Miss Larcom partook of the Holy Communion in Trinity Church, Boston, Easter, 1887, and was confirmed March 20, 1890. By this service, she said, her “heart was fixed,” and she could think of herself as “avowedly in the visible church.” It was after her connection with the Episcopal Church that Miss Larcom wrote her most important religious books, and these embody much of her own thought in matters concerning the deepest spiritual life.
“Similitudes,” a collection of prose poems, was published in 1853; and during the remaining years of her life she published and compiled fourteen books in prose and verse. Her last book, “The Unseen Friend,” was published in 1893. The above list does not include the two volumes of poetical selections compiled by herself and Mr. Whittier.
A complete edition of “Larcom’s Poems” was published by Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., in the Household edition of the poets, in 1884. In writing of this, Miss Larcom, with characteristic modesty, said, “The idea of my being ranked with other American poets.”
She was also editor of Our Young Folks from about 1865 to 1872.
Although it is probable that Miss Larcom’s fame was achieved as an author of verse, yet she was the best satisfied with her prose productions. As she once said to me, “Essay writing would be my choice, rather than any other form of expression.”
It is probable that her name will be the longest remembered by her best-known lyric, “Hannah Binding Shoes;” but this was by no means her favorite, nor would she desire to be remembered by it alone, nor to have it considered as one of the best of her poems. And yet it contains the deep pathos and the tragedy that is in the lives of many solitary women, and as long as such exist, the story of “Poor Lone Hannah” will be read and remembered.
“Hannah Binding Shoes” was written shortly after Miss Larcom’s return from Illinois, when the great contrast between the rugged seacoast, so familiar to her early years, and the “boundlessness of commonplace,” of the level country she had just left, impressed her most vividly. One summer afternoon, in riding through Marblehead, a face at a window riveted her attention, and haunted her for weeks. Meanwhile, the refrain of the lyric, with its peculiar meter, and the face, continually chased each other through her mind, until, to get rid of their importunate presence, she one day sat down, and imprisoned them together in “immortal verse.”
Another poem which takes high rank is “The Rose Enthroned,” her earliest contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, which, in the absence of signature, was attributed to Emerson. Also, “A Loyal Woman’s No,” a patriotic lyric that attracted great attention during our Civil War.
It is such poems as these, with her religious writings and her “Childhood Songs,” that will make Lucy Larcom’s name remembered. And thousands of earnest working-women will thank her for all that she has written, and go on their way refreshed and encouraged by her success and the fulfilment of her aspirations.
In personal appearance Miss Larcom was tall and stately; her hair was wavy and of a light brown color. Her eyes were of a lovely smiling blue, and her whole face was lit by the charm of them. And who that has heard it can forget her musical laugh, so attractive that even strangers would turn and listen to it, or lose the memory of her beautiful smile, so radiant, so illuminating, that lasted even to the end of her life and that left its lingering gleam on her face after it was cold in death, then to be transplanted to that other life because it was a part of her own immortal self!