“‘The liverwort grows here, I think,—one of our earliest flowers,’ said the last speaker. ‘There, push away the leaves, and you will see it. How beautiful, with its delicate shades of pink, and purple and green, lying against the bare roots of the oak tree! But look deeper, or you will not find the flowers: they are under the dead leaves.’
“‘Now I have learned a lesson which I shall not forget,’ said her friend. ‘This seems to me to be a bad world; and there is no denying that there are bad things in it. To a sweeping glance it will sometimes seem barren and desolate; but not one buried germ of life and beauty is lost to the All-Seeing Eye. Having the weakness of human vision, I must believe where I cannot see. Henceforth, when I am tempted to despair on account of evil, I will say to myself, Look deeper; look under the dead leaves, and you will find flowers.’”
Lucy Larcom almost imperceptibly slipped into womanhood during these Lowell years. From being an eager and precocious child, she became an intelligent and thoughtful woman. The one characteristic which seemed most fully defined was her tendency to express her thoughts in verse and prose. As is the case with young authors, her early verses were artificial, the sentiments were often borrowed, and the emotions were not always genuine. It is not natural to find a healthy young girl writing on such themes as “Earthly joys are fleeting,” “Trust not the world, ’twill cheat thee.” “The murderer’s request” was—
“Bury me not where the breezes are sighing
O’er those whom I loved in my innocent days.”
But when she wrote out of her own experience, and recorded impressions she had felt, there was a touch of reality in her work that gave some prophecy of her future excellence. She could write understandingly about the boisterous March winds, or “school days,”—
“When I read old Peter Parley,
Like a bookworm, through and through,
Vainly shunned I Lindley Murray,
And dull Colburn’s ‘Two and Two.’”