Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary

by Daniel Dulany Addison

CHAPTER XII.

LAST YEARS.

Miss Larcom was loved in Beverly. The townspeople were justly proud of her, and they always welcomed her sweet face into their homes. She was interested in the Town Improvement Society, and once, at one of its entertainments, she read two or three of her poems. When there was an effort made to secure Prospect Hill for a public park, she sent some appropriate lines to the local paper, hoping to influence opinion. Her public spirit, as shown in her letters and diaries, was also active in her life, and she joined, according to her opportunities, in such affairs as could receive aid from her pen, and the townspeople were gratified by her contributions to the village life.

The success in literature of a Beverly boy made her happy. When Mr. George E. Woodberry entered the company of American poets by the publishing of the “North Shore Watch,” a volume containing the triumphant ode, “My Country,” not unworthy of comparison with Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode,” and the strong sonnets, “At Gibraltar,” and the classic “Agathon,” she was one of the first to send him her appreciation.

TO GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY.

214 Columbus Avenue,
Boston, February 18, 1889.

Dear Mr. Woodberry,—I have just been reading your poems, and have been so much moved by them that I wanted at once to tell you how deeply they appeal to me. Most of our modern verse,—and I include my own,—is too superficially lyrical, the measure often muffles the meaning,—the thought flies off through the sound. In yours, the music and the meaning unfold together, always hinting the deeper chords half awakened beneath. The feeling of the unexpressed and the inexpressible infinite—that which is at the source of everything real—that which is life itself, is in your poetry, as in almost no other modern poetry that I have read.

The “Transcript” compares it with Clough’s. I delight in Clough, but I do not like comparisons of this kind. You strike different chords, and I believe that you have greater possibilities than he. What touches me especially is the high purity of emotion which is yet as human as it is holy. This is rare, even in great poetry. As I read some lines, it seemed as if my soul were weeping for joy at their beauty.

“Agathon” I wanted to read over again as soon as I had finished it. Indeed, I shall want to turn to it often, for a breath of the pure poetic ether. I do not know a greater poem of its kind since “Comus.” Page 42, and from 59 onward, Milton might have been proud to write. They appeal to all that nobler part of us that lives beneath the shows of things; and I am glad that so young a poet as you begins his song so nobly. I am proud, too, that you are a Beverly boy, as I am a Beverly woman. But for that, I might not have ventured to write so freely. I have not room to write all I want to say, but I must mention the “Christ Scourged,” which seems to me wonderful in its strength of sympathetic expression. It would give me great pleasure to meet you. If you are staying in town, I wish you would call here some evening.

Truly yours,

Lucy Larcom.

In preparing a new edition of “Songs of Three Centuries,” she included among the additions, a poem by Dr. Solis-Cohen, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” and also, “The Crowing of the Red Cock,” by Emma Lazarus. In the course of the correspondence, Dr. Solis-Cohen wrote so frankly, giving his feelings about Christ from an intelligent Jewish standpoint, that she answered in a similar vein, stating clearly her idea of the relations that should exist between the Jew and Christian. Dr. Solis-Cohen had written: “No professed Christian can exceed many Jews in love for the pure and lofty character of Jesus, and we can readily accept that character, as a manifestation of God in man, while we decline to accept the superstructure of the Church.”

TO DR. SOLOMON SOLIS-COHEN.

Beverly, Mass., October 18, 1890.

Dr. S. Solis-Cohen:—

Dear Sir,—The proof of your poem is just received,—and I have put your corrections away so carefully that I cannot at this moment lay my hand upon them; so I will ask you to correct the copy and send it to the printers as soon as convenient. I will tell them to wait for it.

The magazine with the poem in it is received—beautiful and graceful I find the latter. I wish the additions to the “Songs” were not limited—but the publishers do not wish to enlarge the volume too much. We shall have two poems by Emma Lazarus; one of them Mr. Whittier tells me he considers her best—“The Crowing of the Red Cock.”

Your letter interests me exceedingly. I grew up under the influence of old-fashioned Puritanism, and from it drew the idea that Jew and Christian were really one, only they did not understand each other.

Children do construct their own theology oftener than is thought, I believe. The Puritan was like the Hebrew in many ways, most of all in his firm hold of moral distinctions, in his belief in the One God as the God of righteousness and truth.

Certainly no one ever insisted upon obedience to the law more positively than Christ himself. We Christians do believe in Him as the human manifestation of God: that is the one distinctive element of our faith.

All sorts of strange doctrines have been built up about this idea.

I care for none of them, but rest upon what is to me a spiritual certainty—“Truly this is the Son of God.”

I emphasize the “is” because to me that visible life was only one phase of His eternal presence in and with humanity. To me He is “the living Lord”—the Spirit bearing witness to our spirits of their own immortal meaning; and so “the Resurrection and the Life.”

But His life has no spiritual power over ours, unless it teaches us divine love—unless we live in that love which He came to unveil.

Christians have miserably failed of this—in their treatment of each other as well as of the Jews, but it is because they have not received the spirit of their Master.

I thank you sincerely for writing to me so freely, and I thank you for having written the poem enclosed, which bears the same message to me as a Christian, that it does to you as a Jew. I should like to know more of Emma Lazarus. Her early death was a loss to all lovers of true poetry.

Very truly yours,

Lucy Larcom.

The ecstacy of a sudden realization of religious truth sometimes overcame her in the summer mornings, and her heart uttered itself fervently in prayer, as will be seen in the following extracts from her diary.

July 5, 1890. I awoke with a strange joy as of some new revelation, that seemed sounding through my soul, with the words, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!”

Is it a new entering in of life and love at all the doors of my nature? doors that I have left closed and overgrown, perhaps? Come in, O Life, O Truth, O Love, by whatever gate thou wilt,—in whatever form thou wilt! Only make me ready to receive thee, and to go with thee through the gates into the freedom of thy universe!

August 3. Now I see life more clearly in all its bearings, its dangers, and its hopes,—its earthly and heavenly unity. It is almost like beginning a new childhood in the Kingdom of Heaven. All things centre themselves in Christ, the living, spiritual Christ, who is the Life, the Reality, the Person, who makes us real to each other through the eternal union with the Father. Nature is alive. Nothing is dead that the heart of God has touched. And human beings seem so near and dear!

I think of those who have gone, of my sisters Louisa and Charlotte, of my mother, of all the friends whom I see no more, but who have made part of my true life. They seem more alive than when here; my communion is with them and with all the living to-day.

August 6. This morning, with the opening of my windows on the white floating clouds of summer, and the warm hillside, softened with the mist of coming showers, a song and a hymn arose in my thoughts:—

O Thou Eternal Loveliness,—I am part of Thee, or I am not at all! Nature is the expression of Thee, but yet more is this human life of mine. Because I am, and can feel and see this beauty,—feel it as a part of my own life and soul, I know that Thou art—the Divine One in whom all that is immortal of me is enfolded, and from whom it is unfolded. How can Thy being be questioned by one who has had a single glimpse of the beauty of this Thy world? It is such happiness to feel that I am part of it all, because I belong to Thee! Yet I should never have known the spirit of it all, never should have understood the secret, except through the Son, who has brought Thy children back to their spiritual home in Thee. In Him the evil of earth is conquered, and the good of earth is shown also to be the good of heaven. To be of one spirit with Him, the Perfect Love and the Infinite Loveliness, is to belong to the Whole, and so to Thee. And so there can be no losing of anything for us eternally. Who shall separate us from any true Love?

August 24. On the summit of Moosilauke.

Have been here four or five days, in cloud and mist and rain. One bright sunset, two pleasant afternoons, on the last of which there was the most beautiful phenomenon that we call “the sun drawing water.” I never looked down upon the earth through that many tinted transparency of sun and mist before. It was wide as the whole West, and the tints of green upon the nearer hills were brought out with softest intensity. It was like an open fan of thinnest gossamer, wavering in all possible hues between us and the landscape. But the sign was true. It has rained steadily for three days and nights.

August 27. Monday and Tuesday there was a fine sunset and sunrise, and four travelers were up here to enjoy it. But yesterday the mist and cloud rolled up from the valley again, and in the night a southeast storm set in, preceded by the same sign in the east that was in the west last Thursday. It is one of the signs of approaching rain,—the clearness with which the summits and ranges are outlined through the mist. They are most dreamily lovely, so. I thought yesterday how much the earth and sky were alike, on these high places. It was hard to tell which was mountain and which was cloud.

September 6. A week of great beauty in cloud-scenery, though with little sunshine. Most suggestive phases of cloud and mountain interblending; I have been out in it everywhere I could; twice at sunrise, when I was well rewarded by the glory in the east. The days seem so short! I was foolish to bring books up here,—and yet I have found them companionable now and then. “God in his World” I have re-read—it is a book for the heights.

February 4, 1891. Boston. In my room at the Hoffman House these last two weeks. I could not get settled earlier; others were occupying it. But I love this room, because I have lived so intensely and deeply in it; because I have had revelations in it of God and his truth, of human friendship, of the inmost meanings of life. The very walls seem alive to me sometimes. Every place where we have met God, and come to feel Him as the reality in all things, is holy ground.

One of the pleasant things of the last month was my visit to Wheaton Seminary, and the meeting with Mr. Brooks there, and hearing him speak to the girls, making them more happy, and helping them much, as I have to-day heard. His presentation of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, has led one, at least, to a decision for herself, that Christ is the Son of God. I like to meet new friends in my old haunts. I have lived through some painful and some delightful experiences at Norton, struggling and groping in solitude through formal dogma and doctrine into spiritual truth, for there was none with me, and my way of thinking was accounted heresy. But I felt beckoned into clearer light than there was around me, and I followed in silence. I first read Maurice there, and F. W. Robertson, who opened doors for me which have never since been closed. And I taught my pupils, giving them what I had received, truths which I felt were unquestionable, and I knew, while there, that it was not wholly in vain, though I had access to but a few. Now I go back, and I find the whole school apparently ready for this clearer spiritual light, and I am glad. We must love places where we have truly lived,—even in heaven we shall remember them.

I finished my little book last week,—“As It Is in Heaven.” I wonder if it was presumptuous in me to write it? But it seemed to grow by itself, and I wanted to give the blossoms and fruit that had shaped themselves in my mind, to those who might enjoy them, and perhaps get some refreshment and strength from them. I trust it will be of service to somebody.

April 3. Lent has passed, and Passion Week, and Easter. All these festivals now mean so much to me, and yet not wholly for themselves, but because they make the whole year sacred. I have attended all the morning services, and have found it good to begin the days with that half-hour of prayer and thought, and communion with others. Once I should have thought this frequent assembling together day after day, and week after week, for religious services, at least unnecessary. But for the deepening life that has come to me through them I can never be sufficiently thankful, and I feel that the Church holds through them a special power over the spiritual life of the community. For the last weeks of winter and first weeks of spring, everybody is reminded that this life of ours belongs to us through the life and death of Christ our Lord. We are always forgetting that,—always falling back into ourselves and our own petty interests and plans and thoughts of and for ourselves.

I cannot see why Churches of every name should not keep Lent and Good Friday and Easter, as they do Christmas, and I believe they are moving in that direction.

I was present at the Good Friday evening service at the Old South, presided over by its pastor, Rev. Mr. Gordon, where a Baptist, a Unitarian, a Congregationalist, and three Episcopal clergymen took part. It was most impressive, and seemed like a promise of the time when all Christ’s people shall be one. The Good Friday sermon at Trinity Church in the morning was to me a new unfolding of a thought that has always perplexed me, from the text, “The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin.” I could never make the “Atonement,” as set forth by the religious teachers of my youth, a reality to myself; Christ Himself was always real, as a divine man, and as a living presence with us still, but how His death was to us more than His Life, I could never see. The grandeur of it all,—the love that inspired the sacrifice, always moved my being to its depths, but the prominence given to His “Blood-shedding” seemed unnatural. It was tragic; pictorial; yet somehow outside of me—a scene upon which I gazed, and wondered, and longed to understand.

I cannot recall the words of Mr. Brooks’s sermon, but the feeling and the thought left with me from it was that now I could see it all; and that through that completed sacrifice, the divine life entered into every human soul that could open to receive it. And it is the very thought of the blood, which represents, and is, the life, that made it clear.

He gives all of himself that He has to give, in first living for us, and then dying for us. And the giving means our receiving His pure life into our stained souls, so that their defilement is cleansed, and we live His life of love and sacrifice, instead of our old selfish and sinful one. It is now His blood that flows through us, and inspires us with eternal strength. And this is what it means to be His, and one with Him; the character, the person, must be renewed, when filled with his purity, with his righteousness, and his consecration. Any other view of the atonement than this seems to me still to be something of a fiction. But this view is so inspiring to me, that the cross has a new meaning,—it is the true and only emblem of Christ’s work to hold up before the world.

May 17. Mr. Brooks’s election as bishop has followed almost as the natural sequence to Bishop Paddock’s death, and it has seemed to be demanded quite as much by the community at large as by the church. The feeling has been, that if there is a place of higher influence for such a man, he must be put in it. I have not been accustomed to think that there can be any higher place than that of a Christian minister, but he will not cease to be this. But for me it is like the closing of a beautiful book of inspiration, from which I have been reading for the past ten years, almost constantly of late; and before the bishop’s death, I have felt that it was more than any one congregation ought to have to itself, and God will broaden the stream of the water of Life now into more far-reaching channels. The change has brought great sadness, but our best is given us to share, and we shall find joy even in this sacrifice.

May 1. At Beverly,—and tired with my spring languor, and some inward depression. Yesterday I talked with Mr. Brooks about the change that is coming, and though I believe it best and needful for him, still I feel in it an unutterable sadness. It is strange that I do, for I never expect to see him often, or to hear him preach except for a few weeks in the winter. But I suppose we have all had the satisfaction of knowing that the fountain was flowing and that we might drink if we would. And what have I not received at this source? What a different world it is to me, from what it was ten years ago. How I have become strengthened through and through, to see and know what spiritual life is, and in my measure to live it, as I believe! Soul and eyes and heart and hands and feet have been given to me anew, through the illumination received.

That strange “light in light” that seemed to glow around me, as I knelt in reconsecration of myself, a little more than a year ago, has not left me, though it is dimmed by this present regret, and I shall walk on in it through paths yet untried.

Yesterday I sat in the same room and the same chair where, eight years ago, Mr. Brooks first suggested that my place might be in the Episcopal Church. I had not thought it possible, and did not see it so then. To be sitting there in his study, where I had not been again since that first talk with him, as one of his people, and to hear him speak of the strangeness to him of his own new outlook upon life and work,—of the suddenness with which the change has come to him: “First it seemed impossible, and then it became inevitable,” he said,—brought back that other day and all the time between, and my own experience in being lifted out of my old associations into the Church,—for it seems to me that unseen hands at last lifted me into my place.

Well might he speak of that room as a sacred room, where so many souls had been strengthened and led on into light. I wish he need not leave his house when he becomes bishop; it is so truly identified with his life. Our place is partly ourself. I am sure he needs a change, after so many years of incessant service, doing the work of twenty men, apparently. He will still have hard work to do, but it will not be of the same kind.

I do believe that the hand of God is in his election as bishop. It is not so much the Episcopal Church (much as he loves it, and believes in it) that is to be benefited: the whole church—the whole community—will feel the difference in the freedom and depth of spiritual life that can but radiate from such a man, wherever he goes. I do want to live at least ten years longer, to have a part in the good time.

Mr. Whittier writes to me: “The very air of Massachusetts is freer and sweeter, since his election,” and these are the words of a seer.

And still it is a haunting regret that I shall no longer hear his words in the old familiar way, at Trinity Church.