LETTERS AND WORK.
1861-1868.
The regular routine of school-life was varied for Miss Larcom by
charming invitations to Boston where she met many literary friends,
and by her pleasant summer vacations, which she always spent among the
mountains. The two following letters, one to Mr. James T. Fields and
one to Mr. Whittier, are interesting:--
NORTON, April 4, 1861.
DEAR MR. FIELDS,--My thoughts ran into a kind of rhapsody, all to
themselves, after that evening of pleasant surprises at your house. I
did not know it was fairy-land at 37 Charles Street, nor did I dream
of meeting so many of the Genii,--if I had foredreamed or foreknown, I
suppose I should have thought it even more of an impossibility for me
to go than I did.
I wasn’t going to be so foolish as to send you this rhapsody, but I
have just got back to my own room after the wanderings of vacation, and
have hung up my ruined arch. It is Dolabella’s, on the Coelian Hill,
and it brings back so many pleasant reminiscences of those few hours
among the treasures of your home-grotto that I am just in the mood for
inflicting this out-of-date expression of my enjoyment upon Mrs. Fields
and you. I don’t pretend that it is poetry, and if you are ashamed of
me, for running on so, please remember that you shouldn’t have shown me
so many curious and beautiful things;--I am not used to them.
I have heard that Miss Cushman is to play next week. Is it true? If it
is, and if you know before-hand what evenings she will appear as Lady
Macbeth or Meg Merrilies, will you be so kind as to tell Mr. Robinson,
who will let me know, and who has promised to accompany me to the
theatre? I have always wanted to see her in some of her great _rôles_,
and now more than ever, since I have seen her as a noble woman.
What a wonderful statue that “Lotus Eater” is! I was never so “carried
away” with anything in marble!
With remembrances to Mrs. Fields,
Gratefully yours,
LUCY LARCOM.
This poem was enclosed in the above letter:--
Was it a dream
Or waking vision of the gracious night?
Did I on that enchanted isle alight,
Aye blossoming in Shakespeare’s line,
With forms and melodies divine,--
Where all things seem
Ancient yet ever new beneath the hand
Of Prospero and his aërial band?
At every turn a change
To something rich and strange,--
Embodied shapes of poets’ fantasies:
Glimpses of ruins old
Slow fading from the blue Italian skies;
And runes of wizards bold;
Or beautiful or quaint
Memorials of bard, and sage, and saint,
In many an antique tome.
There was some necromancy in the place:
The air was full of voices wondrous sweet;
Crowned shadows of past ages came to greet
Their living peers, who lately lent new grace
To genius-haunted Rome;
And when the lady of the grotto spoke,
’Twas like Miranda, when at first she woke
To Love, lighting the wild sea with her smile
Star of her beautiful and haunted isle;
And the magician, who
Such harmony and beauty round him drew,--
He was her Ariel and Ferdinand
Blended in one,
And heir to Prosper’s wonder-working wand.
He charmed the sprites of power
For one familiar hour,
And Story-land and Dream-land deftly won
To his home-nook the moonlit stream beside:
Hushed and apart
Though in the city’s heart,
There dwell they long, the poet and his bride!
TO J. G. WHITTIER.
NORTON, Mass., September 8, 1861.
Why is it that I always miss thy visits? Why of all things should I
have lost sight of thee at the mountains? and when I was so near thee
too! I cannot think why so pleasant a thing should be withheld from
me, unless because I enjoy it too much. I have no other such friends as
thee and Elizabeth, and when anything like this happens it is a great
disappointment. But I said all the time that seeing the hills with you
could only be a beautiful dream.
I felt the beauty of those mountains around the Lake, as I floated
among them, but I wished for thee all the while; because I have always
associated thee with my first glimpse of them, and somehow it seems
as if they belonged to thee or thee to them, or both. They would not
speak to me much; I needed an interpreter: and when they grew so dim
and spectral in the noon haze, they gave me a strange almost shuddering
feeling of distance and loneliness.
But I am glad thee saw the Notch Mountains, and those grand blue hills
up the river that I used to watch through all their changes. I am glad
Miss B---- saw thee, for she was as much disappointed as I when we gave
up the hope of your coming. I felt almost certain you would both come;
I wanted Lizzie to know the mountains.
Is it right to dream and plan for another year? How I should like to go
to Franconia with thee and Elizabeth to see those great gates of the
Notch open gradually wider and wider, and then to pass through to a
vision of the vast range beyond! It is but a vague memory to me; I long
to take that journey again.
But everything has wearied me this summer, and I feel almost like
dropping my dreams and never expecting anything more. It is doubtless
wiser to take what a kind Providence sends, just as it comes: yet who
is always wise? Twice I rested in the sight of your beautiful river
and on that cottage doorstep at Campton, looking off to the mountains.
But the sea tired me with its restlessness. I wanted to tell it to be
still. And I was very willing to get back from it to the quiet of my
room, to the shelter of these friendly elms, and to the steady cheerful
music of crickets and grasshoppers.
I shall be very happy to try to write a hymn for the Horticultural
Association, as you request; and will send you something as soon as I
can....
In the autumn of 1862, Miss Larcom decided to give up teaching at
Wheaton Seminary. Ill health for some time had made her complain of a
constant sense of weariness in her head. Living in the crowded school
when she longed for quiet, and preparing her work for extra classes,
she became nervously exhausted; so that when an invitation came from
Esther’s mother, requesting her to spend the winter in Waterbury,
Connecticut, she readily accepted it. She longed to be in the peaceful
home made sacred by the presence of her beloved friend, where she felt
that by occupying Esther’s room, sitting at her writing-desk, and using
her very bed, she would enter into her spirit, and help to fill the
vacant place in a mother’s heart. At first there was something hallowed
in the home of one so pure,--she “felt it was holy ground,” and was
“half afraid to live my common life here;” but the close association
with sad memories was depressing, and the solitude, while it gave her
rest, did not refresh her. After having formed a lifelong friendship
with Franklin Carter, a half-brother of Esther and afterwards President
of Williams College, she returned, first to Norton for a little
while,--then to Beverly, where she secured time for her writing, which
was now constantly absorbing her attention.
Her poems, written chiefly for weekly papers--since they were either
on homely fireside topics or incidents of the war, or else were
religious meditations--were widely copied, and found their way into
the scrap-books of thoughtful households all over the land. Referring
to the winter of 1863, she said, “I have written for the newspapers
this winter. My ideas of the ‘Atlantic’ are too high for me often to
offer it anything my thoughts let slip. My standard is so far beyond
my performances, that I am very glad to let them glide away unnoticed,
and unnamed, on the path of the weekly tide wave of print.” Though
Mr. Fields was equal to the task of polite editorial refusal, he
gladdened her heart by occasionally accepting a poem. It was through
his literary judgment that “Hilary,” that tender lyric of sea-sorrow,
with its wistfulness and pathos, first saw the light; and the indignant
strains of “A Loyal Woman’s No” were first heard from the pages of the
“Atlantic.” These successes opened the way for poems of greater merit,
like the “Rose Enthroned.”
Her interest in the war was intense. She followed eagerly the progress
of the campaigns, and rejoiced in every victory, often writing verses
to celebrate the events, as in the case of the sinking Merrimac:--
“Gone down in the flood, and gone out in the flame!
What else could she do, with her fair Northern name?”
Her satire was ready for those able-bodied men who, when the drafting
was talked of, were suddenly seized with many varieties of disease,
or those who went a-fishing for the season--because mariners were
exempt--or, like one man, who cut off three fingers, hoping that the
loss of these members would be sufficient to keep him at home. She
wanted to do something herself: “I am almost ashamed of these high
sentiments in print, because I really have done nothing for our dear
country as yet. These things sound conceited and arrogant to me,
under the circumstances, but I only write from an ideal of patriotic
womanhood, and for my country-women.” She came near offering herself
as a teacher for the “Contrabands,” but some of her friends thought
it unwise in the state of her health at the time, and she concluded
that she was not fitted for the work, with the rather sad confession,
“I have an unconquerable distrust of my own fitness for these angel
ministries; I fear I am not worthy to suffer. I can think, write, and
teach, but can I live?”
In August, 1863, she was called to the West by the serious illness of
her sister Louisa, which terminated fatally.
TO MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS.
HAMMOND, WIS., September 11, 1863.
... and with her, my pleasant dreams of home dissolve; it was she who
said she would make a home for me, wherever I would choose. The earthly
outlook is lonelier than before; but I must not yield to selfish
regrets. She has gone home, in a sense more real than we often say
of the dead. Her whole family had gone before her,--husband and four
children had left her one after another. Her heart seemed broken when
her youngest son died in the army, last year; she never recovered her
strength after that blow. I cannot mourn when I think of that glad
reunion of a household in heaven, but I cannot help the great blank
that her death and my brother’s have left in my life. These family
ties, I find, grow stronger as I grow older.
This prairie life does not now attract me at all. A broad, grand world
opens out on every side, but there is no choice in it. You might as
well take one level road as another....
With the death of this sister, in reality, did dissolve the “pleasant
dreams of a home,” for Miss Larcom never had a home of her own, though
she longed for one, and used to delight in speaking of the possibility
of having one. “I will build my long-planned home among the
mountains,” she used to say, “and my friends shall bivouac with me all
summer.” But her life was spent principally in boarding-houses, or in
the homes of others. Her resources never permitted her to own the bed
on which she slept; however, she did own an old wooden lounge, which
was her only bed for years. But she made the best of it, in her usual
way; “I like this old couch. I like to be independent of things; there
is a charm in Bohemian life.”
On her return to Beverly in 1864, she took a few pupils again, and
spent a good deal of time in painting,--even weeds, for she “loved the
very driest old stick that had a bit of lichen or moss on it.” She
exhausted her friend’s libraries in reading, and received from Mrs.
Fields a large valise filled with precious volumes, which she returned
only after having read them all. “I like to be here in Beverly with my
sister and the children. I think I am more human here than at school.”
The following records were made with feeling in her diary.
April 10, 1865. Waked at five o’clock this morning, to hear bells
ringing for the surrender of Lee’s army; robins screaming, and guns
booming from the fort. The war’s “Finis;” Glory Hallelujah!
April 15. Starting for Boston, the bells began to toll. The President’s
assassination is the report. The morning papers confirm the truth.
Sadness and indignation everywhere. The Rebellion has struck its most
desperate blow, but the Nation moves calmly on.
April 19. The President’s funeral. Every place of business closed.
Services in all the churches. I went to the Old South, and heard
a brief and indignant speech, which received the people’s earnest
response.
May 14, Sunday. Bells ringing for the capture of Jeff Davis.
In 1865, Miss Larcom became one of the editors of the new magazine
for young people, “Our Young Folks,” and retained this position until
1872, when “St. Nicholas” inherited the good-will and patronage of the
earlier magazine. The orange-colored periodical bore her name, and
those of Gail Hamilton and Trowbridge, and usually contained a ballad
or prose sketch by her, or else she contributed some of the answers in
the “Letter Box.” Her work was performed with conscientiousness and
good taste; her sympathy with child-life made her a valuable assistant
in making the magazine popular. She was interested in its success:
“‘Our Young Folks’ greatly delights grown people everywhere. I am very
glad of an occasional criticism that offers a hint of an improvement.
It must be made to distance all competitors in value, as it does in
patronage.”
To be in a position where she had the power to reject or accept
hundreds of manuscripts sent for approval, interested her, but she had
so much sympathy for the struggling author, that, contrary to the
usual custom of the “Editorial Department,” she often sent a personal
note of explanation. She could not help laughing over the strange
letters she received, though she usually answered them politely. One
woman wrote, asking her advice as to the sale of three hundred barrels
of apples. Musicians sent her music, requesting her to write words to
suit. A young girl wrote that she was “young, poor, and orphaned,” thus
appealing to the editorial sympathies, and requested her to arbitrate
concerning the merit of two poems, “The Angel Whisper” and “One of the
Chosen,” for some one had promised to give her five dollars and a new
hat, if her own poem should be successful. Modesty was not always a
virtue with these applicants. One wrote: “Editors, Sir and Madam,--I
send you a palindrome, which you know is a curiosity. I saw a list, the
other day, said to be the best in the language, but this excels them
all, as it represents a complete idea of spiritual philosophy. I should
like to open a school of ideas for children. I believe this would add
to your subscription list.” Another announced the strange theory, that
“languages were originated with references to correspondence between
the visible and invisible world.” Another facetiously remarked, making
application for a position, “Anything but to count money, for I have
not had experience in this form of labor.”
Miss Larcom published, in 1866, the valuable collection of extracts
from religious writings,--“Breathings of the Better Life.” It was
received with warm welcome, and reprinted in England, without,
however, being accredited to the author. It contained the passages
she had discovered in her reading of many books, to which she wanted
to give a wider circulation among those who might not possess the
volumes. This little book represents the development of her religious
thought along deeply spiritual lines. Her favorite authors are
represented,--Robertson, Bushnell, Tholuck, and now and then a little
poem by George Herbert, Madame Guyon, or Mrs. Browning is given. The
subjects treated are characteristic of her thought: “The Kingdom within
the Soul,” “The Way of Access,” “Life Eternal,” “Shadows cast over
Other Lives,” “The Bearing of the Cross,” “The Fullness of Life,” “The
Illuminated Gateway,” and “The Glory Beyond.”
TO MR. J. T. FIELDS.
BEVERLY, MASS., May 20, 1866.
MY DEAR MR. FIELDS,--Before you escape for the summer, I want to bother
you with a word or two about the “Breathings.” I find that people are
imagining I have been very industrious this winter, by the way they
talk about my new book, which they suppose is something original. I
don’t want to give wrong impressions in that way, as the selections are
more valuable on their own account than on mine.
When it is time to announce it, can it not be described as “a
compilation of brief extracts in prose and verse, from favorite
religious writers,” or something to that effect. And must my name
appear in full? The commonplace “Miss Larcom” I should like better than
my usual staring alliteration; as less obtrusive, “L. L.” is better
still.
And please let the book be as inexpensive as possible, because it is
my “little preach,” and I want a large congregation of poor folks like
myself. My object in preparing it will be defeated, if they cannot have
it.
I don’t calculate upon a “paper fractional” from it for myself, so you
can leave that entirely out of consideration. It has been altogether a
labor of love with me. I wanted the good people to know who their best
instructors are. Robertson above all, who is the true apostle of this
age, within the Church.
Yours sincerely,
LUCY LARCOM.
TO MRS. J. T. FIELDS.
BEVERLY, MASS., May 26, 1866.
DEAR ANNIE,--If I could only make you feel the difference in myself
coming home through the apple-blooms last night, and going to Boston
Wednesday morning, I think you would know that you had not lived
in vain, for a few of the beautiful May-day hours. I bring such
refreshment from you always! I wonder if you do not feel that something
is gone out from you, or are you like the flowers, that find an
infinite sweetness in their hearts, replacing constantly what they
give away? So much I must say in love and gratitude, and you must
pardon it, because it is sincere.
I have copied the rhyme note for you. If I did not feel so very
“stingy” (it’s the word!) about our Mr. Whittier’s letters, I should
give you the original, for I think it belongs to you almost as much as
to me. But possession is nine tenths of the law, you know, and I am a
real miser about the letters of a friend,--ashamed as I am to own it to
one so generous to me as you are....
The “rhyme note” mentioned was a delightful doggerel from Mr. Whittier.
AMESBURY, March 25, 1866.
Believe me, Lucy Larcom, it gives me real sorrow
That I cannot take my carpet-bag, and go to town to-morrow;
But I’m “Snow-bound,” and cold on cold, like layers of an onion,
Have piled my back, and weighed me down, as with the pack of Bunyan.
The north-east wind is damper, and the north-west wind is colder,
Or else the matter simply is that I am growing older;
And then, I dare not trust a moon seen over one’s left shoulder
As I saw this, with slender horn caught in a west hill-pine,
As on a Stamboul minaret curves the Arch Impostor’s sign.
So I must stay in Amesbury, and let you go your way,
And guess what colors greet your eyes, what shapes your steps delay,
What pictured forms of heathen love, of god and goddess please you,
What idol graven images you bend your wicked knees to.
But why should I of evil dream, well knowing at your head goes
That flower of Christian womanhood, our dear good Anna Meadows!
She’ll be discreet, I’m sure, although, once, in a fit romantic,
She flung the Doge’s bridal ring, and married the “Atlantic;”
And spite of all appearances, like the woman in the shoe,
She’s got so many “Young Folks” now she don’t know what to do.
But I must say, I think it strange that thee and Mrs. Spalding,
Whose lives with Calvin’s five-barred creed have been so tightly walled in,
Should quit your Puritanic homes, and take the pains to go
So far, with malice aforethought, to walk in a vain show!
Did Emmons hunt for pictures? was Jonathan Edwards peeping
Into the chambers of imagery with maids for Tammuz weeping?
Ah, well, the times are sadly changed, and I myself am feeling
The wicked world my Quaker coat from off my shoulders peeling;
God grant that, in the strange new sea of change wherein we swim,
We still may keep the good old plank of simple faith in Him!
P.S. My housekeeper’s got the “tissick,” and gone away, and Lizzie
Is at home for the vacation, with flounce and trimmings busy;
The snow lies white about us, the birds again are dumb,--
The lying blue-frocked rascals who told us Spring had come;
But in the woods of Folly-Mill the sweet May-flowers are making
All ready for the moment of Nature’s glad awaking.
Come when they come; their welcome share:--except when at the city,
For months I’ve scarce seen womankind, save when, in sheerest pity,
Gail Hamilton came up, beside my lonely hearth to sit,
And make the Winter evening glad with wisdom and with wit
And fancy, feeling but the spur and not the curbing bit,
Lending a womanly charm to what before was bachelor rudeness;--
The Lord reward her for an act of disinterested goodness!
And now, with love to Mrs. F., and Mrs. S. (God bless her!),
And hoping that my foolish rhyme may not prove a transgressor,
And wishing for your sake and mine, it wiser were and wittier,
I leave it, and subscribe myself, your old friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
TO MRS. J. T. FIELDS.
BEVERLY, June 21, 1866.
DEAR ANNIE,--Here I am once more by the salt sea, and out of the
beautiful retreat of the Shakers, where we said “Good-by.”
“Aunt Mary” told me I might come again, and if it were not for the
vision of that great dining-room, and the “two settings” of brethren
and sisters, and the general wash-basin, I should almost be tempted to
go also, and steep myself in that great quietness: only one would need
a book now and then, and literature seems to be tabooed among them.
Mr. Whittier was much interested to hear of our adventures. I think I
must have been eloquent about cider, for he said, “I wish I had some
of it this minute,” so earnestly that I wished I had my hand upon that
invisible Shaker barrel....
TO MRS. CELIA THAXTER.
BEVERLY, July 16, 1867.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--To think that yesterday I was among the Enchanted
Isles, and to-day here, with only the warm murmur of the west wind
among the elms! The glory of the day and the far eastern sea lingers
with me yet. How I do thank you for those three bright days! The
undercurrent of memory would have been too much but for your kindness.
I think I kept it well covered, but there was a vast unrest in me,
all those days. I seemed to myself wandering over the turfy slopes,
and the rocks, and the sea, in search of a dream, a sweet, impalpable
presence that ever eluded me. I never knew how fully dear Lizzie[6]
filled my heart, until she was gone. Is it always so? But that Island
is Lizzie to me, now. It was the refuge of her dreams, when she could
not be there in reality. Her whole being seemed to blossom out into
the immense spaces of the sea. I am glad that I have been there once
again, and with only the dear brother, and you whom she loved and
admired so much. For you _are_ an enchantress. It is a great gift to
attract and to _hold_ as you can, and rare, even among women. To some
it is a snare, but I do not believe it ever can be to you, because
the large generosity of the sea was born into you. How can you help
it, if your waves overblow with music, and all sorts of mysterious
wealth upon others of us humans? I hope you beguiled our friend into
a stay of more than the one day he spoke of. It was doing him so much
good to be there, in that free and easy way; just the life he ought to
lead for half the year, at least. I shall always use my meagre arts
most earnestly to get him to the Island when you are there. There is
such a difference in human atmospheres, you know; the petty, east-wind
blighted inhabitants of towns are not good for the health of such as
he. I esteem it one of the wonderful blessings of my life that he does
not feel uncomfortable when I am about. With you, there is the added
element of exhilaration, the rarest thing to receive, as one gets into
years.
It is a sacred trust, the friendship of such a man.
TO MISS JEAN INGELOW.
BEVERLY, MASS., December 15, 1867.
MY DEAR MISS INGELOW,--It was very kind of you to write to me, and
I can hardly tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me, in my
at present lonely and unsettled life. I think a woman’s life is
necessarily lonely, if unsettled: the home-instinct lies so deep in us.
But I have never had a real home since I was a little child. I have
married sisters, with whom I stay, when my work allows it, but that is
not like one’s own place. I want a corner exclusively mine, in which to
spin my own web and ravel it again, if I wish.
I wish I could learn to think my own thoughts in the thick of other
people’s lives, but I never could, and I am too old to begin now.
However, there are compensations in all things, and I would not be out
of reach of the happy children’s voices, which echo round me, although
they will break in upon me rather suddenly, sometimes.
You asked about the sea,--our sea. The coast here is not remarkable.
Just here there is a deep, sunny harbor, that sheltered the second
company of the Pilgrim settlers from the Mother-Country, more than two
centuries ago. A little river, which has leave to be such only at the
return of the tide, half clasps the town in its crooked arm, and makes
many an opening of beauty twice a day, among the fields and under the
hills. The harbor is so shut in by islands, it has the effect of a
lake; and the tide comes up over the wide, weedy flats, with a gentle
and gradual flow. There are never any dangerous “High Tides” here. But
up the shore a mile or two, the islands drift away, and the sea opens
gradually as we near the storm-beaten point of Cape Ann, where we can
see nothing but the waves and the ships, between us and Great Britain.
The granite cliffs grow higher towards the Cape, but their hollows are
relieved by little thickets of intensely red wild roses, and later, by
the purple twinkling asters and the golden-rod’s embodied sunshine.
The east wind is bitter upon our coast. The wild rocks along the
Cape are strewn with memories of shipwreck. Perhaps you remember
Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus.” The “Reef of Norman’s Woe” is
at Cape Ann, ten miles or so from here. About the same distance out,
there is a group of islands,--the Isles of Shoals, which are a favorite
resort in the summer, and getting to be somewhat too fashionable, for
their charm is the wildness which they reveal and allow. Dressed up
people spoil nature, somehow; unintentionally, I suppose; but the human
butterflies are better in their own _parterres_. At Appledore, one of
the larger of these islands, I have spent many happy days with the
sister of our poet Whittier, now passed to the eternal shores,--and
the last summer was there again, without her, alas! I missed her so,
even though her noble brother was there! Perhaps that only recalled the
lost, lovely days too vividly. I have seldom loved any one as I loved
her.
These islands are full of strange gorges and caverns, haunted with
stories of pirate and ghost. The old-world romance seems to have
floated to them. And there I first saw your English pimpernel. It
came here with the Pilgrims, I suppose, as it is not a native. It
is pleasant to meet with these emigrant flowers. Most of them are
carefully tended in gardens, but some are healthily naturalized in
the bleakest spots. I should so like to see the daisies--Chaucer’s
daisies--in their native fields; and the “yellow primrose,” too.
Neither of these grows readily in our gardens. I have seen them only as
petted house-plants.
I recognize some of our wild flowers in your “Songs of Seven.” By the
way, Mr. Niles has sent me an illustrated copy of it, and what a gem
it is! But I hardly know what are especially ours. Have you the tiny
blue four-petaled “Houstonia Cærulia”?--our first flower of spring,
that and the rock-saxifrage! And is October in England gladdened with
the heavenly azure of the fringed gentian? And does the climbing
bitter-sweet hang its orange-colored fruit high in the deep green
of the pine-trees, in the autumn? The most wonderful climber I ever
saw was the trumpet-vine of the West. It grew on the banks of the
Mississippi, climbing to the top of immense primeval trees, bursting
out, there, into great red, clarion-like flowers. It seems literally to
fix a foot in the trees as it climbs,--and it has an uncivilized way
of pulling the shingles off the roofs of the houses over which it is
trained. I am glad that violets are common property in the world. The
prairies are blue with them. How at home they used to make me feel! for
they are New England blossoms too.
I wonder if you like the mountains as well as you do the sea. I am
afraid I do, and better, even. It seems half disloyal to say so, for
I was born here; to me there is rest and strength, and aspiration
and exultation, among the mountains. They are nearly a day’s journey
from us--the White Mountains--but I will go, and get a glimpse and a
breath of their glory, once a year, always. I was at Winnipiseogee, a
mountain-girdled lake, in New Hampshire, when I saw your handwriting,
first,--in a letter which told of your having been in Switzerland. We
have no sky-cleaving Alps,--there is a massiveness, a breadth, about
the hill scenery here, quite unlike them, I fancy. But such cascades,
such streams as rise in the hard granite, pure as liquid diamonds, and
with a clear little thread of music!
I usually stop at a village on the banks of the Pemigewasset, a small
silvery river that flows from the Notch Mountains,--a noble pile, that
hangs like a dream, and flits like one too, in the cloudy air, as
you follow the stream’s winding up to the Flume, which is a strange
grotto, cut sharply down hundreds of feet through a mountain’s heart;
an immense boulder was lodged in the cleft when it was riven, half way
down, and there it forever hangs, over the singing stream. The sundered
rocks are dark with pines, and I never saw anything lovelier than the
green light with which the grotto is flooded by the afternoon sun. But
I must not go on about the mountains, or I shall never stop,--I want to
say something about our poets, but I will not do that, either.
Beauty drifts to us from the mother-land, across the sea, in argosies
of poetry. How rich we are with Old England’s wealth! Our own lies yet
somewhat in the ore, but I think we have the genuine metal.
How true it is, as you say, that we can never utter the best that is in
us, poets or not. And the great true voices are so, not so much because
they can speak for themselves, but because they are the voices of our
common humanity.
The poets are but leaders in the chorus of souls--they utter our pæans
and our _misereres_, and so we feel that they belong to us. It is
indeed a divine gift, the power of drawing hearts upward through the
magic of a song; and the anointed ones must receive their chrism with
a holy humility. They receive but to give again,--“more blessed” so.
And they may also receive the gratitude of those they bless, to give it
back to God.
I hope you will write to me again some time, though I am afraid I
ought not to expect it. I know what it is to have the day too short for
the occupations which _must_ fill it,--to say nothing of what _might_,
very pleasantly, too.
But I shall always be sincerely and gratefully yours,
LUCY LARCOM.
TO J. G. WHITTIER.
BEVERLY, February 28, 1868.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--Nothing would be pleasanter to me than a visit to
Amesbury, and the cold weather is no especial drawback. But I cannot be
away from Beverly now, my mother is so ill. She has been suffering very
much all winter, but is now nearly helpless, and I think she is rapidly
failing. She has an experienced nurse with her, and there is little
that any of us can do for her, except to look in now and then, and
let her know that her children are not far away. That seems to be her
principal earthly comfort. The coming rest is very welcome to her. She
lies peacefully hoping for it, and she has suffered, and still does,
such intense pain, I cannot feel as I otherwise would about her leaving
us. But the rending of these familiar ties is always very hard to bear.
She has been a good, kind mother to me, and it is saddest of all to see
her suffer without the power of relief; to know that death only can end
her pain.
I think of you often, and wish I could sit down for an evening by the
light of your cheery wood fire, and have one of the old-time chats. I
am so glad that A---- is there, to make it home-like. I think my most
delightful remembrances of Amesbury are of that fireside, and the faces
gathered about it, upon which the soft flow of the flames flickered
and kindled, with the playful and varying interchange of thought. Last
Sunday night I spent at Harriet Pitman’s. Cold enough it was, too. But
the greenhouse is a small edition of the tropics, and full of blossoms
and sweet odors. I should want to live in it, if I were there.
I do not know what to make of the aspect of things at Washington. It
cannot be that we shall be left to plunge into another war, and yet
we may need it. I do not see that our terrible struggle made the deep
impression it should in establishing national principles. Only apathy
to the most vital interests could have brought us to this pass. It
seems as if A. J. must show himself an absolute fiend, before his
removal is insisted upon.
Miss Larcom’s mother died March 14, 1868. The bereavement was great;
but the long illness had prepared her daughter for the affliction.
Years afterwards she used to say that when in trouble or despondency,
like a child she wanted to cry out for her mother.