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):
Chapter twelve 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 work. Read by Lauren Fontaine, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter twelve, From the Merrimack to the Mississippi.
(00:24):
The years between eighteen thirty five and eighteen forty five,
which nearly covered the time I lived at Lowell, seemed
to me as I look back at them singularly interesting years.
People were guessing and experimenting, and wondering and prophesying about
a great many things, about almost everything. We were only
beginning to get accustomed steam boats and railroads to travel
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by either was scarcely less an adventure to us younger
ones than going up in a balloon. Phrenology was much
talked about, and numerous professors of it came around, lecturing
and examining and making charts of cranial bumps. This was
profitable business to them for a while, as almost everybody
who invested in a character received a good one, While
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many very commonplace people were flattered into the belief that
they were geniuses or might be if they chose Mesmerism
followed close upon phrenology, and this too had its lecturers,
who entertained the stronger portion of their audiences by showing
them how easily the weaker ones could be brought under
an uncanny influence. The most widespread delusion of the time
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was Millerism. A great many persons, and yet not so
many that I knew even one of them, believed that
the end of the world was coming in the year
eighteen forty two, though the date was postponed from year
to year as the prophecy failed of fulfillment. The idea
in itself was almost too serious to be jested about,
and yet its advocates made it so literal a matter
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that it did look very ridiculous to unbelievers, and irreverent.
Little work made of mine in the spinning room made
a string of jingling couplets about it, like this, Oh dear,
oh dear, what shall we do in eighteen hundred and
forty two, Oh dear, oh dear, where shall we be
in eighteen hundred and forty three, Oh dear, oh dear,
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we shall be no more in eighteen hundred and forty four,
Oh dear, Oh dear, we shan't be alive in eighteen
hundred and forty five. I thought it audacious in her,
since surely she and all of us were aware that
the world would come to an end some time in
some way for every one of us. I said to
myself that I could not have made up those rhymes. Nevertheless,
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we all laughed at them together. A comet appeared at
about the time of the Miller excitement, and also a
very unusual illumination of sky and earth by the Aurora borealis.
This latter occurred in midwinter. The whole heavens were of
a deep rose color, almost crimson reddest at the zenith
and paling as it radiated towards her. The snow was
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fresh on the ground, and that too was of a
brilliant red. Cold as it was, windows were thrown up
all around us for people to look out at the
wonderful sight. I was gazing with the rest and listening
to exclamations of wonder from surrounding unseen beholders, when somebody
shouted from far down the opposite block of buildings with
startling effect. You can't stand the fire in that great day.
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It was the refrain of a millerte him. The Millerites
believed that these signs in the sky were omens of
the approaching catastrophe, and it was said that some of
them did go so far as to put on white
ascension robes and assemble somewhere to wait for the expected hour.
When Daguerreo types were first made, when we heard that
the sun was going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed
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almost too great a marvel to be believed. While it
was yet only a rumor that such a thing had
been done somewhere across the sea. I saw some verses
about it which impressed me much, which I only partly remember.
These were the opening lines, Oh what if thus our
evil deeds are mirrored on the sky, and to every
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line of our wild lives? Deguero typed done high. My
sister and I considered it quite an event. When we
went to have our de guherotypes taken just before we
started for the west. The photograph was still an undeveloped mystery.
Things that looked miraculous then are commonplace now. It almost
seems as if the children of today could not have
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had so good a time as we did. Sciences left
them so little to wonder about our attitude. The attitude
of the time was that of children climbing their dooryard
fence to watch an approaching show, and to conjecture what
more remarkable spectacle could be following behind. New England had
kept to the quiet, old fashioned ways of living for
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the first fifty years of the Republic. Now all was expectancy.
Changes were coming, things were going to happen. Nobody el
could guess what things have happened and changes have come.
The new England that has grown up with the last
fifty years is not at all the new England that
our fathers knew. We speak of having been reared under
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Puritanic influences, but the traditionary sternness of these was much modified.
Even in the childhood of the generation to which I belong,
we did not recognize the grim features of the Puritan
as we used sometimes to read about him in our
parents or relatives. And yet we were children of the Puritans.
Everything that was new or strange came to us at Lowell,
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and most of the remarkable people of the day came also.
How strange it was to see Mari Johannan, a Nestorian
bishop walking through the factory yard in his oriental robes,
with more than a child's wonder on his face at
the stir and rush of everything. He came from Boston
by railroad and was present at a wedding at the
Clergyman's house where he visited. The rapidity of the simple
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congregational service astonished him. What Mary on railroad too, he asked.
Dickens visited Lowell while I was there, and gave a
good report of what he saw in his American notes.
We did not leave our work even to gaze at
distinguished strangers. So I missed seeing him, but a friend
who did see him sketched his profile and pencil for
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me as he passed along the street. He was then
best known as Boz. Many of the prominent men of
the country were in the habit of giving lyceum lectures,
and the lyceum lecture of that day was a means
of education, conveying to the people the results of study
and thought through the best minds. At Lowell, it was
more patronized by the mill people than any mere entertainment.
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We had John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, John Pierpont, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson among our lecturers, with numerous distinguished clergymen
of the day. Daniel Webster was once in the city
trying a law case. Some of my girlfriends went to
the courtroom and had a gloe glimpse of his face,
but I just miss seeing him. Sometimes an Englishman who
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was studying our national institutions would call and have a
friendly talk with us at our work. Sometimes it was
a traveler from the South who was interested in the
same way. I remember one, an editor and author from
Georgia who visited our improvement circle and who sent some
of us offering contributors copies of his books after he
had returned home. One of the pleasantest visitors that I
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recall was a young Quaker woman from Philadelphia, a school teacher,
who came to see for herself how the loweld girls lived,
of whom she had heard so much. A deep, quiet
friendship grew up between us two. I wrote some verses
for her when we parted, and she sent me one cordial,
charmingly written letter. In a few weeks I answered it,
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but the response was from another person, a near relative.
She was dead, but she still remains a real person
to me. I often recall her features in the tones
for voice. It was as if a beautiful spirit from
an invisible world had slipped in among us and quickly
gone back again. It was an event to me and
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to my immediate friends among the mill girls, when the
poet Whittier came to Lowell to stay Awhile I had
not supposed that it would be my good fortune to
meet him, but one evening when we were assembled at
the Improvement Circle, he was there. The offering editor, Miss
Harriet Farley, had lived in the same town with him,
and they were old acquaintances. It was a warm summer evening.
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I recalled the circumstance that a number of us wore
white dresses, Also that I shrank back into myself and
felt much abashed when some verses of mine were read
by the editor, with others so much better. However, that
mine received little attention, I felt relieved, for I was
not fond of having my productions spoken of for good
or ill. He commended quite highly a poem by another
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member of the circle on Pentucket, the Indian name of
his native place Haverhill. My subject was Sabbath Bell's. As
the friends do not believe in steeple houses. I was
at liberty to imagine that it was my theme and
not my verses that failed to interest him. Various other
papers were read, stories, sketches, et cetera. And after the
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reading there was a little conversation when he came and
spoke to me. I let the friend who had accompanied
me do my part of the talking, for I was
too much overawed by the presence of one whose poetry
I had so long admired to say a great deal.
But from that evening we knew each other as friends,
and of course the day has a white mark among
the memories of my Lowell life. Mister Whittier's visit to
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Lowell had some political bearing upon the anti slavery cause.
Is strange now to think that a cause like that
should not always have been our country's cause, our country,
our own free nation. But anti slavery sentiments were then
regarded by many as traitorous heresies, and those who held
them did not expect to win popularity. If the vote
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of the Mill girls had been taken, it would doubtless
have been unanimous on the anti slavery side. But those
were also the days when a woman was not expected
to give or even to have an opinion on subjects
of public interest. Occasionally a young girl was attracted to
the Lowell Mills through her own idealization of the life
there as it had been reported to her. Margaret Fully,
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who afterwards became distinguished as a sculptor, was one of these.
She did not remain many months at her occupation, which
I think was weaving, soon changing it for that of
teaching and studying art. Those who came as she did
were usually disappointed. Instead of an arcadia, they found a
place of matter of fact, toil, filled with a company
of industrious, wide awake girls who were faithfully improving their opportunities,
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while looking through them into avenues toward profit and usefulness
more desirable. Yet, it has always been the way of
the steady minded New Englander to accept the present situation,
but to accept it without boundaries, taking in also the
larger prospects, all the heavens above and the earth beneath,
towards which it opens. The movement of New England girls
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toward Lowell was only an impulse of a larger movement
which about that time sent so many people from the
Eastern States into the West. The needs of the West
were constantly kept before us in the churches. We were
asked for contributions for home missions, which were willingly given,
and some of us were appointed collectors of funds for
the education of indigent young men to become Western home
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missionary preachers. There was something almost pathetic in the readiness
with which this was done by young girls who were
longing to fit themselves for teachers, but had not the means.
Many a girl at Lowell was working to send her
brother to college, who had far more talent and character
than he. But a man could preach, and it was
not orthodox to think that a woman could, And in
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her devotion to him and her zeal for the spread
of Christian truth, she was hardly conscious of our own sacrifice.
Yet our ministers appreciated the intelligence and piety of their
feminine parishioners. An agent who came from the West for
school teachers was told by our own pastor that five
hundred could easily be furnished from among Lowell Mill girls.
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Many did go, and they made another New England. In
some of our western states. The missionary spirit was strong
among my companions. I never thought that I had the
right qualifications for that work, but I had a desire
to see the prairies and the great rivers of the West,
and to get a taste of free, primitive life among pioneers.
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Before the year eighteen forty five, several of my friends
had emigrated as teachers or missionaries. One of the editors
of the Operatives magazine had gone to Arkansas with a
mill girl who had worked beside her among the Loombs.
They were at an Indian mission to the Cherokees and Choctaws.
I seemed to breathe the air of that far southwest
in a spray of yellow jessamine, which one of those
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friends sent me pressed in a letter. People wrote very
long letters then, in those days of twenty five cent postage. Rachel,
at whose house our German class had been accustomed to me,
had also left her work and had gone to western
Virginia to take charge of a school. She wrote alluring
letters to us about the scenery there. It was in
the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge. My friend Angeline, with
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whom I used to read Paradise Lost, went to Ohio
as a teacher and returned the following year for a
very brief visit. However, and with a husband Another acquaintance
was in Wisconsin teaching a pioneer school. Eliza, my intimate companion,
was about to be married to a clergyman. She too,
eventually settled at the West. The event which brought most
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change into my own life was the marriage of my
sister Emily. It involved the breaking up of our own
little family, of which she really had been the houseband,
the return of my mother to my sisters at Beverly,
and my going to board among strangers as other girls did.
I found excellent quarters and kind friends, but the home
life was ended. My sister's husband was a grammar school
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master in the city, and their cottage, a mile or
more out among the open fields was my frequent refuge
from homesickness in the general clatter. Our partial separation showed
me how much I had depended upon my sister. I
had really let her do most of my thinking for me.
Henceforth I was to trust to my own resources. I
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was no longer the little sister who could ask what
to do and do as she was told. It often
brought me a feeling of dismay to find that I
must make up my own mind about things small and great.
And yet I was naturally self reliant. I am not sure,
but self reliance and dependence really belonged together. They do
seem to meet in the same character like other extremes.
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The health of Emily's husband failing after a year or two,
it was evident that he must change his employment and
his residence. He decided to go with his brother to
Illino and settle upon a prairie farm. Of course, his
wife and baby boy must go too, and with the
announcement of this decision came an invitation to me to
accompany them. I had no difficulty as to my response.
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It was just what I wanted to do. I was
to teach a district school. But what there was beyond that,
I could not guess. I liked to feel that it
was all as vague as the unexplored regions to which
I was going. My friend and roommate, Sarah, who was
preparing herself to be a teacher, was invited to join us,
and she was glad to do so. It was all
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quickly settled, and early in the spring of eighteen forty
six we left New England. When I came to a
realization of what I was leaving. When goodbyes had to
be said, I began to feel very sorrowful and to
wish it was not to be. I said positively that
I should soon return, but underneath my protestations, I was
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afraid that I might not. The West was very far off,
then a full week's journey. It would be hard getting back.
Those I loved might die, I might die myself. These
thoughts passed through my mind, though not through my lips.
My eyes would sometimes tell the story, however, and I
fancy that my tearful farewells must have seemed ridiculous to
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many of my friends, since my going was of my
own cheerful choice. The last meeting of the Improvement Circle
before I went away was a kind of surprise party
to me. Several original poems were read, addressed to me personally.
I am afraid that I received it all in a dumb,
undemonstrative way, for I could not make it seem real
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that I was the person meant, or that I was
going away at all. But I treasured those tributes of sympathy. Afterwards,
under the strange, spacious skies where I sometimes felt so alone,
the editors of the offering left with me a testimonial
in money, accompanied by an acknowledgment of my contributions during
several years. But I had never dreamed of pay and
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did not know how to look upon it, so I
took it gratefully. However, as a token of their appreciation,
and twenty dollars was no small help toward my outfit.
Friends brought me books and other keepsakes. Our minister gave
me Da Bejean's History of the Reformation as a parting gift.
It was quite a circumstance to be going out west.
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The exhilaration of starting off on one's first long journey young, ignorant, buoyant,
expectant is unlike anything else unless it be youth itself,
the real beginning of the real journey. Life annoyances are overlooked.
Everything seems romantic and dreamlike. We went by a southerly
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route on account of starting so early in the season.
There was snow on the ground the day we left.
On the second day, after moonlight night on Long Island Sound,
we were floating down the Delaware between shores misty green
with budding willows. Then most of us seasick, though I
was not. We were tossed across Chessa Peak Bay, then
there was a railway ride to the Alleghenies, which gave
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us glimpses of the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, and
of the lovely scenery around Harper's Ferry. Then followed a
stifling night on the mountains, when we were packed like
sardines into a stagecoach without a breath of air, and
the passengers were crossed because the baby cried, while I
felt inwardly glad that one voice among us could give
utterance to the general discomfort, my own, part of which
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I could have borne if I could only have had
an occasional peep out at the mountain side. After that,
it was all river voyaging down the Monongahela into the
Ohio and up the Mississippi. As I recall this part
of it, I should say that it was the perfection
of a Western journey to travel in the early spring
by an Ohio River steamboat. Such steamboats, as they had
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forty years ago, comfortable, roomy, and well ordered. The company
was social, as Western immigrants were wont to be when
there were not so very many of them, and the
show shores of the river, then only thinly populated, were
a constantly shifting panorama of wilderness beauty. I have never
since seen a combination of spring colors so delicate as
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those shown by the uplifted forests of the Ohio, where
the pure white of the dogwood and the peach bloom
tint of the red bud Judas tree were contrasted with
soft shades of green, almost endlessly various on the unfolding leafage.
Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show
but breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced
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at its level shores edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood,
and sent back aside towards the banks of the Merrimac.
But we did not let each other know what the
Si was for until long after the breaking up of
our little company. When the steamboat landed at Saint Louis
was like the ending of a pleasant dream. We had
to wake up to the fact that by striking dew
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east thirty or forty miles across the monotonous greenness, we
should reach our destination and must accept whatever we should
find there with such grace as we could. What we
did find and did not find, there is not room
fully to relate here. Ours was at first the roughest
kind of pioneering experience, such as persons brought up in
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our well to do New England could not be in
the least prepared for, though they might imagine they were
as we did. We were dropped down finally upon a
vast green expanse extending hundreds of miles north and south
through the state of Illinois, then known as Looking Grass Prairie.
The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away,
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and so small that at that distance it looked like
a shingle set up endwise in the grass. Nothing else
was in sight, not even a tree. Although we could
see miles and miles in every direction, there were only
the hollow blue heavens above us, and the level green
prairie around us, an immensity of intense loneliness. We seldom
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saw a cloud in the sky, and never a beneath
our feet. If we could have picked up the commonest one,
we should have treasured it like a diamond. Nothing in
nature now seems so beautiful to us as rocks. We
had never dreamed of a world without them. It seemed
like living on a floor without walls or foundations. After
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a while, we became accustomed to the vast sameness, and
even liked it in a lukewarm way, And there were
times when it filled us with emotions of grandeur. Boundlessness
in itself is impressive. It makes us feel our littleness,
and yet releases us from that littleness. The grass was
always astir blowing one way, like the waves of the sea,
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for there was a steady, almost an unvarying wind from
the south. It was like the sea, and yet even
more wonderful, for it was a sea of living and
growing things. The spirit of God was moving upon the
face of the earth and breathing everything into life. We
were but specks on the great landscape, but God was
above it all, penetrating it and us with his infinite warmth.
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The distance from human beings made the invisible one seem
so near. Only nature, and ourselves, now face to face
with Him, we could scarcely have found in all the
world a more complete contrast to the moving crowds in
the whir and dust of the city of Spindles than
this unpeopled, silent prairie. For myself, I know that I
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was sent in upon my own thoughts deeper than I
had ever been before. I began to question things which
I had never before doubted. I must have reality. Nothing
but transparent truth would bear the test of this great
solitary stillness. As the prairies lay open to the sunshine,
my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the piercing eye
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of the all seeing. I may say with gratitude that
only some superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away
by the searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood,
in its simplest elements, took firmer root as it found
broader rooms to grow in. I had many peculiar experiences
in my log cabin school teaching, which was seldom more
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than three months in one place. Only once I found
myself among New England people, and there I remained a
year or more fairly reveling in a return to the familiar,
thrifty ways that seemed to me to shape a more
comfortable style of living than any under the sun Vine lodge.
So we named the cottage for its embowering honeysuckles and
its warm hearted inmates. With my little white schoolhouse under
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the oaks make one of the brightest of my Western memories.
Only a mile or two away from this pretty retreat,
there was an edifice towards which I often looked with longing.
It was a seminary for young women, probably at that
time one of the best in the country, certainly second
to none in the West. It had originated about a
dozen years before in a plan for western collegiate education
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organized by Yale College graduates. It was thought that women
as well as men ought to share in the benefits
of such a plan, and the result was Monticello's seminary.
The good man, whose wealth had made the institution a possibility,
lived in the neighborhood. Its trustees were of the best
type of pioneer manhood, and its pupils came from all
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parts of the South and West. Its principal I wonder
now that I could have lived so near her for
a year without becoming acquainted with her. But her high
local reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe,
and I was foolishly diffident. One day, however, upon the
persuasion of my friends at Vine Lodge, who knew my
wishes for a higher education, I went with them to
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call upon her. We talked about the matter which had
been in my thoughts so long, and she gave me
not only a cordial but an urgent invitation to come
and enroll myself as a student. There were arrangements for
those who could not incur the current expenses to meet
them by doing part of the domestic work, and of
these I gladly availed myself. The stately limestone edifice, stand
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in the midst of an original growth of forest trees,
two or three miles from the Mississippi River, became my home,
my student home, for three years. The benefits of those
three years I have been reaping ever since. I trust
not altogether selfishly. It was always my desire and my
ambition as a teacher to help my pupils as my
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teachers had helped me. The course of study at Monticello's
Seminary was the broadest, the most college like that I
have ever known, and I have had experience since in
several institutions of the kind. The study of medieval and
modern history, and of the history of modern philosophy especially
opened new vistas to me. In these our principle was
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also our teacher, and her method was to show us
the tendencies of thought, to put our minds into the
great current of human affairs, leaving us to collect details
as we could then or afterward. We came thus to
feel that these were lifelong studies, as indeed they are.
The course was somewhat alie, but her advice to me
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was not to omit anything because I did not like it.
I had a natural distaste for mathematics, and my recollections
of my struggles with trigonometry and conic sections are not
altogether those of a conquering heroine. But my teacher told
me that my mind had need of just that exact
sort of discipline, and I think she was right. A
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habit of indiscriminate, unsystematized reading such as I had fallen into,
is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind. Attention
is the secret of real acquirement. But it was months
before I could command my own attention. Even when I
was interested in the subject I was examining. It seemed
as if all the pages of all the books I
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had ever read were turning themselves over between me and
this one page that I wanted to understand. I found
that mere reading does not, by any means make a student.
It was more to me to come into communication with
my wise teacher as a friend than even to receive
the wisdom she had to impart. She was dignified and reticent,
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but beneath her reserve, as is often the case, was
a sealed fountain of sympathy, which one who had the
key could easily unlock. Thinking of her nobleness of character,
her piety, her learning, her power, and her sweetness, it
seems to me as if I had once had a
Christian zenobia or hypatia for my teacher. We speak with
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odd tenderness of our unseen guardian angels, But have we
not all had our guiding angels who came to us
in visible form and recognized or unknown, kept beside us
on our difficult path until they had done for us
all that they could. It seems to me as if
one had succeeded another by my side all through the years,
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always someone whose influence made my heart stronger and my
way clearer, though sometimes it has only been a little
child that came and laid its hand into my hand,
as if I were its guide, instead of its being mine.
My dear and honored Lady Principal was surely one of
my strong guiding angels sent to meet me as I
went to meet her upon my life road, just at
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the point where I most needed her for the one
great thing she gave her pupils, scope often quite left
out of a woman's education. I especially thank her. The
true education is to go on forever. But how can
there be any hopeful going on without outlook? And having
an infinite outlook, how can progress ever cease? It was
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worth while for me to go to those western prairies,
if only for the broader mental view that opened upon
me and my pupilage there. During my first year at
the seminary, I was appointed teacher of the Preparatory Department,
a separate school of thirty or forty girls, with the
opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time.
It was a little hard, but I was very glad
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to do it, as I was unwilling to receive an
education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not wish
to debt. I believe that the postponement of these maturer
studies to my early womanhood, after I had worked and taught,
was a benefit to me. I had found out some
of my special ignorances, what the things were which I
most needed to know. I had learned that the book
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knowledge I so much craved was not it self. Education
was not even culture, but only a help an adjunct
to both. As I studied more earnestly, I cared for
fewer books, but those few made themselves indispensable. It still
seems to me that in the Lowell Mills and in
my log Cabin schoolhouse on the Western Prairies, I received
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the best part of my early education. The great advantage
of a seminary course to me was that under my
broad minded principle, I learned what education really is, the
penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as
making continually wider explorations, the rounding of the whole human
being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets
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and suns are rounded until they give out safe and
steady light. This makes the process an infinite one, not
possible to be completed at any school. Returning from the West,
immediately after my graduation, I was, for ten years or
so a teacher of young girls and seminaries, much like
my own alma mater. The best result to me of
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that experience has been the friendship of my pupils, a
happiness which must last as long as life itself. A
book must end somewhere, and the natural boundary of this
narrative is drawn with my leaving New England for the West.
I was to outline the story of my youth for
the young, though I think many a one among them
might tell a story far more interesting than mine. The
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most beautiful lives seldom find their way into print. Perhaps
the most beautiful part of any life never does. I
should like to flatter myself, so I could not stay
at the West. It was never really home to me there,
and my sojourn of six or seven years on the
prairies only deepened my love and longing for the dear
old state of Massachusetts. I came back in the summer
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of eighteen fifty two, and the unwritten remainder of my
sketch is chiefly that of a teacher's and writer's experience,
regarding which latter I will add, for the gratification of
those who have desired them, a few personal particulars. While
a student and teacher at the West, I was still writing,
and much that I wrote was published. A poem printed
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in Sartaine's magazine, sent there at the suggestion of the
editor of Lowell offering was the first for which I
received remuneration five dollars. Several poems written for the Manuscript
School Journal at Montchello Seminary are in the household collection
of my verses, among them those entitled Eureka, hand in
Hand with Angels and Psyche at School. These and various
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others written soon after, were printed in the National Era
in rec turn, for which a copy of the paper
was sent me. Nothing further was asked or expected. The
little song Hannah Binding Shoes, written immediately after my return
from the West, was a study from life, though not
from any one life in my native town. It was
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brought into notice in a peculiar way by my being
accused of stealing it by the editor of the magazine
to which I had sent it with a request for
the usual remuneration if accepted. Accidentally or otherwise, this editor
lost my note and signature, and then denounced me by
name in a newspaper as a literary fefes, having printed
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the verses with a nom de plume in his magazine
without my knowledge. It was awkward to have to come
to my own defense, but the curious incident gave the
song a wide circulation. I did not attempt writing for
money until it became a necessity when my health failed
at teaching, although I should long before then have liked
to spend my whole time with my pen. Could I
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have done so, But it was imperative that I should
have an assured income, however small, and everyone who has
tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is
unless it has become very famous. Indeed, my life is
a teacher. However, I regard as part of my best
preparation for whatever I have since written. I do not know,
but I should recommend five or ten years of teaching
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as the most profitable apprenticeship for a young person who
wished to become an author. To be a good teacher
implies self discipline, and a book written without something of
that sort of personal preparation cannot be a very valuable one.
Success in writing may mean many different things. I do
not know that I have ever reached it, except in
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the sense of liking better and better to write, and
to finding expression easier. It is something to have won
the privilege of going on. Sympathy and recognition are worth
a great deal. The power to touch human beings inwardly
and nobly is worth far more. The hope of attaining
to such results, if only occasionally, must be a writer's
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best inspiration so far as successful publication goes. Perhaps the
first I considered so came when a poem of mine
was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Its title was The
Rose Enthroned, and as the poet Lowell was at that
time editing the magazine, I felt especially gratified that in
another poem, The Loyal Woman's no written early in the
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War of the Rebellion, were each attributed to a different
person among our prominent poets the Atlantic at that time,
not giving author's signatures. Of course, I knew the unlikeness. Nevertheless,
those who made the mistake paid me an unintentional compliment. Compliments, however,
are very cheap and by no means signify success. I
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have always regarded it as a better ambition to be
a true woman than to become a successful writer. To
be the second would never have seemed to me desirable
without also being the first. In concluding, let me say
to you, dear girls for whom these pages have been written,
that if I have learned anything by living, it is
this that the meaning of life is education, not through
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book knowledge alone, sometimes entirely without it. Education is growth,
the development of our best possibilities from within outward, and
it cannot be carried on as it should be except
in a school. Just such a school as we all
find ourselves in this world of human beings by whom
we are surrounded. The beauty of belonging to this school
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is that we cannot learn anything in it by ourselves alone,
but for and with our fellow pupils the wide earth over.
We can never expect promotion here except by taking our
place among the lowest and sharing their difficulties until they
are removed, and we all become graduates together for a
higher school. Humility, sympathy, helpfulness, and faith are the best
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teachers in this great university, and none of us are
well educated who do not accept their training. The real
satisfaction of living is and must forever be, the education
of all, for each, end of each, for all. So
let us all try together to be good and faithful women,
and not care too much for what the world may
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think of us or of our abilities. My little story
is not a remarkable one, for I have never attempted
remarkable things in the words of one of our honored
elder writers, given in reply to a youthful aspirant who
had asked for some points of her literary career. I
never had a career. End of Chapter twelve, From the
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Merrimac to the Mississippi
Chapter twelve 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 work. Read by Lauren Fontaine, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter twelve, From the Merrimack to the Mississippi.
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The years between eighteen thirty five and eighteen forty five,
which nearly covered the time I lived at Lowell, seemed
to me as I look back at them singularly interesting years.
People were guessing and experimenting, and wondering and prophesying about
a great many things, about almost everything. We were only
beginning to get accustomed steam boats and railroads to travel
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by either was scarcely less an adventure to us younger
ones than going up in a balloon. Phrenology was much
talked about, and numerous professors of it came around, lecturing
and examining and making charts of cranial bumps. This was
profitable business to them for a while, as almost everybody
who invested in a character received a good one, While
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many very commonplace people were flattered into the belief that
they were geniuses or might be if they chose Mesmerism
followed close upon phrenology, and this too had its lecturers,
who entertained the stronger portion of their audiences by showing
them how easily the weaker ones could be brought under
an uncanny influence. The most widespread delusion of the time
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was Millerism. A great many persons, and yet not so
many that I knew even one of them, believed that
the end of the world was coming in the year
eighteen forty two, though the date was postponed from year
to year as the prophecy failed of fulfillment. The idea
in itself was almost too serious to be jested about,
and yet its advocates made it so literal a matter
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that it did look very ridiculous to unbelievers, and irreverent.
Little work made of mine in the spinning room made
a string of jingling couplets about it, like this, Oh dear,
oh dear, what shall we do in eighteen hundred and
forty two, Oh dear, oh dear, where shall we be
in eighteen hundred and forty three, Oh dear, oh dear,
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we shall be no more in eighteen hundred and forty four,
Oh dear, Oh dear, we shan't be alive in eighteen
hundred and forty five. I thought it audacious in her,
since surely she and all of us were aware that
the world would come to an end some time in
some way for every one of us. I said to
myself that I could not have made up those rhymes. Nevertheless,
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we all laughed at them together. A comet appeared at
about the time of the Miller excitement, and also a
very unusual illumination of sky and earth by the Aurora borealis.
This latter occurred in midwinter. The whole heavens were of
a deep rose color, almost crimson reddest at the zenith
and paling as it radiated towards her. The snow was
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fresh on the ground, and that too was of a
brilliant red. Cold as it was, windows were thrown up
all around us for people to look out at the
wonderful sight. I was gazing with the rest and listening
to exclamations of wonder from surrounding unseen beholders, when somebody
shouted from far down the opposite block of buildings with
startling effect. You can't stand the fire in that great day.
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It was the refrain of a millerte him. The Millerites
believed that these signs in the sky were omens of
the approaching catastrophe, and it was said that some of
them did go so far as to put on white
ascension robes and assemble somewhere to wait for the expected hour.
When Daguerreo types were first made, when we heard that
the sun was going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed
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almost too great a marvel to be believed. While it
was yet only a rumor that such a thing had
been done somewhere across the sea. I saw some verses
about it which impressed me much, which I only partly remember.
These were the opening lines, Oh what if thus our
evil deeds are mirrored on the sky, and to every
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line of our wild lives? Deguero typed done high. My
sister and I considered it quite an event. When we
went to have our de guherotypes taken just before we
started for the west. The photograph was still an undeveloped mystery.
Things that looked miraculous then are commonplace now. It almost
seems as if the children of today could not have
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had so good a time as we did. Sciences left
them so little to wonder about our attitude. The attitude
of the time was that of children climbing their dooryard
fence to watch an approaching show, and to conjecture what
more remarkable spectacle could be following behind. New England had
kept to the quiet, old fashioned ways of living for
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the first fifty years of the Republic. Now all was expectancy.
Changes were coming, things were going to happen. Nobody el
could guess what things have happened and changes have come.
The new England that has grown up with the last
fifty years is not at all the new England that
our fathers knew. We speak of having been reared under
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Puritanic influences, but the traditionary sternness of these was much modified.
Even in the childhood of the generation to which I belong,
we did not recognize the grim features of the Puritan
as we used sometimes to read about him in our
parents or relatives. And yet we were children of the Puritans.
Everything that was new or strange came to us at Lowell,
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and most of the remarkable people of the day came also.
How strange it was to see Mari Johannan, a Nestorian
bishop walking through the factory yard in his oriental robes,
with more than a child's wonder on his face at
the stir and rush of everything. He came from Boston
by railroad and was present at a wedding at the
Clergyman's house where he visited. The rapidity of the simple
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congregational service astonished him. What Mary on railroad too, he asked.
Dickens visited Lowell while I was there, and gave a
good report of what he saw in his American notes.
We did not leave our work even to gaze at
distinguished strangers. So I missed seeing him, but a friend
who did see him sketched his profile and pencil for
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me as he passed along the street. He was then
best known as Boz. Many of the prominent men of
the country were in the habit of giving lyceum lectures,
and the lyceum lecture of that day was a means
of education, conveying to the people the results of study
and thought through the best minds. At Lowell, it was
more patronized by the mill people than any mere entertainment.
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We had John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, John Pierpont, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson among our lecturers, with numerous distinguished clergymen
of the day. Daniel Webster was once in the city
trying a law case. Some of my girlfriends went to
the courtroom and had a gloe glimpse of his face,
but I just miss seeing him. Sometimes an Englishman who
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was studying our national institutions would call and have a
friendly talk with us at our work. Sometimes it was
a traveler from the South who was interested in the
same way. I remember one, an editor and author from
Georgia who visited our improvement circle and who sent some
of us offering contributors copies of his books after he
had returned home. One of the pleasantest visitors that I
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recall was a young Quaker woman from Philadelphia, a school teacher,
who came to see for herself how the loweld girls lived,
of whom she had heard so much. A deep, quiet
friendship grew up between us two. I wrote some verses
for her when we parted, and she sent me one cordial,
charmingly written letter. In a few weeks I answered it,
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but the response was from another person, a near relative.
She was dead, but she still remains a real person
to me. I often recall her features in the tones
for voice. It was as if a beautiful spirit from
an invisible world had slipped in among us and quickly
gone back again. It was an event to me and
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to my immediate friends among the mill girls, when the
poet Whittier came to Lowell to stay Awhile I had
not supposed that it would be my good fortune to
meet him, but one evening when we were assembled at
the Improvement Circle, he was there. The offering editor, Miss
Harriet Farley, had lived in the same town with him,
and they were old acquaintances. It was a warm summer evening.
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I recalled the circumstance that a number of us wore
white dresses, Also that I shrank back into myself and
felt much abashed when some verses of mine were read
by the editor, with others so much better. However, that
mine received little attention, I felt relieved, for I was
not fond of having my productions spoken of for good
or ill. He commended quite highly a poem by another
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member of the circle on Pentucket, the Indian name of
his native place Haverhill. My subject was Sabbath Bell's. As
the friends do not believe in steeple houses. I was
at liberty to imagine that it was my theme and
not my verses that failed to interest him. Various other
papers were read, stories, sketches, et cetera. And after the
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reading there was a little conversation when he came and
spoke to me. I let the friend who had accompanied
me do my part of the talking, for I was
too much overawed by the presence of one whose poetry
I had so long admired to say a great deal.
But from that evening we knew each other as friends,
and of course the day has a white mark among
the memories of my Lowell life. Mister Whittier's visit to
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Lowell had some political bearing upon the anti slavery cause.
Is strange now to think that a cause like that
should not always have been our country's cause, our country,
our own free nation. But anti slavery sentiments were then
regarded by many as traitorous heresies, and those who held
them did not expect to win popularity. If the vote
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of the Mill girls had been taken, it would doubtless
have been unanimous on the anti slavery side. But those
were also the days when a woman was not expected
to give or even to have an opinion on subjects
of public interest. Occasionally a young girl was attracted to
the Lowell Mills through her own idealization of the life
there as it had been reported to her. Margaret Fully,
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who afterwards became distinguished as a sculptor, was one of these.
She did not remain many months at her occupation, which
I think was weaving, soon changing it for that of
teaching and studying art. Those who came as she did
were usually disappointed. Instead of an arcadia, they found a
place of matter of fact, toil, filled with a company
of industrious, wide awake girls who were faithfully improving their opportunities,
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while looking through them into avenues toward profit and usefulness
more desirable. Yet, it has always been the way of
the steady minded New Englander to accept the present situation,
but to accept it without boundaries, taking in also the
larger prospects, all the heavens above and the earth beneath,
towards which it opens. The movement of New England girls
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toward Lowell was only an impulse of a larger movement
which about that time sent so many people from the
Eastern States into the West. The needs of the West
were constantly kept before us in the churches. We were
asked for contributions for home missions, which were willingly given,
and some of us were appointed collectors of funds for
the education of indigent young men to become Western home
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missionary preachers. There was something almost pathetic in the readiness
with which this was done by young girls who were
longing to fit themselves for teachers, but had not the means.
Many a girl at Lowell was working to send her
brother to college, who had far more talent and character
than he. But a man could preach, and it was
not orthodox to think that a woman could, And in
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her devotion to him and her zeal for the spread
of Christian truth, she was hardly conscious of our own sacrifice.
Yet our ministers appreciated the intelligence and piety of their
feminine parishioners. An agent who came from the West for
school teachers was told by our own pastor that five
hundred could easily be furnished from among Lowell Mill girls.
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Many did go, and they made another New England. In
some of our western states. The missionary spirit was strong
among my companions. I never thought that I had the
right qualifications for that work, but I had a desire
to see the prairies and the great rivers of the West,
and to get a taste of free, primitive life among pioneers.
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Before the year eighteen forty five, several of my friends
had emigrated as teachers or missionaries. One of the editors
of the Operatives magazine had gone to Arkansas with a
mill girl who had worked beside her among the Loombs.
They were at an Indian mission to the Cherokees and Choctaws.
I seemed to breathe the air of that far southwest
in a spray of yellow jessamine, which one of those
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friends sent me pressed in a letter. People wrote very
long letters then, in those days of twenty five cent postage. Rachel,
at whose house our German class had been accustomed to me,
had also left her work and had gone to western
Virginia to take charge of a school. She wrote alluring
letters to us about the scenery there. It was in
the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge. My friend Angeline, with
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whom I used to read Paradise Lost, went to Ohio
as a teacher and returned the following year for a
very brief visit. However, and with a husband Another acquaintance
was in Wisconsin teaching a pioneer school. Eliza, my intimate companion,
was about to be married to a clergyman. She too,
eventually settled at the West. The event which brought most
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change into my own life was the marriage of my
sister Emily. It involved the breaking up of our own
little family, of which she really had been the houseband,
the return of my mother to my sisters at Beverly,
and my going to board among strangers as other girls did.
I found excellent quarters and kind friends, but the home
life was ended. My sister's husband was a grammar school
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master in the city, and their cottage, a mile or
more out among the open fields was my frequent refuge
from homesickness in the general clatter. Our partial separation showed
me how much I had depended upon my sister. I
had really let her do most of my thinking for me.
Henceforth I was to trust to my own resources. I
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was no longer the little sister who could ask what
to do and do as she was told. It often
brought me a feeling of dismay to find that I
must make up my own mind about things small and great.
And yet I was naturally self reliant. I am not sure,
but self reliance and dependence really belonged together. They do
seem to meet in the same character like other extremes.
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The health of Emily's husband failing after a year or two,
it was evident that he must change his employment and
his residence. He decided to go with his brother to
Illino and settle upon a prairie farm. Of course, his
wife and baby boy must go too, and with the
announcement of this decision came an invitation to me to
accompany them. I had no difficulty as to my response.
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It was just what I wanted to do. I was
to teach a district school. But what there was beyond that,
I could not guess. I liked to feel that it
was all as vague as the unexplored regions to which
I was going. My friend and roommate, Sarah, who was
preparing herself to be a teacher, was invited to join us,
and she was glad to do so. It was all
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quickly settled, and early in the spring of eighteen forty
six we left New England. When I came to a
realization of what I was leaving. When goodbyes had to
be said, I began to feel very sorrowful and to
wish it was not to be. I said positively that
I should soon return, but underneath my protestations, I was
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afraid that I might not. The West was very far off,
then a full week's journey. It would be hard getting back.
Those I loved might die, I might die myself. These
thoughts passed through my mind, though not through my lips.
My eyes would sometimes tell the story, however, and I
fancy that my tearful farewells must have seemed ridiculous to
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many of my friends, since my going was of my
own cheerful choice. The last meeting of the Improvement Circle
before I went away was a kind of surprise party
to me. Several original poems were read, addressed to me personally.
I am afraid that I received it all in a dumb,
undemonstrative way, for I could not make it seem real
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that I was the person meant, or that I was
going away at all. But I treasured those tributes of sympathy. Afterwards,
under the strange, spacious skies where I sometimes felt so alone,
the editors of the offering left with me a testimonial
in money, accompanied by an acknowledgment of my contributions during
several years. But I had never dreamed of pay and
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did not know how to look upon it, so I
took it gratefully. However, as a token of their appreciation,
and twenty dollars was no small help toward my outfit.
Friends brought me books and other keepsakes. Our minister gave
me Da Bejean's History of the Reformation as a parting gift.
It was quite a circumstance to be going out west.
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The exhilaration of starting off on one's first long journey young, ignorant, buoyant,
expectant is unlike anything else unless it be youth itself,
the real beginning of the real journey. Life annoyances are overlooked.
Everything seems romantic and dreamlike. We went by a southerly
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route on account of starting so early in the season.
There was snow on the ground the day we left.
On the second day, after moonlight night on Long Island Sound,
we were floating down the Delaware between shores misty green
with budding willows. Then most of us seasick, though I
was not. We were tossed across Chessa Peak Bay, then
there was a railway ride to the Alleghenies, which gave
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us glimpses of the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, and
of the lovely scenery around Harper's Ferry. Then followed a
stifling night on the mountains, when we were packed like
sardines into a stagecoach without a breath of air, and
the passengers were crossed because the baby cried, while I
felt inwardly glad that one voice among us could give
utterance to the general discomfort, my own, part of which
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I could have borne if I could only have had
an occasional peep out at the mountain side. After that,
it was all river voyaging down the Monongahela into the
Ohio and up the Mississippi. As I recall this part
of it, I should say that it was the perfection
of a Western journey to travel in the early spring
by an Ohio River steamboat. Such steamboats, as they had
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forty years ago, comfortable, roomy, and well ordered. The company
was social, as Western immigrants were wont to be when
there were not so very many of them, and the
show shores of the river, then only thinly populated, were
a constantly shifting panorama of wilderness beauty. I have never
since seen a combination of spring colors so delicate as
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those shown by the uplifted forests of the Ohio, where
the pure white of the dogwood and the peach bloom
tint of the red bud Judas tree were contrasted with
soft shades of green, almost endlessly various on the unfolding leafage.
Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show
but breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced
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at its level shores edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood,
and sent back aside towards the banks of the Merrimac.
But we did not let each other know what the
Si was for until long after the breaking up of
our little company. When the steamboat landed at Saint Louis
was like the ending of a pleasant dream. We had
to wake up to the fact that by striking dew
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east thirty or forty miles across the monotonous greenness, we
should reach our destination and must accept whatever we should
find there with such grace as we could. What we
did find and did not find, there is not room
fully to relate here. Ours was at first the roughest
kind of pioneering experience, such as persons brought up in
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our well to do New England could not be in
the least prepared for, though they might imagine they were
as we did. We were dropped down finally upon a
vast green expanse extending hundreds of miles north and south
through the state of Illinois, then known as Looking Grass Prairie.
The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away,
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and so small that at that distance it looked like
a shingle set up endwise in the grass. Nothing else
was in sight, not even a tree. Although we could
see miles and miles in every direction, there were only
the hollow blue heavens above us, and the level green
prairie around us, an immensity of intense loneliness. We seldom
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saw a cloud in the sky, and never a beneath
our feet. If we could have picked up the commonest one,
we should have treasured it like a diamond. Nothing in
nature now seems so beautiful to us as rocks. We
had never dreamed of a world without them. It seemed
like living on a floor without walls or foundations. After
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a while, we became accustomed to the vast sameness, and
even liked it in a lukewarm way, And there were
times when it filled us with emotions of grandeur. Boundlessness
in itself is impressive. It makes us feel our littleness,
and yet releases us from that littleness. The grass was
always astir blowing one way, like the waves of the sea,
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for there was a steady, almost an unvarying wind from
the south. It was like the sea, and yet even
more wonderful, for it was a sea of living and
growing things. The spirit of God was moving upon the
face of the earth and breathing everything into life. We
were but specks on the great landscape, but God was
above it all, penetrating it and us with his infinite warmth.
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The distance from human beings made the invisible one seem
so near. Only nature, and ourselves, now face to face
with Him, we could scarcely have found in all the
world a more complete contrast to the moving crowds in
the whir and dust of the city of Spindles than
this unpeopled, silent prairie. For myself, I know that I
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was sent in upon my own thoughts deeper than I
had ever been before. I began to question things which
I had never before doubted. I must have reality. Nothing
but transparent truth would bear the test of this great
solitary stillness. As the prairies lay open to the sunshine,
my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the piercing eye
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of the all seeing. I may say with gratitude that
only some superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away
by the searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood,
in its simplest elements, took firmer root as it found
broader rooms to grow in. I had many peculiar experiences
in my log cabin school teaching, which was seldom more
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than three months in one place. Only once I found
myself among New England people, and there I remained a
year or more fairly reveling in a return to the familiar,
thrifty ways that seemed to me to shape a more
comfortable style of living than any under the sun Vine lodge.
So we named the cottage for its embowering honeysuckles and
its warm hearted inmates. With my little white schoolhouse under
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the oaks make one of the brightest of my Western memories.
Only a mile or two away from this pretty retreat,
there was an edifice towards which I often looked with longing.
It was a seminary for young women, probably at that
time one of the best in the country, certainly second
to none in the West. It had originated about a
dozen years before in a plan for western collegiate education
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organized by Yale College graduates. It was thought that women
as well as men ought to share in the benefits
of such a plan, and the result was Monticello's seminary.
The good man, whose wealth had made the institution a possibility,
lived in the neighborhood. Its trustees were of the best
type of pioneer manhood, and its pupils came from all
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parts of the South and West. Its principal I wonder
now that I could have lived so near her for
a year without becoming acquainted with her. But her high
local reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe,
and I was foolishly diffident. One day, however, upon the
persuasion of my friends at Vine Lodge, who knew my
wishes for a higher education, I went with them to
(24:36):
call upon her. We talked about the matter which had
been in my thoughts so long, and she gave me
not only a cordial but an urgent invitation to come
and enroll myself as a student. There were arrangements for
those who could not incur the current expenses to meet
them by doing part of the domestic work, and of
these I gladly availed myself. The stately limestone edifice, stand
(25:00):
in the midst of an original growth of forest trees,
two or three miles from the Mississippi River, became my home,
my student home, for three years. The benefits of those
three years I have been reaping ever since. I trust
not altogether selfishly. It was always my desire and my
ambition as a teacher to help my pupils as my
(25:20):
teachers had helped me. The course of study at Monticello's
Seminary was the broadest, the most college like that I
have ever known, and I have had experience since in
several institutions of the kind. The study of medieval and
modern history, and of the history of modern philosophy especially
opened new vistas to me. In these our principle was
(25:41):
also our teacher, and her method was to show us
the tendencies of thought, to put our minds into the
great current of human affairs, leaving us to collect details
as we could then or afterward. We came thus to
feel that these were lifelong studies, as indeed they are.
The course was somewhat alie, but her advice to me
(26:02):
was not to omit anything because I did not like it.
I had a natural distaste for mathematics, and my recollections
of my struggles with trigonometry and conic sections are not
altogether those of a conquering heroine. But my teacher told
me that my mind had need of just that exact
sort of discipline, and I think she was right. A
(26:22):
habit of indiscriminate, unsystematized reading such as I had fallen into,
is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind. Attention
is the secret of real acquirement. But it was months
before I could command my own attention. Even when I
was interested in the subject I was examining. It seemed
as if all the pages of all the books I
(26:43):
had ever read were turning themselves over between me and
this one page that I wanted to understand. I found
that mere reading does not, by any means make a student.
It was more to me to come into communication with
my wise teacher as a friend than even to receive
the wisdom she had to impart. She was dignified and reticent,
(27:04):
but beneath her reserve, as is often the case, was
a sealed fountain of sympathy, which one who had the
key could easily unlock. Thinking of her nobleness of character,
her piety, her learning, her power, and her sweetness, it
seems to me as if I had once had a
Christian zenobia or hypatia for my teacher. We speak with
(27:26):
odd tenderness of our unseen guardian angels, But have we
not all had our guiding angels who came to us
in visible form and recognized or unknown, kept beside us
on our difficult path until they had done for us
all that they could. It seems to me as if
one had succeeded another by my side all through the years,
(27:46):
always someone whose influence made my heart stronger and my
way clearer, though sometimes it has only been a little
child that came and laid its hand into my hand,
as if I were its guide, instead of its being mine.
My dear and honored Lady Principal was surely one of
my strong guiding angels sent to meet me as I
went to meet her upon my life road, just at
(28:09):
the point where I most needed her for the one
great thing she gave her pupils, scope often quite left
out of a woman's education. I especially thank her. The
true education is to go on forever. But how can
there be any hopeful going on without outlook? And having
an infinite outlook, how can progress ever cease? It was
(28:32):
worth while for me to go to those western prairies,
if only for the broader mental view that opened upon
me and my pupilage there. During my first year at
the seminary, I was appointed teacher of the Preparatory Department,
a separate school of thirty or forty girls, with the
opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time.
It was a little hard, but I was very glad
(28:54):
to do it, as I was unwilling to receive an
education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not wish
to debt. I believe that the postponement of these maturer
studies to my early womanhood, after I had worked and taught,
was a benefit to me. I had found out some
of my special ignorances, what the things were which I
most needed to know. I had learned that the book
(29:16):
knowledge I so much craved was not it self. Education
was not even culture, but only a help an adjunct
to both. As I studied more earnestly, I cared for
fewer books, but those few made themselves indispensable. It still
seems to me that in the Lowell Mills and in
my log Cabin schoolhouse on the Western Prairies, I received
(29:39):
the best part of my early education. The great advantage
of a seminary course to me was that under my
broad minded principle, I learned what education really is, the
penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as
making continually wider explorations, the rounding of the whole human
being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets
(30:03):
and suns are rounded until they give out safe and
steady light. This makes the process an infinite one, not
possible to be completed at any school. Returning from the West,
immediately after my graduation, I was, for ten years or
so a teacher of young girls and seminaries, much like
my own alma mater. The best result to me of
(30:24):
that experience has been the friendship of my pupils, a
happiness which must last as long as life itself. A
book must end somewhere, and the natural boundary of this
narrative is drawn with my leaving New England for the West.
I was to outline the story of my youth for
the young, though I think many a one among them
might tell a story far more interesting than mine. The
(30:46):
most beautiful lives seldom find their way into print. Perhaps
the most beautiful part of any life never does. I
should like to flatter myself, so I could not stay
at the West. It was never really home to me there,
and my sojourn of six or seven years on the
prairies only deepened my love and longing for the dear
old state of Massachusetts. I came back in the summer
(31:10):
of eighteen fifty two, and the unwritten remainder of my
sketch is chiefly that of a teacher's and writer's experience,
regarding which latter I will add, for the gratification of
those who have desired them, a few personal particulars. While
a student and teacher at the West, I was still writing,
and much that I wrote was published. A poem printed
(31:31):
in Sartaine's magazine, sent there at the suggestion of the
editor of Lowell offering was the first for which I
received remuneration five dollars. Several poems written for the Manuscript
School Journal at Montchello Seminary are in the household collection
of my verses, among them those entitled Eureka, hand in
Hand with Angels and Psyche at School. These and various
(31:56):
others written soon after, were printed in the National Era
in rec turn, for which a copy of the paper
was sent me. Nothing further was asked or expected. The
little song Hannah Binding Shoes, written immediately after my return
from the West, was a study from life, though not
from any one life in my native town. It was
(32:16):
brought into notice in a peculiar way by my being
accused of stealing it by the editor of the magazine
to which I had sent it with a request for
the usual remuneration if accepted. Accidentally or otherwise, this editor
lost my note and signature, and then denounced me by
name in a newspaper as a literary fefes, having printed
(32:37):
the verses with a nom de plume in his magazine
without my knowledge. It was awkward to have to come
to my own defense, but the curious incident gave the
song a wide circulation. I did not attempt writing for
money until it became a necessity when my health failed
at teaching, although I should long before then have liked
to spend my whole time with my pen. Could I
(32:57):
have done so, But it was imperative that I should
have an assured income, however small, and everyone who has
tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is
unless it has become very famous. Indeed, my life is
a teacher. However, I regard as part of my best
preparation for whatever I have since written. I do not know,
but I should recommend five or ten years of teaching
(33:20):
as the most profitable apprenticeship for a young person who
wished to become an author. To be a good teacher
implies self discipline, and a book written without something of
that sort of personal preparation cannot be a very valuable one.
Success in writing may mean many different things. I do
not know that I have ever reached it, except in
(33:40):
the sense of liking better and better to write, and
to finding expression easier. It is something to have won
the privilege of going on. Sympathy and recognition are worth
a great deal. The power to touch human beings inwardly
and nobly is worth far more. The hope of attaining
to such results, if only occasionally, must be a writer's
(34:02):
best inspiration so far as successful publication goes. Perhaps the
first I considered so came when a poem of mine
was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly. Its title was The
Rose Enthroned, and as the poet Lowell was at that
time editing the magazine, I felt especially gratified that in
another poem, The Loyal Woman's no written early in the
(34:25):
War of the Rebellion, were each attributed to a different
person among our prominent poets the Atlantic at that time,
not giving author's signatures. Of course, I knew the unlikeness. Nevertheless,
those who made the mistake paid me an unintentional compliment. Compliments, however,
are very cheap and by no means signify success. I
(34:46):
have always regarded it as a better ambition to be
a true woman than to become a successful writer. To
be the second would never have seemed to me desirable
without also being the first. In concluding, let me say
to you, dear girls for whom these pages have been written,
that if I have learned anything by living, it is
this that the meaning of life is education, not through
(35:10):
book knowledge alone, sometimes entirely without it. Education is growth,
the development of our best possibilities from within outward, and
it cannot be carried on as it should be except
in a school. Just such a school as we all
find ourselves in this world of human beings by whom
we are surrounded. The beauty of belonging to this school
(35:33):
is that we cannot learn anything in it by ourselves alone,
but for and with our fellow pupils the wide earth over.
We can never expect promotion here except by taking our
place among the lowest and sharing their difficulties until they
are removed, and we all become graduates together for a
higher school. Humility, sympathy, helpfulness, and faith are the best
(35:59):
teachers in this great university, and none of us are
well educated who do not accept their training. The real
satisfaction of living is and must forever be, the education
of all, for each, end of each, for all. So
let us all try together to be good and faithful women,
and not care too much for what the world may
(36:19):
think of us or of our abilities. My little story
is not a remarkable one, for I have never attempted
remarkable things in the words of one of our honored
elder writers, given in reply to a youthful aspirant who
had asked for some points of her literary career. I
never had a career. End of Chapter twelve, From the
(36:42):
Merrimac to the Mississippi
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