With a man beside her, to point the way,
Hand joining hand in the marriage link?
Possibly, Yes: it is likelier, Nay.”
TO MISS ESTHER S. HUMISTON.
Norton, January 15, 1859.
... The books came through the post-office, with the note separate; they were brought to me while I was having a class recite logic in my room,—the dryest and most distasteful of all subjects to me, but it is a select class, and that makes up for the study. The young ladies who compose it are on quite familiar terms with me, and when the messenger said, “Three books and two letters for Miss Larcom,” their curiosity was greatly excited, and there was so much sly peeping at corners and picking at strings that they were not, on the whole, very logical. They asked to hold them for me till I was ready to open them, and I believe in letting “young ladies” act like children while they can.... I was thinking how much I should enjoy a quiet forenoon writing to you, when the words, “Study hour out”—accompanied the clang of the bell, and a Babel of voices broke into the hall outside my door.
I am trying not to hear—to get back into the quiet places of thought where your letters, open before me, were leading me, but I cannot; there is a jar, a discord,—and I suppose it is selfish in me not to be willing to be thus disturbed. How I long for a quiet place to live in! I never found a place still enough yet. But all kinds of natural sounds, as winds, waters, and even the crying of a baby, if not too loud and protracted, are not noises to me. Is it right to feel the sound of human voices a great annoyance? One who loved everybody would always enjoy the “music of speech,” I suppose, and would find music where I hear only discord.
TO THE SAME.
Sabbath evening.
... I read in school yesterday morning, something from the “Sympathy of Christ.” We have had some very naughty girls here, and have had to think of expulsion; but one of them ran away, and so saved us the trouble. How hard it is to judge the erring rightly—Christianly. I am always inclined to be too severe, for the sake of the rest; one corrupt heart that loves to roll its corruption about does so much evil. I do not think that a school like this is the place for evil natures—the family is the place, it seems to me, or even something more solitary. And yet there have been such reforms here, that sometimes I am in doubt. When there is a Christian, sympathizing heart to take the erring home, and care for her as a mother would, that is well. But we are all so busy here, with the everythings. I am convinced that I have too much head-employment altogether; I get hardly breathing time for heart and home life....
In 1854, Miss Larcom published her first book,—“Similitudes from the Ocean and the Prairie.” It was a little volume of not more than one hundred pages, containing brief prose parables drawn from nature, with the purpose of illustrating some moral truth. The titles of the Similitudes suggest their meaning: “The Song before the Storm;” “The Veiled Star;” “The Wasted Flower;” and “The Lost Gem.” Though the conception was somewhat crude, yet her desire to find in all things a message of a higher life and a greater beauty, showed the serious beginnings of the poet’s insight, which in after years was to reveal to her so many hidden truths. She characterized the book as “a very immature affair, often entirely childish.”
Her first distinct literary success was the writing of the Kansas Prize Song, in 1855. When Kansas was being settled, the New England Emigrant Aid Company offered a prize of fifty dollars for the best song, written with the object of inspiring in the emigrants the sentiments of freedom. The power of a popular melody was to be used in maintaining a free soil. She gained this prize; and her stirring words were sung all through the West. They were printed, with the appropriate music of Mr. E. Norman, on cotton handkerchiefs, which were given away by the thousand.
“Yeomen strong, hither throng,
Nature’s honest men;
We will make the wilderness
Bud and bloom again;