"Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound"
gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart
in its trance echoed the poet's invocation,--
"Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth!
And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD!"
I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with
Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face
with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of
them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in
human possibilities,--like a white ideal beckoning me on.
Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here
that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful
elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of
blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much
earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory
breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched
even dull drudgery with its sunshine.
Hard work, however, has its own illumination--if done as duty which
worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest
temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one
of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if
anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the
Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the
poet's, whenever he most deeply moves our souls.
Reason and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me also
that it is great--poetry even the greatest--which the youngest crave,
and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does
not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her
oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little
children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the
"American First Class Book," and affirm it to have been one of the best
of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest
poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by
British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a
permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt's description of the
eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of
the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of
the sightless speaker's voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that
the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in
the grand, brief sentence,--"Socrates died like a philosopher; but
Jesus Christ--like a God!"
Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl
of "Moss-Side," from "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life." From the
few short words with which it began--"Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man,
and he had been a poor man all the days of his life"--to the happy
waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with
which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable
poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its
rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and
the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I
read--
"How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich--at least in
Scotland!"
For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible
visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of
Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque.
After my father's death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more
and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to "the wolf
at the door": and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all
have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our
safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread.
Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed
dreams of what it might soon mean for me to "earn my own living."