"With books, and work, and healthful play,
May my first years be passed,
That I may give, for every day,
Some good account at last."
I knew all about the books and the play; but the work,--how should I
ever learn to do it?
My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all his
children, girls as well as boys, should have some independent means of
self-support by the labor of their hands; that every one should, as was
the general custom, "learn a trade." Tailor's work--the finishing of
men's outside garments--was the trade learned most frequently by women
in those days, and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I
think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the
idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to
make clothing for mankind.
This thought came over me with a sudden dread one Sabbath morning when
I was a toddling thing, led along by my sister, behind my father and
mother. As they walked arm in arm before me, I lifted my eyes from my
father's heels to his head, and mused: "How tall he is! and how long
his coat looks! and how many thousand, thousand stitches there must be
in his coat and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and
have a husband, and put all those little stitches into his coats and
pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!" A shiver of utter
discouragement went through me. With that task before me, it hardly
seemed to me as if life were worth living. I went on to meeting, and I
suppose I forgot my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it was real.
It was not the only time in my life that I have tired myself out with
crossing bridges to which I never came.
Another trial confronted me in the shape of an ideal but impossible
patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were
learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a
bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I
was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best to begin mine early.
So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them
together in my usual independent way, without asking direction. I liked
assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were
scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons
who wore them. One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me.
It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a
piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride
and angel in One. I always saw her face before me when I unfolded this
scrap,--a face with an expression truly heavenly in its loveliness.
Heaven claimed her before my childhood was ended. Her beautiful form
was laid to rest in mid-ocean, too deep to be pillowed among the soft
sea-mosses. But she lived long enough to make a heaven of my childhood
whenever she came home.
One of the sweetest of our familiar hymns I always think of as
belonging to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her spirit and
mine. She had come back to us for a brief visit, soon after her
marriage, with some deep, new experience of spiritual realities which
I, a child of four or five years, felt in the very tones of her voice,
and in the expression of her eyes.
My mother told her of my fondness for the hymn-book, and she turned to
me with a smile and said, "Won't you learn one hymn for me--one hymn
that I love very much?"
Would I not? She could not guess how happy she made me by wishing me to
do anything for her sake. The hymn was,--
"Whilst Thee I seek, protecting Power."
In a few minutes I repeated the whole to her and its own beauty,
pervaded with the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at once
indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it to her again,
deepened with a lifetime's meaning, beyond the sea, and beyond the
stars.
I could dream over my patchwork, but I could not bring it into
conventional shape. My sisters, whose fingers had been educated,
called my sewing "gobblings." I grew disgusted with it myself, and gave
away all my pieces except the pretty sea-moss pattern, which I was not
willing to see patched up with common calico. It was evident that I
should never conquer fate with my needle.
Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the saying that
every girl must have a pillow-case full of stockings of her own
knitting before she was married. Here was another mountain before me,
for I took it for granted that marrying was inevitable--one of the
things that everybody must do, like learning to read, or going to
meeting.
I began to knit my own stockings when I ways six or seven years old,
and kept on, until home-made stockings went out of fashion. The
pillow-case full, however, was never attempted, any more than the
patchwork quilt. I heard somebody say one day that there must always be
one "old maid" in every family of girls, and I accepted the prophecy of
some of my elders, that I was to be that one. I was rather glad to know
that freedom of choice in the matter was possible.
One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my golden-haired and
golden-hearted sister Emilie, teasing her with wondering questions
about our future, she announced to us (she had reached the mature age
of fifteen years) that she intended to be an old maid, and that we
might all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her, but
she said, "Why, if they fit themselves to be good, helpful, cheerful
old maids, they will certainly be better wives, if they ever are
married," and that maxim I laid by in my memory for future
contingencies, for I believed in every word she ever uttered. She
herself, however, did not carry out her girlish intention. "Her
children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also; and he
praiseth her." But the little sisters she used to fondle as her
"babies" have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations
to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies.
I regard it as a great privilege to have been one of a large family,
and nearly the youngest. We had strong family resemblances, and yet no
two seemed at all alike. It was like rehearsing in a small world each
our own part in the great one awaiting us. If we little ones
occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the petting and
praising and loving, that was wholesome for us, and not at all to be
regretted.
Almost every one of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her
fingers. One worked exquisite lace-embroidery; another had a knack at
cutting and fitting her doll's clothing so perfectly that the wooden
lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel doll-world; and
another was an expert at fine stitching, so delicately done that it was
a pleasure to see or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had
none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and sometimes tried to
imitate, but my efforts usually ended in defeat and mortification.
I did like to knit, however, and I could shape a stocking tolerably
well. My fondness for this kind of work was chiefly because it did not
require much thought. Except when there was "widening" or "narrowing"
to be done, I did not need to keep my eyes upon it at all. So I took a
book upon my lap and read, and read, while the needles clicked on,
comforting me with the reminder that I was not absolutely unemployed,
while yet I was having a good time reading.
I began to know that I liked poetry, and to think a good deal about it
at my childish work. Outside of the hymn-book, the first rhymes I
committed to memory were in the "Old Farmer's Almanac," files of which
hung in the chimney corner, and were an inexhaustible source of
entertainment to us younger ones.
My father kept his newspapers also carefully filed away in the garret,
but we made sad havoc among the "Palladiums" and other journals that we
ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures. We valued the anecdote
column and the poet's corner only; these we clipped unsparingly for our
scrap-books.
A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to
me, on account of the specimens of English versification which I found
in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I
used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself
when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of
iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming
occupation it must be to "make up" verses.
I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old. My brother
John proposed "writing poetry" as a rainy-day amusement, one afternoon
when we two were sent up into the garret to entertain ourselves without
disturbing the family. He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts,
but I produced two stanzas, the first of which read thus:--
"One summer day, said little Jane,
We were walking down a shady lane,
When suddenly the wind blew high,
And the red lightning flashed in the sky.
The second stanza descended in a dreadfully abrupt anti-climax; but I
was blissfully ignorant of rhetoricians' rules, and supposed that the
rhyme was the only important thing. It may amuse my child-readers if I
give them this verse too:
"The peals of thunder, how they rolled!
And I felt myself a little cooled;
For I before had been quite warm;
But now around me was a storm."
My brother was surprised at my success, and I believe I thought my
verses quite fine, too. But I was rather sorry that I had written them,
for I had to say them over to the family, and then they sounded silly.
The habit was formed, however, and I went on writing little books of
ballads, which I illustrated with colors from my toy paintbox, and then
squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor, for fear that
somebody would find them.
My fame crept out among the neighbors, nevertheless. I was even invited
to write some verses in young lady's album; and Aunt Hannah asked me to
repeat my verses to her. I considered myself greatly honored by both
requests.
My fondness for books began very early. At the age of four I had formed
the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp, paper-covered
picture-books, such as people give to babies; no! I wanted books with
stiff covers, that could stand up side by side on a shelf, and maintain
their own character as books. But I did not know how to make a
beginning, for mine were all of the kind manufactured for infancy, and
I thought they deserved no better fate than to be tossed about among my
rag-babies and playthings.
One day, however, I found among some rubbish in a corner a volume, with
one good stiff cover; the other was missing. It did not look so very
old, nor as if it had been much read; neither did it look very inviting
to me as I turned its leaves. On its title-page I read "The Life of
John Calvin." I did not know who he was, but a book was a book to me,
and this would do as well as any to begin my library with. I looked
upon it as a treasure, and to make sure of my claim, I took it down to
my mother and timidly asked if I might have it for my own. She gave me
in reply a rather amused "Yes," and I ran back happy, and began my
library by setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the garret
eaves, my "make-believe" book-case shelf.
I was proud of my literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy
with a row of books, every one of which should have two stiff covers.
But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin
was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured
him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other
book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this
attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of
magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or
not.
This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called
Spenserian. It was Byron's "Vision of Judgment," and Southey's also was
bound up with it.
Southey's hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron's
lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter
came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant
anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the
clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author's irreverence, took it for a
sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale.
There was on my mother's bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all
over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of
keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz
counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an
explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with
the words,--
"St. Peter sat at the celestial gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."
I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house
reciting grandly,--
"St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."
That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds
me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its
mock-magnificence.
John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the
foundation of an infant's library; but I was not aware of any unfitness
or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other
in their refusal to wear limp covers.
It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one
child's tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother
Goose. I supplemented "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" and
"Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,"
with "Yankee Doodle" and the "Diverting History of John Gilpin;" and
with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me,
I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and
butter,--sweeter than any has tasted since,--and would jump up towards
the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wishing I
too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee.
After Dr. Watts's hymns the first poetry I took great delight in
greeted me upon the pages of the "American First Class Book," handed
down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters
and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That
book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who
was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called
"first-class" in another sense than that which was understood by its
title. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it
much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare's
plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little
Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a
tear to my own. Bryant's "Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis" were there also;
and Neal's,--
"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak,"
that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this
last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of
the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's
movement:--
"Slowly it came in its mountain wrath,
And the forests vanished before its path;
And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,--
And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead."
In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I
first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the
mountains--a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far
more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as
real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly
friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,--for
something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly
love them,--was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same
"First Class Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession
of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the
genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently
trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck
some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of
what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I
did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of
eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many
games and pastimes.
But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a
revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must
reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it
was to me like the thought of God and of truth. To leave out poetry
would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and
vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc
stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places--
"Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers
Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?"