If such as you, when Freedom’s ways are rough,
Cannot walk in them,—learn that women can!”
The poem was not written entirely out of her own experience. In making a confession about it to a friend, she says, “I have had a thousand tremblings about its going into print, because I feel that some others might feel hurt by the part that is not from my own experience. If it is better for the cause, let me and those old associations be sacrificed.” The publication of the poem was justified by the way it was received everywhere. It was quoted in the newspapers all over the North. An answer was printed in “The Courier,” called “A Young Man’s Reply.” This interested Miss Larcom, and she referred to it as “quite satisfactory, inasmuch as it shows that somebody whom the coat fitted put it on! If it does make unmanly and disloyal men wince, I am glad I wrote it.”
TO ESTHER S. HUMISTON.
Norton, June 1, 1858.
... I shall probably never marry. I can see reasons why it would be unwise for me; and yet I will freely tell you that I believe I should have been very happy, “if it might have been.” A true marriage (the is the word I should have used) is the highest state of earthly happiness,—the flowing of the deepest life of the soul into a kindred soul, two spirits made one,—to be a double light and blessing to other souls has, I doubt not, been sometimes, though seldom, realized on earth....
This touch of real romance in her life shows that she had a woman’s true nature, and that she did not escape the gentle grasping of the divine passion, though she shook herself free from it, deciding that it was better for her to walk alone. Some lines of her poem, “Unwedded,” suggest the reasons for her decision:—
“And here is a woman who understood
Herself, her work, and God’s will with her,
To gather and scatter His sheaves of good,
And was meekly thankful, though men demur.
“Would she have walked more nobly, think,