said, why,
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it is nothing but fun. It is just like play,
And for a little while it was only a new amusement.
I liked it better than going to school and making
believe I was learning when I was not. And there
was a great deal of play mixed with it. We
were not occupied. More than half the time. The intervals
were spent frolicking around among the spinning frames, teasing and
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talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with games
and stories in a corner, or exploring, with the overseers permission,
the mysteries of the carting room, the dressing room, and
the weaving room. I never cared much for machinery. The
buzzing and hissing and whizzing of pulleys and rollers and
spindles and fliers around me often grew tiresome. I could
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not see into their complications or feel interested in them.
But in a room below us, we were sometimes allowed
to peer in through a sort of blind door. At
the great water wheel that carried the works of the
whole mill, it was so huge that we could only
watch a few of its spokes at a time, and
part of its dripping rim moving with a slow, measured
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strength through the darkness that shut it in. It impressed
me with something of the awe which comes to us
in thinking of the great power which keeps the mechanism
of the universe in motion. Even now, the remembrance of
its large, mysterious movement, in which every little motion of
every noisy little wheel was involved, brings back to me
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a verse from one of my favorite hymns. Our lives,
through various scenes are drawn and vexed by trifling cares,
while Thine eternal thought moves on thy undisturbed affairs. There
were compensations for being shut into daily toil so early.
The mill itself had its lessons for us, but it
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was not, and could not be, the right sort of
life for a child, and we were happy in the
knowledge that, at the longest our employment was only to
be temporary. When I took my next three months at
the grammar school, everything there was changed, and I too
was changed. The teachers were kind and thorough in their instruction,
and my mind seemed to have been plowed up during
(27:29):
that year of work, so that knowledge took root in
it easily. It was a great delight to me to study,
and at the end of the three months. The master
told me that I was prepared for high school, but
alas I could not go. The little money I could
earn one dollar a week. Besides, the price of my
board was needed in the family, and I must return
(27:51):
to the mill. It was a severe disappointment to me,
though I did not say so at home. I did
not at all accept the conclusion of a neighbor whom
I heard talking about it with my mother. His daughter
was going to the high school, and my mother was
telling him how sorry she was that I could not go. Oh,
he said, in a soothing tone, My girl hasn't got
(28:12):
any such head piece as yours has. Your girl doesn't
need to go. Of course, I knew that whatever sort
of a head piece I had, I did need and
want just that very opportunity to study. I think the
resolution was then formed inwardly that I would go to
school again some time. Whatever happened, I went back to
my work, but now without enthusiasm. I had looked through
(28:35):
an open door that I was not willing to see
shut upon me. I began to reflect upon life rather
seriously for a girl of twelve or thirteen. What was
I here for? What could I make of myself. Must
I submit to be carried along with the current and
do just what everybody else did? No, I knew I
should not do that, for there was a certain myself
(28:59):
who was always starting up with her own original plan
or aspiration before me, and who was quite indifferent as
to what people generally thought. Well, I would find out
what this myself was good for and that she should be.
It was but the presumption of extreme youth. How gladly
would I know, now, after all these long years, just
(29:20):
why I was sent into the world, and whether I
have in any degree fulfilled the purpose of my being.
In the older times, it was seldom said to little girls,
as it always has been said to boys, that they
ought to have some definite plan while they were children
what to be and do when they were grown up.
(29:40):
There was usually but one path open before them, to
become good wives and housekeepers, and the ambition of most
girls was to follow their mother's footsteps in this direction,
a natural and laudable ambition. But girls as well as
boys must often have been conscious of their own peculiar capabilities.
Must I have desired to cultivate and make use of
(30:02):
their individual powers? When I was growing up they had
already begun to be encouraged to do so. We were
often told that it was our duty to develop any
talent we might possess, or at least to learn how
to do some one thing which the world needed or
which would make it a pleasanter world. When I thought
what I should best like to do, my first dream,
(30:24):
almost a baby's dream about it, was that it would
be a fine thing to be a school teacher like
Aunt Hannah. Afterward, when I heard that there were artists,
I wished I could sometime be one. A slate and
pencil to draw pictures was my first request whenever a
day's ailment kept me at home from school, and I
rather enjoyed being a little ill for the sake of
amusing myself in that way. The wish grew up with me.
(30:47):
But there were no good drawing teachers in those days,
and if there had been, the cost of instruction would
have been beyond the family means. My sister Emily, however,
who saw my taste and shared it herself, did her
best to assay, furnishing me with pencil and paper and
paint box. If I could only make a rose bloom
on paper, I thought I should be happy, or if
(31:09):
I could at least succeed in drawing the outline of
winter stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky.
It seemed to me that I should be willing to
spend years in trying. I did try a little, and
very often. Jack Frost was my most inspiring teacher. His
sketches on the bedroom window pane and cold mornings were
(31:30):
my ideal studies of Swiss scenery. Crags and peaks, and
chalets and fir trees and graceful tracery of ferns like
those that grew in the woods where we went huckleberrying,
all blended together by his touch of enchantment. I wondered
whether human fingers ever succeeded in imitating that lovely work.
(31:51):
The taste has followed me all my life through but
I could never indulge it except as a recreation. I
was not to be an artist, and I'm ither glad
that I was hindered, for I had even stronger inclinations
in other directions, and art, really, noble art requires the
entire devotion of a lifetime. I seldom thought seriously of
(32:14):
becoming an author, although it seemed to me that anybody
who had written a book would have a right to
feel very proud. But I believed that a person must
be exceedingly wise before presuming to attempt it. Although now
and then I thought I could feel ideas growing in
my mind that it might be worth while to put
into a book if I lived and studied until I
(32:35):
was forty or fifty years old. I wrote my little
verses to be sure, but that was nothing. They just grew.
They were the same as breathing or singing. I could
not help writing them, and I thought and dreamed a
great many that were never put on paper. They seemed
to fly into my mind and away again, like birds
going with a carol through the air. It seemed strange
(32:58):
to me that people should notice them, or should think
my writing verses anything peculiar, For I supposed that they
were in everybody's mind, just as they were in mine,
and that anybody could write them who chose. One day
I heard a relative say to my mother, keep what
she writes till she grows up, and perhaps she will
get money for it. I have heard of someone who
(33:20):
earned a thousand dollars by writing poetry. It sounded so
absurd to me money for writing verses. One dollar would
be as ridiculous as a thousand. I should as soon
have thought of being paid for thinking. My mother, fortunately
was sensible enough never to flatter me or let me
be flattered about my scribbling. It never was allowed to
(33:43):
hinder any work I had to do. I crept away
into a corner to write what came into my head,
just as I ran away to play, and I looked
upon it only as my most agreeable amusement, never thinking
of preserving anything which did not of itself stay in
my memory. This, too, was well for the time did
not come when I could afford to look upon verse
(34:03):
writing as an occupation. Through my life, it has only
been permitted to me as an aside from other more
pressing employments. Whether I should have written better verses had
circumstances left me free to do what I chose, It
is impossible now to know. All My thoughts about my
future set me back to my aunt Hannah and my
(34:24):
first infantile idea of being a teacher. I foresaw that
I should be that before I could be or do
anything else. It had been impressed upon me that I
must make myself useful in the world, and certainly one
could be useful who could keep school as Aunt Hannah did.
I did not see anything else for a girl to
do who wanted to use her brains as well as
(34:46):
her hands. So the plan of preparing myself to be
a teacher gradually and almost unconsciously shaped itself in my
mind as the only practicable one I could earn my
living in that way and all important consideration. I liked
the idea of self support, but I would have chosen
some artistic or beautiful work if I could. I had
(35:09):
no especial aptitude for teaching and no absorbing wish to
be a teacher, but it seemed to me that I
might succeed if I tried. What I did like about
it was that one must know something first. I must
acquire knowledge before I could impart it, and that was
just what I wanted. I could be a student wherever
I was, and whatever else I had to be or do,
(35:32):
and I would. I knew I should write. I could
not help doing that, for my hands seemed instinctively to
move toward pen and paper in moments of leisure. But
to write anything worth while I must have mental cultivation.
So in preparing myself to teach, I could also be
preparing myself to write. This was the plan that indefinitely
(35:53):
shaped itself in my mind as I returned to my
work in the spinning room, and which I followed out
not without many breaks, in hindrances and neglects, during the
next six or seven years to learn all I could
so that I should be fit to teach or to write.
As the way opened, and it turned out that fifteen
or twenty of my best years were given to teaching.
(36:16):
End of chapter seven, Beginning to Work, read by Dana Kovar, Tampa, Florida,
April second, twenty twenty three.
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