REFLECTIONS OF A TEACHER.
It was not Miss Larcom’s regular habit to keep a diary, but at certain
times she recorded her thoughts in private note-books. Her object in
doing this was to cultivate clearness of expression by frequently
writing, and to give definiteness to her ideas by putting them down
in black and white, thus preserving them, either for immediate use as
material for letters to her friends, or for her own inspection years
afterwards. Long intervals of time elapsed between the periods when
she wrote in her diaries; so they have not the value of a continuous
life-history, but are interesting as records of phases of her thought
which often reflect vividly the conditions in which she lived.
The following extracts from her diary have been made with the purpose
of showing how she was influenced by the circumstances of her life,
and how deeply she entered into the spirit of her intellectual and
political surroundings.
Norton, May 4, 1860. Our talk has been of the mystics again to-day.
With all the vagaries into which some of them wandered, I cannot
help feeling that these men had more of the truth than any of those
more strictly styled philosophers. Cousin has a cool, patronizing
way with all systems that rather amuses me at times. What he says of
the relation of philosophy to religion seems very conceited: that,
while they have been separated, philosophy must now take religion by
the hand, and gently guide her steps to the light. The history of
philosophy would rather show that he was making a guide of the one who
needed to be led! Certainly it must be so, if God is wiser than man.
May 21. Out of door studies, these past days, among goldfinches,
orioles, larks, brown thrushes, and all the singing brotherhood; and a
course of lectures on natural history, to help out the classifying and
naming. Better living than among philosophers.
June 13. These weeks that have been spent over a discussion of Eastern
and Western mythologies, have allowed little time for reading or
thinking of anything else. I have learned to value the thoughts of
thinkers, and to perceive the difference between them and pleasant
surface-writers. I expected to gain much from Mrs. Child’s “History
of Religious Ideas,” and I have found it full of entertaining and
instructive facts, told in a very kind and impartial way; but hers is
not the philosophic depth of Carlyle, nor the broad and deep spiritual
insight of Maurice,--the latter always pours light into the windows
of my soul, and makes truth seem all near and clear. Mrs. C.’s work
is still a most valuable one, because it makes so much comprehensible
that had been shut up for the general reader, and such a spirit as hers
makes everything that she writes good to read. This reading and writing
have impressed me more fully than ever before with the certainty that
truth is one, radiating from one source through all manner of mediums,
colored and distorted by all sorts of error; yet wherever a good word
has been spoken, there is the voice of God, whether the speaker were
Christian or Pagan.
June 20. After reading the addresses at the Music Hall, in memory of
Theodore Parker, and what is said of him in the religious papers, it
seems to me a great relief that there is a perfect Judge of human
character and human life above. Neither friends nor foes could know
this man truly; his works will follow him, right or wrong, for he wrote
himself in innumerable hearts, with all the energy of confidence in his
own views. I did not like the tone of his preaching and lecturing,--it
seemed to me often dogmatic, and abusive of other beliefs; certainly
never very patient with what he did not like. Yet the noble impulses he
communicated, the perfect freedom of thought which he advised, cannot
be without their good results. The fire will try his work, as it does
and will that of all human workers, to prove of what sort it is.
August 12, Gardiner, Maine. Now in the seclusion of this little bird’s
nest in the woods, I feel easy and free, like the winds that sweep
through pine and hemlock, and the birds that go singing or silent from
the glen to the orchard. Heartsease grows here, best of all blossoms; I
surely did not bring it with me, for I was very uneasy at home.
August 14. Leisure,--is it anything to be thankful for, or not? I
never do what I mean to do, nor so much, as when I think my time all
occupied. This vacation is almost gone, and not one of the achievements
I had planned, in the way of writing, is executed. It is something to
rest, but not so much, if one feels that it is not exactly right or
necessary to rest!
August 18. The prospect of a journey to the mountains to-day. There is
a thick fog from the river, but the birds are singing through it. I can
scarcely let the summer go without giving me a glimpse of the mountains.
August 22. Returned last night after a very pleasant visit of three
days. It rained on the way, but it was only the cooler and more
comfortable traveling for that; and when the sun came out in the
west just as we reached the top of a ridge from which the whole long
mountain chain was visible on the horizon, I felt that that one view
was enough compensation for going, and that first glimpse I shall never
forget. The round summit of Blue, and the bolder ridges of Saddle-back
and Abraham, lifted themselves above the lower elevations that would
be mountains anywhere but among mountains, far off and solemn with the
deepening purple of sunset, and over them the sky hung, fiery gold,
intermingled with shadow. The first glimpse was finer than anything
afterward, though I rode up the lovely valley of the Sandy River, which
is _like_ a paradise, if not one, recalling ever the old words of the
hymn:--
“Sweet fields arrayed in living green,
And rivers of delight.”
What can be more beautiful than green meadow-lands, bordered by
forest-covered slopes, that ever rise and rise, till they fade into dim
blue mountain-distances?
I climbed one mountain half-way,--the bluest of the blue,--and so
called, by emphasis, Mount Blue. It was a grand view,--the great
distant mountain wall, and the valleys slumbering safe in its
shadow. Yet the distant view is always more impressive, more full of
suggestions for me; and coming back to the first point of observation,
I hoped for a repetition of the first delight. But the far-off ridges
were closely veiled with mist and rain, and a thunder-shower swept
toward us from them, across the wide valley. Yet as we turned to leave,
Mount Blue just lifted off his mist-cap for a few minutes, as if to say
good-by!
Altogether, it is a most charming and comforting picture for future
remembrance: flowery mountain-slopes, little garden patches of
golden-rod, white everlasting and purple willow-herb, under the shade
of maples, and firs, and graceful hemlocks; and glimpses of cottagers’
homes on hillsides and by running streams. My eyes are rested, and my
heart is glad.
August 24. Beverly. The sail down the Kennebec River was delightful,
and I took a wicked sort of pleasure in shutting myself up from the
crowd and enjoying it!
August 26. Sabbath day memories and regrets--how unlike everything
else they are! One thing to be grateful for, in a Puritan training, is
that it makes one day in the week a thoughtful one, at least. The old
customs we may not keep up,--may even regard them as foolish,--still,
there is a questioning as to right and wrong on this day, which we must
be hardened to get wholly rid of. If I have lived unworthily for a
week, the Sabbath quietly shows me myself in her mirror.
Lately I have heard some discussion as to the name and manner of
keeping the day. “The Sabbath,” they say, “was a Jewish institution,
not a Christian festival, such as we should keep.” But I believe that
_rest_ is still the noblest idea of the day; the old Sabbath was a type
of Christian rest; not constrained, but free, full, peaceful; so I like
not anything that disturbs the _quiet_ of the day.
September 17. Whether such a record as this is a useful thing,
or entirely useless, I begin to question. I don’t want to feel
interested in anything which is only to benefit myself, and I don’t
want to write these trifles for other people’s eyes. A journal of
the “subjective” kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a
morbid self-consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I
am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
Letter-writing is a better safety valve than a journal, when we write
to those we can trust, and this I meant to be a sort of prolonged
letter, a mirror of my occupations and progress, for my old friend,
Esther. But she, I fear will never read it; she is on her way to a
place of better occupation, and I feel that the first stimulus is gone.
Shall I stop in the middle of my book? No, I believe not; for I think
it will be indirectly a useful thing, and I shall write just when I
feel like it, often enough to keep track of myself, and give account of
myself to myself.
Since I returned to school I have read--well, not much; two little
works on natural history; I have begun Ruskin’s fifth volume, with
great interest, and Trench on the Parables for my Sunday class. “The
Limits of Religious Thought” I am reading with a pupil, and with it
Maurice’s reply, “What is Revelation?” My impression of these two
writers, so far, is that Maurice is a much more deeply religious man
than Mansel; and that the latter’s logic will not always sustain his
footing. I do not like logic in religion,--reason is not always logic;
reason seems to me to be the mind wide open--no faculty numb or asleep;
and to that state of inner being, truth must come like sunshine, and
the mysteries which cannot be explained will be harmonized with our
certain knowledge, in such light.
September 22. Morris’s Poems have come to me to-day, by mail. I have
just glanced through the book, and find myself attracted by the
clearness and simplicity of the songs; the most beautiful the most
familiar, as songs should be. It does not strike me that any of them
came from the very deep places of the heart,--many of them sound as if
written only to please, and as if the highest aim of the author was to
have them pretty and unobjectionable. I’ve written things in that way
myself sometimes, and I don’t like it.
September 26. I know I haven’t regarded ministers as others do, yet it
seems to me that there are few “ministers” or “pastors” nowadays,--real
ones,--such as the apostolic times knew. A “preacher” does not mean the
thing, for he may preach himself only. I wonder whether the relations
between pastor and people can ever be again as they have been? People
are becoming their own judges and guides in religious things; this is a
necessity of Protestantism, I think. And yet my “liberal” Mr. Maurice
says that the “right of private judgment” only makes every man his own
pope. The true idea of a church has not yet been shown the world,--a
visible Church, I mean,--unless it was in the very earliest times;
yes, the twelve disciples bound to their Lord in love, to do his work
forever,--that was a church,--a Christian family. But then they had no
system of theology to which all were expected to conform; love was all
their theology. And then, afterwards, while they took the wisest and
best as teachers, and called no one Master or Head but Christ, they
were a true Church.
I don’t believe we can look upon our ministers as the early disciples
did upon Paul and John, unless they have the spirit of Paul and John.
The ministry is trifled with too much by ministers themselves, and
it sometimes seems to me as if this was so, because it is made a
_business_.
September 29. “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears,
for they hear.” This is the blessing of life: to be in the light and
harmony of the love of God and reveal it. To “know the mysteries” of
the kingdom of Heaven,--what is it, but to be in God’s universe with a
soul opened, by love, to truth; unto such only “it is given.” Yet we
have hearing and vision and the spiritual sense, all of us, and for the
use of each, or misuse, or neglect, and consequent loss, every one is
to blame. Oh, for a heart always opened; to read all parables in the
light in which they were born!
November 10. I have actually forgotten to write for months in this
book. I fear me, “my heart is nae here.” I have lived a good deal in
the past week, and the world has been doing a great business,--our
country in particular. The Prince has turned the heads of our
democratic people, and Republicans have chosen a President at last.
That is glorious! Freedom takes long strides in these better days. The
millennium is not so far off as we feared. While there is so much to
be lived outside, who cares for the little self-life of a journal? But
I never meant it to be a “subjective” one, and when it has been so, it
has been so because I was living below my ideal. Yet this shall be just
the book my thoughts shape from their various moods; when the thought
is for myself, I will write it, and when it is for another, I will
write it too.
“Whose window opened towards the rising sun.”
So the happy pilgrim rested, knowing that as soon as there was light
anywhere, he should have the first ray. Strange, that every Christian
sojourner should not seek a room with windows opening to the dawn!
Some of them seem afraid of the sun; they choose a chamber having
only a black, northerly outlook, and lie down saying, “What a dreary,
miserable world!” And what wonder that they should grow thin and
sickly--plants of the shade must ever be so; the soul, as well as the
body, needs large draughts of sunshine for vigorous life.
November 27. Since I came to Beverly I have been looking over “Wilhelm
Meister” for the first time. I am disappointed in it, and have little
respect for Goethe as a man, great as was his genius. Great thoughts he
had, and they shine like constellations through the book; artistic, no
doubt he was, but everything that relates to principle or right feeling
is terribly chaotic, it seems to me. And _Wilhelm_ is an embodiment of
high-strung selfishness, under a cloak of generosity and spontaneous
good feeling. If I could despise any man, it would be such a one as he.
December 9. God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts!
It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with
others greater and better in every way than we are. Having just made
myself the possessor of “Guesses at Truth,” I feel as if I had struck a
new mine, or were a privileged traveler into regions hitherto unknown,
where there is every variety of natural and cultivated growth, where
there are ever recurring contrasts of scenery, and where even the rocks
are not barren, but glittering with veins of precious ore. How much
better these “thinking books” are than any “sensation books” of any
kind, prose or poetry! They are the true intellectual companions. One
does not read them, and put them by on the shelf, to be read again one
of these days, perhaps,--but they are wanted close at hand, and often.
“No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen in an Autumnal face.”
The poet Donne wrote so of the mother of “holy George Herbert.” It is
so true! and I have seen the same. It would be worth while to live
long, to suffer much, to struggle and to endure, if one might have such
spiritual beauty blossom out of furrows and wrinkles as has been made
visible in aged human faces. Such countenances do not preach,--they are
poetry, and music, and irresistible eloquence.
Christmas, 1860. Two or three books I have read lately. Mrs. Jameson’s
“Legends of the Madonna” is full of that fine appreciation of the
deepest beauty, even in the imperfect creations of art, where the
creation had in it the breath of spirit life, so peculiar to this
gifted woman. If I were going to travel in Europe, I should want, next
to a large historical knowledge, an intimate acquaintance with the
writings of Mrs. Jameson, to appreciate the treasures of mediæval art.
Whittier’s “Home Ballads,” dear for friendship’s sake, though not
directly a gift from him, as were some of the former volumes. I wonder
if that is what makes me like the songs in the “Panorama,”--some of
them--better than anything in this new volume, although I know that
this is more perfect as poetry. I doubt if he will ever write anything
that I shall like so well as the “Summer by the Lakeside,” in that
volume: it is so full of my first acquaintance with the mountains, and
the ripening of my acquaintance with him, my poet-friend. How many
blessings that friendship has brought me!--among them, a glimpse into a
true home, a realizing of such brotherly and sisterly love as is seldom
seen outside of books,--and best of all, the friendship of dear Lizzie,
his sole home-flower, the meek lily blossom that cheers and beautifies
his life. Heaven spare them long to each other, and their friendship to
me!
But the “Ballads” are full of beauty and of a strong and steady trust,
which grows more firmly into his character and poetry, as the years
pass over him. “My Psalm,” with its reality, its earnest depth of
feeling, makes other like poems, Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” for
instance, seem weak and affected. I like, too, the keenness and
kindness of the Whitefield poem, in which he has preserved the memory
of a Sabbath evening walk I took with him.
Dr. Croswell’s poems contain many possibilities of poetry, and some
realities; but there always seems to me a close air, as if the
church windows were shut, in reading anything written by a devout
Episcopalian. Still, there was true Christianity in the man, and it is
also in the book.
December 27. To-night the telegraph reports the evacuation of Fort
Moultrie by the Federal troops by order of the Executive, and the
burning of the fort. There’s something of the “spirit of ’76” in
the army, surely; South Carolina having declared herself a foe to
the Union, how could those soldiers quietly give up one of the old
strongholds to the enemy, even at the President’s command?
But what will the end be? Is this secession-farce to end with a
tragedy? The South will suffer, by insurrection and famine; there is
every prospect of it; the way of transgressors is hard, and we must
expect it to be so. God grant that, whatever must be the separate or
mutual sufferings of North and South, these convulsions may prove to be
the dying struggles of slavery, and the birth-throes of liberty.
It is just about a year since “Brown of Ossawatomie” was hung in the
South, for unwise interference with slavery. He was not wholly a
martyr; there were blood-stains on his hands, though no murder was
in his heart. He was a brave man and a Christian, and his blood,
unrighteously shed, still cries to heaven from the ground. Who knows
but this is the beginning of the answer? But that judicial murder was
not the only wrong for which the slaveholding South is now bringing
herself before the bar of judgment, before earth and heaven. The
secret things of darkness are coming to light, and the question will
be decided rightly, I firmly believe. And the South is to be pitied,
as all hardened and blinded wrong-doers should be! I believe the North
will show herself a noble foe, if foe the South determines to make her.