THE years between 1835 and 1845, which nearly cover the time I lived at
Lowell, seem 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 to steamboats and railroads. To
travel 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 heads, 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 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 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 1842; though the date
was postponed from year to year, as the prophesy 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 that it did look very
ridiculous to unbelievers.
An irreverent little workmate 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! we shall be no more
In eighteen hundred and forty-four,
"Oh dear! oh dear! we sha'n'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 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 the horizon. The snow was 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!"
It was the refrain of a Millerite hymn. 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 daguerreotypes were first made, when we heard that the sun was
going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed 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, but which I only partly remember. These were the
opening lines:--
"Oh, what if thus our evil deeds
Are mirrored on the sky,
And every line of our wild lives
Daguerreotyped on high!"
My sister and I considered it quite an event when we went to have our
daguerreotypes 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 to-day could not have so good a time as we did,
science has 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 the first fifty years of the
Republic. Now all was expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were
going to happen, nobody 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 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. And most of
the remarkable people of the day came also. How strange it was to see
Mar Yohannan, 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 the wedding at the clergyman's house where he visited. The
rapidity of the simple Congregational service astonished him.
"What? Marry 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 work even to gaze
at distinguished strangers, so I missed seeing him. But a friend who
did see him sketched his profile in pencil for 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. 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 girl
friends went to the court-room and had a glimpse of his face, but I
just missed seeing him.
Sometimes an Englishman, who was studying our national institutions,
would call and have a friendly talk with us at work. Sometimes it was a
traveler from the South, who was interested in some 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
book after he had returned home.
One of the pleasantest visitors that I recall was a young Quaker woman
from Philadelphia, a school-teacher, who came to see for herself how
the Lowell 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; 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 and the tone of her 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 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 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. I recall 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 member of the Circle, on
"Pentucket," the Indian name of his native place, Haverhill. My
subject was "Sabbath Bells." 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, etc., and after the
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 memories of
my Lowell life.
Mr. Whittier's visit to Lowell had some political bearing upon the
antislavery cause. It 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 antislavery sentiments were then regarded by many as
traitorous heresies; and those who held them did not expect to win
popularity. If the vote of the mill-girls had been taken, it would
doubtless have been unanimous on the antislavery 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 Foley, 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, 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 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 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 her devotion
to him, and her zeal for the spread of Christian truth, she was hardly
conscious of her 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.
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.
Before the year 1845, 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
looms. 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 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 meet,
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 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 change into my own life was the marriage
of my sister Emilie. It involved the breaking up of our own little
family, of which she had really 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 master in the city, and their
cottage, a mile or more out, among the open fields, was my frequent
refuge from homesickness and 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 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 belong together. They do seem to
meet in the same character, like other extremes.
The health of Emilie'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 Illinois 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. 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 room-mate
Sarah, who was preparing herself to be a teacher, was invited to join
us, and she was glad to do so. It was all quickly settled, and early in
the spring of 1846 we left New England.
When I came to a realization of what I was leaving, when good-bys 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 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 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 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 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
D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation" as a parting gift. It was
quite a circumstance to be "going out West."
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 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 a 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 Chesapeake Bay;
then there was a railway ride to the Alleghanies, which gave 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 cross 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 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 early spring by an Ohio River
steamboat,--such steamboats as they had forty years ago, comfortable,
roomy, and well ordered. The company was social, as Western emigrants
were wont to be when there were not so very many of them, and the
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 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 at its level shores,
edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood, and sent back a sigh
towards the banks of the Merrimack. But we did not let each other know
what the sigh 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 due
east thirty or forty miles across that 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 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 expense, extending
hundreds of miles north and south through the State of Illinois, then
known as Looking-Glass Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about
a mile away, 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 saw a
cloud in the sky, and never a pebble beneath our feet. If we could have
picked up the commonest one, we should have treasured it like a
diamond. Nothing in nature now seemed 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 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;
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. 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 and the whir and dust of the City of Spindles,
than this unpeopled, silent prairie.
For myself, I know that I 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 of the All-Seeing. I may say with gratitude that only some
superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away by this
searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood, in its simplest
elements, took firmer root as it found broader room to grow in.
I had many peculiar experiences in my log-cabin school-teaching, which
was seldom more 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 seem 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
honey-suckles), and its warm-hearted inmates, with my little white
schoolhouse under 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, 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
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 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 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, standing 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 teachers had helped me.
The course of study at Monticello 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 mediaeval and modern
history, and of the history of modern philosophy, especially, opened
new vistas to me. In these our Principal was 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
life-long studies, as indeed they are.
The course was somewhat elective, but her advice to me 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 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 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, 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 awed 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 they could? It seems to me as if one had succeeded
another by my side all through the years,--always some one whose
influence made my heart stronger and my way clearer; though sometimes
it has been only 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 the point where I most needed her. For the one great thing she gave
her pupils,--scope, often quite left out of 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 worth while for
me to go to those Western prairies, if only for the broader mental view
that opened upon me in 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 to do it, as I was unwilling
to receive an education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not
wish to incur a 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-knowledge I so much
craved was not itself 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 the best part of my early education.
The great advantage of a seminary course to me was that under my
broad-minded Principal 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 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 in seminaries much like my own
Alma Mater. The best result to me of 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 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 of 1852, 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 in "Sartain's Magazine,"
sent there at the suggestion of the editor of the "Lowell Offering" was
the first for which I received remuneration--five dollars. Several
poems written for the manuscript school journal at Monticello 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 others written soon after, were printed in the
"National Era," in return 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 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
thiefess;" having printed 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 have done so. But it
was imperative that I should have an assured income, however small; and
every one who has tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is,
unless it has become very famous indeed. My life as 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 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 the sense of liking better and better
to write, and of 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 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 and another
poem, "The Loyal Woman's No," written early in the War of the
Rebellion, were each attributed to a different person among our
prominent poets, the "Atlantic" at that time not giving authors'
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 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
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 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 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, and 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 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."