August 18, 2025 • 32 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 (00:01):
Chapter eleven 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. Read by Val Roth, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter eleven, Reading and studying. My return to
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millwork involved making acquaintance with a new kind of machinery.
The spinning room was the only one I had hitherto
known anything about. Now my sister Emily found a place
for me in the dressing room beside herself. It was
much more airy, and fewer girls were in the room.
For the dressing frame itself was a large, clumsy affair
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that occupied a great deal of space. Mine seemed to
me as unmanageable as an overgrown, spoilt child. It had
to be watched in a dozen directions every minute, and
even then that was always getting itself and me into trouble.
I felt as if the half lived creature, with its
great groaning joints and whizzing van was aware of my
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incapacity to manage it, and had a fiendish spite against me.
I had contracted an unconquerable dislike to it. Indeed, I
had never liked it, never could learn to like any
kind of machinery, and this machine finally conquered me. It
was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that there were
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some things I could not do, and I retired from
the field vanquished. The two things I had enjoyed in
this room were that my sister was with me, and
that our windows looked toward the west. When the work
was running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to
each other all the sunset poetry we could remember. Our
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taste did not quite agree. Her favorite description of the
clouds was from Pollock. They seemed like chariots of saints
by fiery courses, drawn as brightly hued as if the glorious,
bushy golden locks of thousand Cherubim had been shorn off
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and on the temples hung of morn. And even I
liked better a translation from the German beginning, methinks it
were no pain to die on such an eve, while
such a sky oh eer canopies the west. And she
generally had to hear the whole poem, for I was
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very fond of it, though the especial verse that I
contrasted with hers, was there's peace and welcome in yon sea,
a endless blue tranquility. Those clouds are living things. I
trace their veins of liquid gold and see them silently
unfold their soft and fleecy wings. Then she would tell
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me that my nature inclined to quietness and heart harmony,
while hers asked for motion and splendor. I wondered whether
it really were so. But that huge creaking framework beside
us would continually intrude upon our meditations, and break up
our discussions, and silence all our poetry. For us, with
its dull prose, emily found more profitable work elsewhere, And
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I found some that was less so, but far more satisfactory,
as it would give me openings of leisure, which I craved.
The paymaster asked, when I left, go and where on
can earn more money? No, I answered, I am going
where I and have more time. Ayes, he said sententiously.
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Time is money, But that was not my thought about it.
Time is education, I said to myself, for that was
what I meant it should be to me. Perhaps I
never gave the wage earning element and work its due weight.
It always seemed to me that the Apostle's idea about
worldly possessions was the only sensible one. Having food and raiment,
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let us be therewith content if I could earn enough
to furnish that and have time to study. Besides, of course,
we always give way a little. However little we had,
it seemed to me a sufficiency. At this time I
was receiving two dollars a week besides my board. Those
who were earning much more and were carefully laying it
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up did not appear to be any happier than I was.
I never thought that the possession of money would make
me feel rich. It often does seem to have an
opposite effect, But then I have never had the opportunity
of knowing by experience how it does make one feel.
It is something to have been spared the responsibility of
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taking charge of the Lord's silver and gold. Let us
be thankful for what we have not as well as
for what we have. Freedom to live life truly is
surely more desirable than any earthly acquisition or possession. And
at my new work I had hours of freedom every day.
I never went back again to the bondage of machinery,
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and a working day thirteen hours long The daughter of
one of my neighbors, who also went to the same
church with us, told me of a vacant place in
the cloth room where she was, which I gladly secured.
This was a low brick building next to the counting room,
and a little apart from the mills, where the cloth
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was folded, stamped, and bailed for the market. There were
only half a dozen girls of us who measured the
cloth and kept an account of pieces bailed and their
lengths in yards. It pleased me much to have something
to do which required the use of pen and ink,
and I think there must be a good many scraps
of verse buried among the blank pages of those old
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account books of that found their way during the frequent
half hours of waiting for cloth to be brought up
from the mills. The only machinery in the room was
a hydraulic arrangement for pressing the cloth into bales, managed
by two or three men, one of whom was quite
a poet and a fine singer. Also, his hymns were
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frequently in request on public occasions. He lent me the
first volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It
was a small book containing mostly anti slavery pieces. The
Yankee Girl was one of them. Fully to appreciate the
spirit of which it is necessary to have been a
working girl in slave labor times New England. Womanhood crowned
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Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's
spirited response to the slaveholder. Oh, could he have seen her,
that pride of our girls arise and cast back? The
dark wealth of her curls with a scorn in her
eye that the gazer could feel, and a glance like
the sunshine that flashes on steel. Go back, haughty Southron,
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Go back, for thy gold is red with the blood
of the hearts, thou hast sold. There was in this
volume another poem which is not in any of the
later editions, the impression of which, as it remains to
me in broken snatches, is very beautiful. It began with
the lines bind up thy tresses, thou beautiful one of
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brown in the shadow and gold in the sun. It
was a refreshment and an inspiration to look into this
book between my long rows of figures, and read such
poems as the Angel of Patience Fallen Raphael, and that
wonderfully rendered hymn from Lamartine that used to whisper itself
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through me after I had read it, like an echo
of a spirit's voice, when the breath of vine is
flowing zephyr, like o'er all things going, And as the
touch of viewless fingers softly on my soul, that lingers
open to a breath, the lightest, conscious of a touch,
the slightest, Then, O Father, thou alone, from the shadow
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of thy throne, to the sighing of my breast and
its rapture answerest. I grew so familiar with this volume
that I felt acquainted with the poet long before I
met him. It remained in my desk drawer for months.
I thought it belonged to my poetic friend, the Bailer
of Claw, but one day he informed me it was
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a borrowed book. He thought, however, he should claim it
for his own, now that he had kept it so long.
Upon which remark I delivered it up to the custody
of his own conscience and saw it no more. One day,
toward the last of my stay at Lowell, I never
check my workroom again. This same friendly fellow toiler handed
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me a poem to read which someone had sent to
us from the counting room, with the penciled comment singularly beautiful.
It was Poe's Raven, which had just made its first
appearance in some magazine. It seemed like an apparition in literature. Indeed,
the sensation it created among the staid, measured lyrics of
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the day, with its flit of spectral wings and its
ghostly refrain of nevermore, was very noticeable. Poe came to
Lowell to live awhile, but it was after I had
gone away. Our national poetry was at this time just
beginning to be well known and appreciated. Bryant had published
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two volumes, and every school child was familiar with his
Death of the Flowers and God's First Temples. Some one
lent me The Voices of the Night, the only collection
of Longfellow's verse then issued. I think the Footsteps of
Angels glided at once into my memory and took possession
of a permanent place there. With its tender melody, the
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Last Leaf and old Ironsides were favorites with everybody who
read poetry at all. But I do not think we
Lowell girls had a volume of Doctor Holmes's poems at
that time. The Lady's book and Graham's Magazine were then
the popular periodicals, and the mill girls took them. I
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remembered that the nuggets I used to pick out of
one or the other of them when I was quite
a child, were labeled with the signature of Harriet E Beecher,
father Morris, and uncle Tim and others. Of the delightful
Mayflower Sketches first appeared in this way Irving's Sketch Book
all reading people were supposed to have read, and I
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recall the pleasure it was to me when one of
my sisters came into possessions of Knickerbucker's History of New York.
It was the first humorous book, as well as the
first history that I ever cared about, and I was
pleased enough for I was a little girl when my
fondness for it began to hear our ministers say that
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he always read Dietrich Knickerbocker for his tired Monday's recreation.
We were allowed to have books in the cloth room.
The absence of machinery permitted that privilege. Our superintendent, who
was a man of culture and a Christian gentleman of
the Puritan school, dignified and reserved, used often to stop
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at my desk at his daily round to see what
book I was reading. One day was Mather's Magnalia, which
I had brought from the public library with the desire
to know something of the early history of New England.
He looked a little surprised at the archaeological turn my
mind had taken, but his only comment was a valuable
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old book, that it was a satisfaction have a superintendent
like him, whose granite principles, emphasized by his stately figure
and bearing, made him a tower of strength in the
church and in the community. He kept a silent, kindly
rigid watch over the corporation life of which she was
the head, and only those of us who were incidentally
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admitted to his confidence knew how carefully we were guarded.
We had occasional glimpses into his well ordered home life
at social gatherings. His little daughter was in my infant
sabbath school class from her fourth to her seventh or
eighth year. She sometimes visited me at work, and we
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had our frolics among the heaps of cloth, as if
we were both children. She had also the same love
of hymns that I had as a child, and she
would sit by my side and repeat to me one
after another that she had learned not as a task,
but because of her delight in them. One of my
sincerest griefs and going on to the West, was that
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I should see my little pupil Mary as a child
no more. When I came back, she was a grown
up young woman. My friend, Anna, who had procured for
me the place and work beside her which I liked
so much, was not at all a bookish person, but
we had perhaps a better time together than if she
had been. She was one who found the happiness of
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her life in doing kindnesses for others, and in helping
them bear their burdens. Family reverses had brought her with
her mother and sisters to Lowell, and this was one
strong point of sympathy between my own family and hers.
It was indeed a bond of neighborly union between a
great many households in the young manufacturing city. Anna's manners
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and language were those of a lady, though she had
come from the wilds of Maine, somewhere in the vicinity
of Mount Desert, the very name of which seemed in
those days to carry one into the wilderness of mountain
and waves. We chatted together at her work on all
manner of subjects, and once she astonished me by saying, confidentially,
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in a low tone, do you know I am thirty
years old? She spoke as if she thought the fact
implied something serious. My surprise was that she should have
taken me into her intimate friendship when I was only seventeen.
I should hardly have supposed her older than myself if
she had not volunteered the information. When I lifted my
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eyes from her tall, thin figure to her fair face
and somewhat sad blue eyes, I saw that she looked
a little worn, but I knew that it was from
care for others, strangers as well as her own relatives.
And it seemed to me as if those thirty loving
years were her Rose Garland. I became more attached to
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her than ever. What a foolish dread it is, showing
unripeness rather than youth, the dread of growing old, For
how could a life be beauty more than by its
beautiful years? A living, loving, growing spirit can never be old.
Emerson says spring still makes spring in the mind when
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sixty years are told, and some of us are thankful
to have lived long enough to bear witness with him
to that truth. The few others who measured cloth with
us were nice, bright girls, and some of them remarkably pretty.
Our work and the room itself were so clean that
in summer we could wear fresh muslin dresses, sometimes white ones,
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without fear of spoiling them. This slight difference of apparel
and our fewer work hours seemed to give us a
slight advantage over the toilers in the mills opposite, and
we occasionally heard ourselves spoken of as the cloth room aristocracy,
but that was only in fun. Most of us had
served an apprenticeship in the mills, and many of our
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best friends were still there, preferring their work because it
brought them more money than we could earn. For myself,
no amount of money would have been a temptation compared
with my precious daytime, freedom, whole hours of sunshine for reading,
for walking, for studying, for writing, for anything I wanted
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to do. The days were so lovely and long, and
yet how fast they slipped away. I had not given
up my dream of a better education, and as I
could not go to school, I began to study by myself.
I had received a pretty thorough drill in the common
English branches at the grammar school and at my employments.
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I only needed a little simple arithmetic. A few of
my days were studying algebra in an evening class, but
I had no fancy for mathematics. My first wish was
to learn about English literature, and to go back to
its very beginnings. It was not then studied even in
the higher schools, and I knew no one who could
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give me any assistance in it as a teacher. Percy's
Relics and Chambers Cyclopaedia of English Literature were in the
city library, and I used them, making extracts from Chaucer
and Spencer to fix their peculiarities in my memory, though
there was only a taste of them to be had
from the Cyclopaedia Shakespeare, I had read from childhood in
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a fragmentary way, The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, and
King Lear I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now
I discovered that the historical plays, notably Julius, Caesar and Cornelius,
had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind.
But it was easy for me to forget that I
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was trying to be a literary student and slip off
from Belmont to Venice with Portia to witness the discomfiture
of Shylock. Although I did pity the miserable Jew and
thought he might have least been allowed the comfort of
his paltry ducots, I do not think that any of
my studying at this time was very severe. It was
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pleasure rather than toil, for I undertook only the tasks
I liked, but what I learned remained with me. Nevertheless,
with Milton I was more familiar than with any other poet,
and from thirteen years of age to eighteen he was
my preference. My friend Angeline and I another of my
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cloth room associates, made the paradise lost a language study
in an evening class under one of the grammar school masters.
And I never opened to the majestic lines high on
a throne of royal state, which far outshone the wealth
of armas and a nd or, where the gorgeous East,
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with richest hand showers on her king's barbaric pearl and gold,
without seeing Angeline's kindly, homely face longed through the magnificence
instead of the lineaments of the evil angel by merit
raised to that bad eminence. She too was much older
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than I, and a most excellent, energetic, and studious young woman.
I wonder if she remembers how hard we tried to
get to Beelzebub than whom Satan, except none higher sat
into the limits of our grammatical rules, not altogether with success.
I believe I copied passages from Jeremy Taylor and the
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old Theologians into my note books, and have found them
useful even recently in preparing compilations. Dryden and the eighteenth
century poets generally did not interest me, though I tried
to read them from a sense of duty. Pope was
an exception, however, Aphorisms from the Essay on Man were
in as common use among us as those from the
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Book of Proverbs. Some of my choicest extracts were in
the first volume of the Collected Poetry. I ever owned
a little red Morocco book called The young Man's Book
of Poetry. It was given me by one of my
sisters when I was about a dozen years old, who
rather apologized for the young man on the title, saying
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that the poetry was just as good as if he
were not there. And indeed no young man could have
valued it more than I did. It contained selections from
standard poets and choice ones from less familiar sources. One
of the extracts was Wordsworth's Some Set among the Mountains
from the Excursion to Read, which however, often always lifted
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me into an ecstasy. The red Morocco book was my treasure.
It traveled with me to the West, and I meant
to keep it as long as I lived, But alas
it was borrowed by a little girl out on the
Illinois prairies, who never brought it back. I do not
know if I have ever quite forgiven her. I have
wished I could look at it again often and often
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through the years. But perhaps I ought to be grateful
to that little girl for teaching me to be careful
about returning board books myself. Only a lover of them
can appreciate the loss of one which has been a
possession from childhood. Young and Cowper were considered religious reading,
and as such I had always known something of them.
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Through him, I best learned to know poetry as song.
I think that I heard the Cotter's Saturday Night, and
a Man's a man for a that more frequently quoted
than any other poems familiar to my girlhood. Some of
my work folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to Blackwood's magazine
and the Westminster and Edinburgh Reviews, and they lent them
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to me. These and Macaulay's essays were a great help
and delight. I had also the reading of Bibliotheca Sacra,
and the New Englander, and sometimes of the North American Review.
By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and
Coleridge in my readings of English poetry, I was enjoying
it all so much that I could not any longer
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call it study. A gift from a friend of Griswold's
Poets and Poetry of England gave me my first knowledge
of Tennyson. It was a great experience to read Locksley's
Hall for the first time, while it was yet a
new poem, and while one's own young life was stirred
by the prophetic spirit of the age that gave birth
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to it. I had a friend about my own age,
and between us there was something very much like what
is called a schoolgirl friendship, a kind of intimacy supposed
to be superficial, but often as deep and permanent as
it is pleasant. Eliza and I managed to see each
other every day. We exchanged confidences, laughed and cried together, read, wrote, walked,
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visited and studied together. Her dress always had an airy touch,
which I admired, though I was rather indifferent as to
what I wore myself. But she would endeavor to fix
me up tastefully, while I would help her to put
her compositions for the offering into proper style. She had
not begun to go to school at two years old,
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repeating the same routine of study every year of her
childhood as I had when a child. I should have
thought it almost as much of a disgrace to spell
a word wrong or make a mistake in the multiplication
table as to break one of the ten commandments. I
was astonished to find that Eliza and her friends had
not been as particularly dealt with in their early education.
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But she knew her deficiencies and earned money enough to
leave her work and attend a day school part of
the year. She was an ambitious scholar, and she persuaded
me into studying the German language with her. The native
professor had formed a class among young women connected with
the Mills, and we joined in We met six or
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ras of us at the home of two of these
young women, a factory boarding house, in a neat little
parlor which contained a piano. The professor was a music
teacher also, and he sometimes brought his guitar and let
us finish our recitation with a concert. More frequently he
gave us the songs of deutsch Land that we begged for.
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He sang the Earl King in his own tongue admirably.
We went through Fallin's German Grammar and Reader. What a
choice collection of extracts that reader was. We conquered the
difficult gutturals like those in the numeral ach ind axes,
the test of our pronouncing abilities so completely that the
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professor told us a native really would understand this. At
his request, I put some little German songs into English,
which he published the sheet music with my name. To
hear my words sung quite gave me the feeling of
a successful translator. The professor had his own distinctive name
for each of his pupils. Eliza was Naivety for her
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artless manners, and me he called Etheria, probably on account
of my star gazing and verse writing habits. Certainly there
was never anything ethereal in my visible presence. A botany
class was formed in town by a literary lady who
was preparing a school text book on the subject, and
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Eliza and I joined that. Also. The most I recall
about that is the delightful flower hunting rambles we took together.
The Linnaean system then in use did not give us
a very satisfactory key to the science, but we made
the acquaintance of hitherto unfamiliar flowers that grew around us,
and that was the opening to us of another door
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toward the beautiful. Our minister offered to instruct the young
people in his parish in ethics, and my sister Emilie
and myself were among his pupils. We came to regard
Whyland's Moral Science our text book, as most interesting reading,
and had furnished us with many subjects for thought and
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for social discussion. Carlyle's hero Worship brought us a startling
and keen enjoyment. It was lent to me by a
Dartmouth College student and the brother of one of my roommates,
soon after it was first published in this country. The
young man did not seem to know exactly what to
think of it, and wanted another reader's opinion. Few persons
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could have welcomed those early writings of Carlyle more enthusiastically
than some of us working girls did. The very ruggedness
of the sentences had a fascination for us like that
of climbing over loose boulders in a mountain scramble to
get sight of a wonderful landscape. My roommate, the student's sister,
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was the possessor of an electrifying new poem, fest Us,
that we sat up nights to read. It does not
seem as if it could be more than forty years
since Sarah and I looked up into each other's face
from the page as the lamplight grew dim and said,
quoting the poem, who can mistake great thoughts? She gave
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me the volume afterwards when we went west together, and
I still have it. Its questions and conjectures were like
a glimpse into the chaos of our own dimly developing
inner life. The fascination of Festus was that of wonder,
doubt and dissent, with great outbursts of an overmastering faith
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sweeping over our minds. As we read some of our
friends thought it quite safe reading, but we remember it
as one of the inspirations of our workaday youth. We
read books also that bore directly upon the condition of
humanity in our time. The Glory and Shame of England
was one of them, and it stirred us with a
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wonderful and painful interest. We followed travelers in a explorers
layard to Nineveh and Stephens to Yucatan, and we were
as fond as good story books as any girls that
live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a
character picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days.
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It is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to
modern girlhood. Where's Snobia? The Queen of Palmera walked among
us and held a lofty place among our ideals of
heroic womanhood, never yet obliterated from admiring remembrance. We had
the delight of reading Frederica Bremer's home and neighbors when
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they were fresh from the fountain of her heart. And
some of us must not be blamed for feeling that
no tales of domestic life half so charming have been
written since. Perhaps it is partly because the home life
of Sweden is in itself so delightfully unique. We read
George Borrow's Bible and Space Bain and wandered with him
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among the Gypsies, to whom he seemed to belong. I
have never forgotten a verse that this strange traveler picked
up somewhere among the Zincali. I'll joyfully labor both night
and day to aid my unfortunate brothers as a laundressed
hands or own face in the ray to cleanse the
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garments of others. It suggested a somewhat similar verse in
my own mind. Why should not our washerwoman's work have
its touch of poetry? Also this thought flashed by like
a ray of light that brightened my homely labor. The
water is making my own hands white while I wash
the robes of my neighbor. And how delighted we were
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with Missus Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow, the first
real Western book I ever read. Its genuine pioneer flavor
was delicious, and moreover, it was a prophecy to Sarah,
Emily and myself, who were one day thankful enough to
find an anti partial's dish kettle in a cabin on
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an Illinois prairie. So the pleasantly occupied years slipped on,
I still nursing my purpose of a more systemic course
of study, though I saw no near possibility of its fulfillment.
It came in an unexpected way, as almost everything worth
having does come. I could never have dreamed that I
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was going to meet my opportunity nearly or quite a
thousand miles away on the banks of the Mississippi. And
yet with that strange, delightful consciousness of growth into a
comprehension of one's self and of one's life that most
young persons must occasionally have experienced, I often vaguely felt
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Heaven's opening for my half fledged wings to try themselves in.
Things about me were good and enjoyable, but I could
not quite rest in them. There was more for me
to be, to know, and to do. I felt almost
surer of the future than of the present. In the
dream of the millennium, which brightened the somewhat somber clothes
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of the first ten years of my life had faded
a little out of the very roughnesses of the intervening road.
Light had been kindled, which made the end of the
second ten years glow with enthusiastic hope. I had been
saved from a great mistake. For it is the greatest
of mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it
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is going to be easy, or with the wish to
have it. So what a world would be if there
were no hills to climb. Our powers were given us
that we might conquer obstacles and clear obstructions from the
overgrown human path, and grow strong by striving, led onward
always by an invisible guide. Life to me, as I
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looked forward, was a bright blank of mystery, like the
broad western tracts of our continent, which in the Atlases
of those days bore the title of unexplored regions. It
was to be penetrated, struggled through, and its difficulties were
not greatly dreaded, for I had not lost the dream
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of doing the first bound and the pursuing. I knew
that there was no joy like the joy of pressing forward.
End of Chapter eleven. Reading and Studying
Chapter eleven 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. Read by Val Roth, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter eleven, Reading and studying. My return to
(00:27):
millwork involved making acquaintance with a new kind of machinery.
The spinning room was the only one I had hitherto
known anything about. Now my sister Emily found a place
for me in the dressing room beside herself. It was
much more airy, and fewer girls were in the room.
For the dressing frame itself was a large, clumsy affair
(00:48):
that occupied a great deal of space. Mine seemed to
me as unmanageable as an overgrown, spoilt child. It had
to be watched in a dozen directions every minute, and
even then that was always getting itself and me into trouble.
I felt as if the half lived creature, with its
great groaning joints and whizzing van was aware of my
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incapacity to manage it, and had a fiendish spite against me.
I had contracted an unconquerable dislike to it. Indeed, I
had never liked it, never could learn to like any
kind of machinery, and this machine finally conquered me. It
was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that there were
(01:32):
some things I could not do, and I retired from
the field vanquished. The two things I had enjoyed in
this room were that my sister was with me, and
that our windows looked toward the west. When the work
was running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to
each other all the sunset poetry we could remember. Our
(01:53):
taste did not quite agree. Her favorite description of the
clouds was from Pollock. They seemed like chariots of saints
by fiery courses, drawn as brightly hued as if the glorious,
bushy golden locks of thousand Cherubim had been shorn off
(02:13):
and on the temples hung of morn. And even I
liked better a translation from the German beginning, methinks it
were no pain to die on such an eve, while
such a sky oh eer canopies the west. And she
generally had to hear the whole poem, for I was
(02:34):
very fond of it, though the especial verse that I
contrasted with hers, was there's peace and welcome in yon sea,
a endless blue tranquility. Those clouds are living things. I
trace their veins of liquid gold and see them silently
unfold their soft and fleecy wings. Then she would tell
(02:57):
me that my nature inclined to quietness and heart harmony,
while hers asked for motion and splendor. I wondered whether
it really were so. But that huge creaking framework beside
us would continually intrude upon our meditations, and break up
our discussions, and silence all our poetry. For us, with
its dull prose, emily found more profitable work elsewhere, And
(03:22):
I found some that was less so, but far more satisfactory,
as it would give me openings of leisure, which I craved.
The paymaster asked, when I left, go and where on
can earn more money? No, I answered, I am going
where I and have more time. Ayes, he said sententiously.
(03:43):
Time is money, But that was not my thought about it.
Time is education, I said to myself, for that was
what I meant it should be to me. Perhaps I
never gave the wage earning element and work its due weight.
It always seemed to me that the Apostle's idea about
worldly possessions was the only sensible one. Having food and raiment,
(04:08):
let us be therewith content if I could earn enough
to furnish that and have time to study. Besides, of course,
we always give way a little. However little we had,
it seemed to me a sufficiency. At this time I
was receiving two dollars a week besides my board. Those
who were earning much more and were carefully laying it
(04:29):
up did not appear to be any happier than I was.
I never thought that the possession of money would make
me feel rich. It often does seem to have an
opposite effect, But then I have never had the opportunity
of knowing by experience how it does make one feel.
It is something to have been spared the responsibility of
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taking charge of the Lord's silver and gold. Let us
be thankful for what we have not as well as
for what we have. Freedom to live life truly is
surely more desirable than any earthly acquisition or possession. And
at my new work I had hours of freedom every day.
I never went back again to the bondage of machinery,
(05:12):
and a working day thirteen hours long The daughter of
one of my neighbors, who also went to the same
church with us, told me of a vacant place in
the cloth room where she was, which I gladly secured.
This was a low brick building next to the counting room,
and a little apart from the mills, where the cloth
(05:34):
was folded, stamped, and bailed for the market. There were
only half a dozen girls of us who measured the
cloth and kept an account of pieces bailed and their
lengths in yards. It pleased me much to have something
to do which required the use of pen and ink,
and I think there must be a good many scraps
of verse buried among the blank pages of those old
(05:57):
account books of that found their way during the frequent
half hours of waiting for cloth to be brought up
from the mills. The only machinery in the room was
a hydraulic arrangement for pressing the cloth into bales, managed
by two or three men, one of whom was quite
a poet and a fine singer. Also, his hymns were
(06:19):
frequently in request on public occasions. He lent me the
first volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It
was a small book containing mostly anti slavery pieces. The
Yankee Girl was one of them. Fully to appreciate the
spirit of which it is necessary to have been a
working girl in slave labor times New England. Womanhood crowned
(06:42):
Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's
spirited response to the slaveholder. Oh, could he have seen her,
that pride of our girls arise and cast back? The
dark wealth of her curls with a scorn in her
eye that the gazer could feel, and a glance like
the sunshine that flashes on steel. Go back, haughty Southron,
(07:07):
Go back, for thy gold is red with the blood
of the hearts, thou hast sold. There was in this
volume another poem which is not in any of the
later editions, the impression of which, as it remains to
me in broken snatches, is very beautiful. It began with
the lines bind up thy tresses, thou beautiful one of
(07:31):
brown in the shadow and gold in the sun. It
was a refreshment and an inspiration to look into this
book between my long rows of figures, and read such
poems as the Angel of Patience Fallen Raphael, and that
wonderfully rendered hymn from Lamartine that used to whisper itself
(07:54):
through me after I had read it, like an echo
of a spirit's voice, when the breath of vine is
flowing zephyr, like o'er all things going, And as the
touch of viewless fingers softly on my soul, that lingers
open to a breath, the lightest, conscious of a touch,
the slightest, Then, O Father, thou alone, from the shadow
(08:18):
of thy throne, to the sighing of my breast and
its rapture answerest. I grew so familiar with this volume
that I felt acquainted with the poet long before I
met him. It remained in my desk drawer for months.
I thought it belonged to my poetic friend, the Bailer
of Claw, but one day he informed me it was
(08:42):
a borrowed book. He thought, however, he should claim it
for his own, now that he had kept it so long.
Upon which remark I delivered it up to the custody
of his own conscience and saw it no more. One day,
toward the last of my stay at Lowell, I never
check my workroom again. This same friendly fellow toiler handed
(09:04):
me a poem to read which someone had sent to
us from the counting room, with the penciled comment singularly beautiful.
It was Poe's Raven, which had just made its first
appearance in some magazine. It seemed like an apparition in literature. Indeed,
the sensation it created among the staid, measured lyrics of
(09:26):
the day, with its flit of spectral wings and its
ghostly refrain of nevermore, was very noticeable. Poe came to
Lowell to live awhile, but it was after I had
gone away. Our national poetry was at this time just
beginning to be well known and appreciated. Bryant had published
(09:46):
two volumes, and every school child was familiar with his
Death of the Flowers and God's First Temples. Some one
lent me The Voices of the Night, the only collection
of Longfellow's verse then issued. I think the Footsteps of
Angels glided at once into my memory and took possession
of a permanent place there. With its tender melody, the
(10:10):
Last Leaf and old Ironsides were favorites with everybody who
read poetry at all. But I do not think we
Lowell girls had a volume of Doctor Holmes's poems at
that time. The Lady's book and Graham's Magazine were then
the popular periodicals, and the mill girls took them. I
(10:31):
remembered that the nuggets I used to pick out of
one or the other of them when I was quite
a child, were labeled with the signature of Harriet E Beecher,
father Morris, and uncle Tim and others. Of the delightful
Mayflower Sketches first appeared in this way Irving's Sketch Book
all reading people were supposed to have read, and I
(10:53):
recall the pleasure it was to me when one of
my sisters came into possessions of Knickerbucker's History of New York.
It was the first humorous book, as well as the
first history that I ever cared about, and I was
pleased enough for I was a little girl when my
fondness for it began to hear our ministers say that
(11:13):
he always read Dietrich Knickerbocker for his tired Monday's recreation.
We were allowed to have books in the cloth room.
The absence of machinery permitted that privilege. Our superintendent, who
was a man of culture and a Christian gentleman of
the Puritan school, dignified and reserved, used often to stop
(11:35):
at my desk at his daily round to see what
book I was reading. One day was Mather's Magnalia, which
I had brought from the public library with the desire
to know something of the early history of New England.
He looked a little surprised at the archaeological turn my
mind had taken, but his only comment was a valuable
(11:56):
old book, that it was a satisfaction have a superintendent
like him, whose granite principles, emphasized by his stately figure
and bearing, made him a tower of strength in the
church and in the community. He kept a silent, kindly
rigid watch over the corporation life of which she was
the head, and only those of us who were incidentally
(12:19):
admitted to his confidence knew how carefully we were guarded.
We had occasional glimpses into his well ordered home life
at social gatherings. His little daughter was in my infant
sabbath school class from her fourth to her seventh or
eighth year. She sometimes visited me at work, and we
(12:40):
had our frolics among the heaps of cloth, as if
we were both children. She had also the same love
of hymns that I had as a child, and she
would sit by my side and repeat to me one
after another that she had learned not as a task,
but because of her delight in them. One of my
sincerest griefs and going on to the West, was that
(13:01):
I should see my little pupil Mary as a child
no more. When I came back, she was a grown
up young woman. My friend, Anna, who had procured for
me the place and work beside her which I liked
so much, was not at all a bookish person, but
we had perhaps a better time together than if she
had been. She was one who found the happiness of
(13:24):
her life in doing kindnesses for others, and in helping
them bear their burdens. Family reverses had brought her with
her mother and sisters to Lowell, and this was one
strong point of sympathy between my own family and hers.
It was indeed a bond of neighborly union between a
great many households in the young manufacturing city. Anna's manners
(13:47):
and language were those of a lady, though she had
come from the wilds of Maine, somewhere in the vicinity
of Mount Desert, the very name of which seemed in
those days to carry one into the wilderness of mountain
and waves. We chatted together at her work on all
manner of subjects, and once she astonished me by saying, confidentially,
(14:08):
in a low tone, do you know I am thirty
years old? She spoke as if she thought the fact
implied something serious. My surprise was that she should have
taken me into her intimate friendship when I was only seventeen.
I should hardly have supposed her older than myself if
she had not volunteered the information. When I lifted my
(14:29):
eyes from her tall, thin figure to her fair face
and somewhat sad blue eyes, I saw that she looked
a little worn, but I knew that it was from
care for others, strangers as well as her own relatives.
And it seemed to me as if those thirty loving
years were her Rose Garland. I became more attached to
(14:50):
her than ever. What a foolish dread it is, showing
unripeness rather than youth, the dread of growing old, For
how could a life be beauty more than by its
beautiful years? A living, loving, growing spirit can never be old.
Emerson says spring still makes spring in the mind when
(15:13):
sixty years are told, and some of us are thankful
to have lived long enough to bear witness with him
to that truth. The few others who measured cloth with
us were nice, bright girls, and some of them remarkably pretty.
Our work and the room itself were so clean that
in summer we could wear fresh muslin dresses, sometimes white ones,
(15:37):
without fear of spoiling them. This slight difference of apparel
and our fewer work hours seemed to give us a
slight advantage over the toilers in the mills opposite, and
we occasionally heard ourselves spoken of as the cloth room aristocracy,
but that was only in fun. Most of us had
served an apprenticeship in the mills, and many of our
(15:58):
best friends were still there, preferring their work because it
brought them more money than we could earn. For myself,
no amount of money would have been a temptation compared
with my precious daytime, freedom, whole hours of sunshine for reading,
for walking, for studying, for writing, for anything I wanted
(16:20):
to do. The days were so lovely and long, and
yet how fast they slipped away. I had not given
up my dream of a better education, and as I
could not go to school, I began to study by myself.
I had received a pretty thorough drill in the common
English branches at the grammar school and at my employments.
(16:42):
I only needed a little simple arithmetic. A few of
my days were studying algebra in an evening class, but
I had no fancy for mathematics. My first wish was
to learn about English literature, and to go back to
its very beginnings. It was not then studied even in
the higher schools, and I knew no one who could
(17:02):
give me any assistance in it as a teacher. Percy's
Relics and Chambers Cyclopaedia of English Literature were in the
city library, and I used them, making extracts from Chaucer
and Spencer to fix their peculiarities in my memory, though
there was only a taste of them to be had
from the Cyclopaedia Shakespeare, I had read from childhood in
(17:25):
a fragmentary way, The Tempest and Midsummer Night's Dream, and
King Lear I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now
I discovered that the historical plays, notably Julius, Caesar and Cornelius,
had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind.
But it was easy for me to forget that I
(17:46):
was trying to be a literary student and slip off
from Belmont to Venice with Portia to witness the discomfiture
of Shylock. Although I did pity the miserable Jew and
thought he might have least been allowed the comfort of
his paltry ducots, I do not think that any of
my studying at this time was very severe. It was
(18:06):
pleasure rather than toil, for I undertook only the tasks
I liked, but what I learned remained with me. Nevertheless,
with Milton I was more familiar than with any other poet,
and from thirteen years of age to eighteen he was
my preference. My friend Angeline and I another of my
(18:27):
cloth room associates, made the paradise lost a language study
in an evening class under one of the grammar school masters.
And I never opened to the majestic lines high on
a throne of royal state, which far outshone the wealth
of armas and a nd or, where the gorgeous East,
(18:48):
with richest hand showers on her king's barbaric pearl and gold,
without seeing Angeline's kindly, homely face longed through the magnificence
instead of the lineaments of the evil angel by merit
raised to that bad eminence. She too was much older
(19:10):
than I, and a most excellent, energetic, and studious young woman.
I wonder if she remembers how hard we tried to
get to Beelzebub than whom Satan, except none higher sat
into the limits of our grammatical rules, not altogether with success.
I believe I copied passages from Jeremy Taylor and the
(19:31):
old Theologians into my note books, and have found them
useful even recently in preparing compilations. Dryden and the eighteenth
century poets generally did not interest me, though I tried
to read them from a sense of duty. Pope was
an exception, however, Aphorisms from the Essay on Man were
in as common use among us as those from the
(19:53):
Book of Proverbs. Some of my choicest extracts were in
the first volume of the Collected Poetry. I ever owned
a little red Morocco book called The young Man's Book
of Poetry. It was given me by one of my
sisters when I was about a dozen years old, who
rather apologized for the young man on the title, saying
(20:14):
that the poetry was just as good as if he
were not there. And indeed no young man could have
valued it more than I did. It contained selections from
standard poets and choice ones from less familiar sources. One
of the extracts was Wordsworth's Some Set among the Mountains
from the Excursion to Read, which however, often always lifted
(20:38):
me into an ecstasy. The red Morocco book was my treasure.
It traveled with me to the West, and I meant
to keep it as long as I lived, But alas
it was borrowed by a little girl out on the
Illinois prairies, who never brought it back. I do not
know if I have ever quite forgiven her. I have
wished I could look at it again often and often
(21:01):
through the years. But perhaps I ought to be grateful
to that little girl for teaching me to be careful
about returning board books myself. Only a lover of them
can appreciate the loss of one which has been a
possession from childhood. Young and Cowper were considered religious reading,
and as such I had always known something of them.
(21:23):
Through him, I best learned to know poetry as song.
I think that I heard the Cotter's Saturday Night, and
a Man's a man for a that more frequently quoted
than any other poems familiar to my girlhood. Some of
my work folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to Blackwood's magazine
and the Westminster and Edinburgh Reviews, and they lent them
(21:46):
to me. These and Macaulay's essays were a great help
and delight. I had also the reading of Bibliotheca Sacra,
and the New Englander, and sometimes of the North American Review.
By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and
Coleridge in my readings of English poetry, I was enjoying
it all so much that I could not any longer
(22:08):
call it study. A gift from a friend of Griswold's
Poets and Poetry of England gave me my first knowledge
of Tennyson. It was a great experience to read Locksley's
Hall for the first time, while it was yet a
new poem, and while one's own young life was stirred
by the prophetic spirit of the age that gave birth
(22:28):
to it. I had a friend about my own age,
and between us there was something very much like what
is called a schoolgirl friendship, a kind of intimacy supposed
to be superficial, but often as deep and permanent as
it is pleasant. Eliza and I managed to see each
other every day. We exchanged confidences, laughed and cried together, read, wrote, walked,
(22:53):
visited and studied together. Her dress always had an airy touch,
which I admired, though I was rather indifferent as to
what I wore myself. But she would endeavor to fix
me up tastefully, while I would help her to put
her compositions for the offering into proper style. She had
not begun to go to school at two years old,
(23:14):
repeating the same routine of study every year of her
childhood as I had when a child. I should have
thought it almost as much of a disgrace to spell
a word wrong or make a mistake in the multiplication
table as to break one of the ten commandments. I
was astonished to find that Eliza and her friends had
not been as particularly dealt with in their early education.
(23:38):
But she knew her deficiencies and earned money enough to
leave her work and attend a day school part of
the year. She was an ambitious scholar, and she persuaded
me into studying the German language with her. The native
professor had formed a class among young women connected with
the Mills, and we joined in We met six or
(23:59):
ras of us at the home of two of these
young women, a factory boarding house, in a neat little
parlor which contained a piano. The professor was a music
teacher also, and he sometimes brought his guitar and let
us finish our recitation with a concert. More frequently he
gave us the songs of deutsch Land that we begged for.
(24:21):
He sang the Earl King in his own tongue admirably.
We went through Fallin's German Grammar and Reader. What a
choice collection of extracts that reader was. We conquered the
difficult gutturals like those in the numeral ach ind axes,
the test of our pronouncing abilities so completely that the
(24:43):
professor told us a native really would understand this. At
his request, I put some little German songs into English,
which he published the sheet music with my name. To
hear my words sung quite gave me the feeling of
a successful translator. The professor had his own distinctive name
for each of his pupils. Eliza was Naivety for her
(25:07):
artless manners, and me he called Etheria, probably on account
of my star gazing and verse writing habits. Certainly there
was never anything ethereal in my visible presence. A botany
class was formed in town by a literary lady who
was preparing a school text book on the subject, and
(25:27):
Eliza and I joined that. Also. The most I recall
about that is the delightful flower hunting rambles we took together.
The Linnaean system then in use did not give us
a very satisfactory key to the science, but we made
the acquaintance of hitherto unfamiliar flowers that grew around us,
and that was the opening to us of another door
(25:49):
toward the beautiful. Our minister offered to instruct the young
people in his parish in ethics, and my sister Emilie
and myself were among his pupils. We came to regard
Whyland's Moral Science our text book, as most interesting reading,
and had furnished us with many subjects for thought and
(26:10):
for social discussion. Carlyle's hero Worship brought us a startling
and keen enjoyment. It was lent to me by a
Dartmouth College student and the brother of one of my roommates,
soon after it was first published in this country. The
young man did not seem to know exactly what to
think of it, and wanted another reader's opinion. Few persons
(26:32):
could have welcomed those early writings of Carlyle more enthusiastically
than some of us working girls did. The very ruggedness
of the sentences had a fascination for us like that
of climbing over loose boulders in a mountain scramble to
get sight of a wonderful landscape. My roommate, the student's sister,
(26:53):
was the possessor of an electrifying new poem, fest Us,
that we sat up nights to read. It does not
seem as if it could be more than forty years
since Sarah and I looked up into each other's face
from the page as the lamplight grew dim and said,
quoting the poem, who can mistake great thoughts? She gave
(27:14):
me the volume afterwards when we went west together, and
I still have it. Its questions and conjectures were like
a glimpse into the chaos of our own dimly developing
inner life. The fascination of Festus was that of wonder,
doubt and dissent, with great outbursts of an overmastering faith
(27:34):
sweeping over our minds. As we read some of our
friends thought it quite safe reading, but we remember it
as one of the inspirations of our workaday youth. We
read books also that bore directly upon the condition of
humanity in our time. The Glory and Shame of England
was one of them, and it stirred us with a
(27:55):
wonderful and painful interest. We followed travelers in a explorers
layard to Nineveh and Stephens to Yucatan, and we were
as fond as good story books as any girls that
live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a
character picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days.
(28:17):
It is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to
modern girlhood. Where's Snobia? The Queen of Palmera walked among
us and held a lofty place among our ideals of
heroic womanhood, never yet obliterated from admiring remembrance. We had
the delight of reading Frederica Bremer's home and neighbors when
(28:40):
they were fresh from the fountain of her heart. And
some of us must not be blamed for feeling that
no tales of domestic life half so charming have been
written since. Perhaps it is partly because the home life
of Sweden is in itself so delightfully unique. We read
George Borrow's Bible and Space Bain and wandered with him
(29:01):
among the Gypsies, to whom he seemed to belong. I
have never forgotten a verse that this strange traveler picked
up somewhere among the Zincali. I'll joyfully labor both night
and day to aid my unfortunate brothers as a laundressed
hands or own face in the ray to cleanse the
(29:21):
garments of others. It suggested a somewhat similar verse in
my own mind. Why should not our washerwoman's work have
its touch of poetry? Also this thought flashed by like
a ray of light that brightened my homely labor. The
water is making my own hands white while I wash
the robes of my neighbor. And how delighted we were
(29:45):
with Missus Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow, the first
real Western book I ever read. Its genuine pioneer flavor
was delicious, and moreover, it was a prophecy to Sarah,
Emily and myself, who were one day thankful enough to
find an anti partial's dish kettle in a cabin on
(30:05):
an Illinois prairie. So the pleasantly occupied years slipped on,
I still nursing my purpose of a more systemic course
of study, though I saw no near possibility of its fulfillment.
It came in an unexpected way, as almost everything worth
having does come. I could never have dreamed that I
(30:27):
was going to meet my opportunity nearly or quite a
thousand miles away on the banks of the Mississippi. And
yet with that strange, delightful consciousness of growth into a
comprehension of one's self and of one's life that most
young persons must occasionally have experienced, I often vaguely felt
(30:47):
Heaven's opening for my half fledged wings to try themselves in.
Things about me were good and enjoyable, but I could
not quite rest in them. There was more for me
to be, to know, and to do. I felt almost
surer of the future than of the present. In the
dream of the millennium, which brightened the somewhat somber clothes
(31:11):
of the first ten years of my life had faded
a little out of the very roughnesses of the intervening road.
Light had been kindled, which made the end of the
second ten years glow with enthusiastic hope. I had been
saved from a great mistake. For it is the greatest
of mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it
(31:33):
is going to be easy, or with the wish to
have it. So what a world would be if there
were no hills to climb. Our powers were given us
that we might conquer obstacles and clear obstructions from the
overgrown human path, and grow strong by striving, led onward
always by an invisible guide. Life to me, as I
(31:56):
looked forward, was a bright blank of mystery, like the
broad western tracts of our continent, which in the Atlases
of those days bore the title of unexplored regions. It
was to be penetrated, struggled through, and its difficulties were
not greatly dreaded, for I had not lost the dream
(32:16):
of doing the first bound and the pursuing. I knew
that there was no joy like the joy of pressing forward.
End of Chapter eleven. Reading and Studying
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