LUCY LARCOM.
A part of this sketch of Miss Larcom was written by me not long before her death, and submitted to her for her approval. The additions made are extracts from her letters, with my own personal reminiscences.
In response to my letter asking her approval of what I had prepared, Miss Larcom wrote:—
“I approve the sketch, and appreciate your way of writing it, though I dont often encourage living obituary notices of myself. What they call ‘fame’ amounts to so little. But some things about us in it may help others to know.... I am not ambitious to appear in any book; but if I am to be ‘written up,’ would much rather it would be done by a friend.... I told in ‘A New England Girlhood’ all I care to tell about my early life. You know something more of me, and you are at liberty to say what you choose. I have tried to make my life count for good to others, and to make my verses an expression of what I am trying to live. You once wrote something about me in The Independent that was fresh and natural. Why not utilize that? I have done nothing worth speaking of in a literary sense, but I love to write, and I suppose I shall go on trying to express myself in this way always, The material fact that I have never earned more than enough with my pen than to meet, with difficulty, the necessary expenses of living, does not in the least discourage me, or make me willing to write the trash that ‘pays.’ That is where I am now on the literary question, and that is where I am content to remain.”
It was in that early poetic atmosphere when our American bards first began to teach the young people of the time to love poetry for poetry’s sake, that Lucy Larcom received the first incentive to her life-work.
Lucy Larcom was born in one of the earliest settled coast towns in the state, Beverly, Mass., March 5, 1824. Her father, Benjamin Larcom, was a sea-captain; he died when she was a child, and her widowed mother, taking with her Lucy and two or three others of her younger children, then removed to Lowell. The year 1835 found her in one of the Lowell grammar schools, where her education went on until it became necessary for her to earn her living, which she began to do very early as an operative in a cotton-factory.
In her “Idyl of Work” the mill-life is truthfully portrayed, with the scenery, characteristics, style of life, thought, and aspirations peculiar to New England womanhood of that period.
In writing to me of this book, in 1875, she says, “What do you think of that name for a reminiscence of Lowell life? Of course you won’t like it as poetry; and there is not so very much truth in it, except in general outlines of the way of living. I had to write my remembered impressions, and everybody had different ones. The story, such as it is, is manufactured, of course; for I didn’t want any personalities, so I haven’t even got myself in, that I know of.”...
But it is very easy to detect, in her loving descriptions, many of her young companions, who shared with her the simplicity of those days of toil; and in following with her the career of some of those bright spirits, and watching their success in their varied pathways through life, it is very pleasant for me to be able to corroborate what she has said.
Riches have fallen to the lot of some of those young girls, and to others a degree of distinction in various situations and occupations; but have they not, from their better surroundings, ever looked back, as she does, to those dear old simple days, so full of health and endeavor, so free from care, as among the happiest of their lives? Then, ignorance of the world was bliss, and hope and aspiration reigned supreme.
My first recollection of Lucy Larcom is as a precocious writer of verses in The Lowell Casket, where the editor, Mr. George Brown, in his notice of them, said, “They were written by a young lady of thirteen, who was beyond a doubt inspired by the Nurses,”—a misprint, of course, for “Muses;” although the author was so young, that the mistake was not so far wrong.
This, however, was not her first attempt at verse-making, since she began to write while a child of seven or eight years, in the attic of her early home in Beverly. The title of these first verses was “A Thunder Storm,” and they were read with wonder by her admiring brothers and sisters.
Two pictures of her in that early factory-life remain in my memory. By the Merrimack River, whose romantic banks she loved to describe, on a bridge which crossed a narrow part of the stream, I once passed her, a tall and bonnie young girl, with her head in the clouds. After a little nod of recognition, as I looked up at her,—for, although she was only a year older than I, she was much larger and more mature,—she went on. But to me she seemed so grand, so full of thought, that, with girlish admiration for one who had written verses, I forgot my errand, turned, stood still, and thoughtfully watched her out of sight.
Miss Larcom’s first work as a Lowell operative was in a spinning-room on the Lawrence corporation where her mother lived. At first she was a “doffer,” with the other little girls; after that she tended a spinning-frame, and then worked in the dressing-room beside “pleasant windows looking towards the river.” After this she “graduated” into the cloth-room, and it was here that I saw my second picture of her. The cloth-room was considered by some of the mill-girls a rather aristocratic working-place because of its fewer hours of confinement, its cleanliness, and the absence of machinery. In this room the cloth, after it had been finished and cut into thirty or forty yard pieces in the weaving-room, was measured on hooks, one yard apart, until the length of each piece was told off. I used often to run in and see her at her work; and to my imaginative eyes she was like a Sibyl I had read of, as with waving arms she told off the yards of cloth in measured rhythm, and it seemed to be verses, and not cloth, that lay heaped up behind her.
The last two years of her Lowell life (which covered in all a period of about ten years), were spent in the same room; the latter part of the time she was the book-keeper, and recorded the number of pieces and bales. Here she pursued her studies, and in intervals of leisure some text-book usually lay open on her desk, awaiting a spare moment.
Lucy Larcom’s first contribution to The Lowell Offering, “My Burial Place” (written at sixteen), was published in No. 4 of the first series, and was sent to the editor by her sister Emmeline, while Lucy was on a visit to Beverly. With this exception, she was not a contributor to the magazine while it was under Mr. Thomas’s editorship. During that time she wrote for The Operatives’ Magazine, which was published under the supervision of her pastor, the Rev. Amos Blanchard, and which contained only articles written by the young ladies who were members of an Improvement Circle connected with his parish.
It may be said here that, whatever sectarian feeling there may have been between these rival publications, it was not shared by the girls themselves, at least not by Lucy Larcom. She simply and naturally followed the lead of her pastor. After the “orthodox” magazine stopped, and Miss Curtis and Miss Farley took charge of The Offering, Lucy became one of the corps of writers; and many of her verses and essays, both grave and gay, can be found in its bound volumes. Her first contribution to Volume Third, “The River,” a poem, appeared in October, 1843. She wrote letters from “Looking Glass Prairie,” Illinois; and many of her “prose poems,” published afterwards as “Similitudes,” with several early poems, including a different version of “The Lady Arabella,” first appeared in The Lowell Offering.
Our friendship began when we were little girls in “pantalets,” when we were “doffers” together in the cotton-mill, and was continued to the end of her life. She also became my husband’s friend; and during his lifetime she was our frequent guest, and was always “Aunt Lucy” to our children. Mr. Robinson had great faith in her possibilities as a writer, and he published her verses in his newspaper long before they found admittance into the magazines.
It was through him, while he was the reader (or “stopper”) for The Atlantic Monthly, during Mr. Lowell’s editorship, that “The Rose Enthroned” was brought to the notice of the poet, and afterwards admitted into the pages of the magazine. In a letter to Mr. Robinson, Miss Larcom says of this poem: “‘The Rose Enthroned’ was written in 1860, and published in June, 1861, through your mediation, you know.”
I should be glad to quote freely from her letters, they are so full of friendship and of loving kindness, but must refrain, and give extracts from those only which relate to her personal history.
In a letter written to me at Concord, Mass., in 1857, she says:—
“I was very glad to hear from you, and was particularly interested in your account of the sewing-society [anti-slavery] at R. W. E——’s. Didn’t it seem funny to go a-gossiping to the house of the Seer? I don’t wonder at your expecting the parrot to talk ‘transcendentally.’ Did the tea and toast smack of Hymettus? and was there any apple-sass from those veritable sops-o’-wine? Attic salt came in as a matter of course. Well, it’s a fine thing to be on visiting terms at Olympus. I should like to see the philosopher again. I don’t think I should be afraid of him now.... Sometimes I like philosophers, and sometimes I don’t. The thing is to live. Beautiful theories don’t make any of us do that, but the real breath of life from the Infinite Good, which every soul must have for itself, or, fool or philosopher, he is dead as a heap of sand.... I should like to see the hills where huckleberries grow, and the Pond. There never were hills so still and balmy as those.”...
During the war her letters breathe the spirit of “A Loyal Woman’s No!” and show, to one that can read between the lines, that she had a personal interest in saying No to a lover who seemed to her to be disloyal to his country.
Although a strong abolitionist, and a believer in the political rights of man, regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” she did not see the justice of woman’s claim to equal rights with man. In answer to a letter asking for her help in the suffrage cause, written in 1870, she says:—
“You know I am way behind the times, am not even a ‘suffrage woman’ yet, though I haven’t the least objection to the rest of the women’s having it. Don’t you see, I’m constitutionally on the fence.... I hope your enthusiastic believers will succeed; and if the suffrage comes, as it will, I hope it will be a blessing to everybody. All the people I know and respect seem to be in the movement, and still ‘I don’t see it.’...
Later, in 1888, she writes:—
“I am for human rights for woman. I never did believe in man’s claim to dictate to her. But I want to work for her elevation in my own way, so that when she does vote, it will not be a failure. I cannot ‘Club,’ myself. I am an obstinate old Independent.... Men are chivalrous, you know. Do you suppose we women shall be so towards them, by and by, in the women’s millenium? Dear me! I like the old slavish bonds, and am perfectly willing men should rule the world yet, heathenish old maid that I am. Now, here I am perplexed with two calls to the meeting to consider the matter of women’s voting, about which I have never made up my mind, and can’t! If I were a property woman, I might.”...
In writing of her volume of poetical works, published in 1868, Miss Larcom says,—
“I shall send a volume to your other self and you, (how are we to use adjectives in the Women’s Rights speech?), not by way of throwing a sop to Cerberus, but because of old friendship, and because I value your candid opinion and Warrington’s very highly. I am a little more afraid of you than of him,—I remember Gail Hamilton and the wringing-machine. Don’t pillory me in a paragraph, will you? nor inspire the pen masculine with a bon mot at my expense.”
At Miss Larcom’s particular request I have refrained from saying more than is necessary of her as a writer for The Offering. On her last visit to me, in 1892, while speaking of the material to be used in this book, she asked me not to say too much about her, because, as she said, she was “tired of being always cited as the representative of The Offering writers, when there were others who wrote and did quite as much, or more, for the magazine than I did.”
Miss Larcom is correct here. Her fame was achieved long after she ceased to be a mill-girl; and there were several others, as the sketches will show, who were as good writers, and much better known than herself, when she left the factory. And it is very thoughtful of her to speak a good word for those hitherto forgotten authors, by declining to be made a sort of composite portrait, as representing the best and brightest among them.
In one of her letters she says,—
“Don’t you think it is getting a little tiresome, this posing as factory-girls of the olden time? It is very much like politicians boasting of carrying their dinners in a tin pail in their youth. What if they did?... I am proud to be a working-woman, as I always have been; but that special occupation was temporary, and not the business of our lives, we all knew, girls as we were.”...
“I sent you a copy of my ‘New England Girlhood,’ for old time’s sake. Did you receive it? You could write a more entertaining one. Why don’t you write a novel? I wish you would write up The Offering time, and sketch Harriot Curtis in it. She was unique.”
Miss Larcom’s writings, all told, never yielded her income enough to live on, even in her modest way. In speaking of this matter in a letter written in February 1891, she says,—
“‘A New England Girlhood’ has as yet brought me only about two hundred dollars. How can writers live by writing?”
She was therefore obliged to supplement her literary labors by teaching. She was very prudent in her manner of living, and never, from childhood, really had a home of her own. Towards the last of her life she found herself much cramped for means to secure that rest her tired brain so much needed; and this made the gifts received from her publisher and from her dearly loved Wheaton Seminary pupils, most welcome, and enabled her, during her last illness, to feel a relief from pecuniary anxiety.
If Miss Larcom had not been exceptionally fortunate, not only in her temperament but in her surroundings,—hampered as she was all through her life by want of pecuniary means,—she could not have developed her writing talent so well. She had the rare gift of finding and keeping the right kind of friends, in her own family as well as outside, and these supplied to her life that practical (though not pecuniary) help she so much needed. So her days were free from household and other cares, and when relieved from her duties as teacher, or as editor, her time was free to use in her own chosen way.
In this, her life differed from that of many women writers, who, whether married or not, often have exacting cares which interrupt and hinder the expression of their written thoughts. Miss Larcom did not have that hindrance; and she had the chance through most of her life to carry out her idea, as she expressed it, of “developing the utmost that is in me.” She had no family or domestic cares, and her children were all “dream children.”
Miss Larcom might have married, once when she was quite young, and again later; but for reasons of her own she declined,—reasons, the validity of which, in one instance at least, I did not see. I have been asked if Mr. Whittier and Miss Larcom were never more than friends. I can truly answer, no. Miss Larcom was the intimate friend of Elizabeth Whittier, the poet’s sister, who, as she said, “was lovely in character, and had fine poetic taste.”
She often visited their home, and after the death of the sister the friendship with the brother continued. Miss Larcom was Mr. Whittier’s assistant in compiling the books of selections which bear his name, and did a great deal of the actual work in collecting material; they were true friends.
In a letter written shortly after his death, she says,—
“I have not spoken of Mr. Whittier going away. You will know that it is a real sorrow to me, and yet a joy that he has entered into a larger life.... This imperfect existence of ours can be but the shadow of the true life; in that, there is no death.”...
One of her last letters to me was written from Boston a few weeks before her death, and is as follows:—
Dear H.,—I have been here nearly a month, but have hardly been out at all. I have never been so much of an invalid, and I don’t like it. I suppose I have been steadily “running down,” the last year or so, but have gone on just as if I were well. Now I am brought to a stop, and am told that I must never do any more hard work. Lack of strength is what I feel most. They tell me that if I will really rest, brain and body, I may yet accomplish a good deal before I die. I do not feel as if I had got through yet; but who knows? I am trying to realize that it does not make much difference what part of the universe we are in, provided we are on the right track upward. Somehow I feel nearer Emmeline and Mr. Whittier,—as if we knew each other better now than before they went away. I should like to leave my life and work here just when I can go on with what is waiting for me elsewhere. But there is a Master of life who takes care of all that.
Ever truly yours,
Lucy Larcom.
Of her religious life, it may be said that in her early childhood Lucy became a communicant of the Congregational church; but in later years, as her mind broadened, she became deeply imbued with a sense of the divine fatherhood of God, and the impossibility that He would leave one of the souls that He had made to perish eternally, or, as she says, to quote from her “Biography,” “After probing my heart, I find that it utterly refuses to believe that there is any corner in God’s universe where hope never comes, ... where love is not brooding, and seeking to penetrate the darkest abyss.”
In 1879 she first listened to Phillips Brooks, and his preaching to her “was the living realization of her own thought.” She did not give up her Puritanism, but thought she saw, in the belief and service of his church, a new way of finding the right path towards the end of her journey in search of the truth. As she wrote, “It is not the church, but only one way of entering Christ’s church.” Her religious faith was not so much changed as deepened by this departure from some of the old-time beliefs; for, in writing of the matter to me, she said, “I count the faith of my whole life as one.”
Miss Larcom partook of the Holy Communion in Trinity Church, Boston, Easter, 1887, and was confirmed March 20, 1890. By this service, she said, her “heart was fixed,” and she could think of herself as “avowedly in the visible church.” It was after her connection with the Episcopal Church that Miss Larcom wrote her most important religious books, and these embody much of her own thought in matters concerning the deepest spiritual life.
“Similitudes,” a collection of prose poems, was published in 1853; and during the remaining years of her life she published and compiled fourteen books in prose and verse. Her last book, “The Unseen Friend,” was published in 1893. The above list does not include the two volumes of poetical selections compiled by herself and Mr. Whittier.
A complete edition of “Larcom’s Poems” was published by Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., in the Household edition of the poets, in 1884. In writing of this, Miss Larcom, with characteristic modesty, said, “The idea of my being ranked with other American poets.”
She was also editor of Our Young Folks from about 1865 to 1872.
Although it is probable that Miss Larcom’s fame was achieved as an author of verse, yet she was the best satisfied with her prose productions. As she once said to me, “Essay writing would be my choice, rather than any other form of expression.”
It is probable that her name will be the longest remembered by her best-known lyric, “Hannah Binding Shoes;” but this was by no means her favorite, nor would she desire to be remembered by it alone, nor to have it considered as one of the best of her poems. And yet it contains the deep pathos and the tragedy that is in the lives of many solitary women, and as long as such exist, the story of “Poor Lone Hannah” will be read and remembered.
“Hannah Binding Shoes” was written shortly after Miss Larcom’s return from Illinois, when the great contrast between the rugged seacoast, so familiar to her early years, and the “boundlessness of commonplace,” of the level country she had just left, impressed her most vividly. One summer afternoon, in riding through Marblehead, a face at a window riveted her attention, and haunted her for weeks. Meanwhile, the refrain of the lyric, with its peculiar meter, and the face, continually chased each other through her mind, until, to get rid of their importunate presence, she one day sat down, and imprisoned them together in “immortal verse.”
Another poem which takes high rank is “The Rose Enthroned,” her earliest contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, which, in the absence of signature, was attributed to Emerson. Also, “A Loyal Woman’s No,” a patriotic lyric that attracted great attention during our Civil War.
It is such poems as these, with her religious writings and her “Childhood Songs,” that will make Lucy Larcom’s name remembered. And thousands of earnest working-women will thank her for all that she has written, and go on their way refreshed and encouraged by her success and the fulfilment of her aspirations.
In personal appearance Miss Larcom was tall and stately; her hair was wavy and of a light brown color. Her eyes were of a lovely smiling blue, and her whole face was lit by the charm of them. And who that has heard it can forget her musical laugh, so attractive that even strangers would turn and listen to it, or lose the memory of her beautiful smile, so radiant, so illuminating, that lasted even to the end of her life and that left its lingering gleam on her face after it was cold in death, then to be transplanted to that other life because it was a part of her own immortal self!
Her whole atmosphere was full of a benignant interest in those with whom she came into personal relations. She lived up to her profession, both in religion and in ethics, and was a bright example of what a woman can become, who believes that this life is but the beginning of the next, and who takes the higher law for her inspiration and her guide.
She died April 17, 1893, and is buried in Beverly, Mass., her native place. There, by the seashore, where the salt breezes—
“Chase the white sails o’er the sea,”
and linger lovingly over her grave, her tired body finds its earthly resting-place.
Farewell, old friend and work-mate, but not forever; I too have the conviction, the faith, that this is not all of life, but that sometime, somewhere, we shall take up these broken threads, and go on with our appointed work “on the right track upward.”