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.”