LETTERS AND WORK.
1861-1868.

The regular routine of school-life was varied for Miss Larcom by charming invitations to Boston where she met many literary friends, and by her pleasant summer vacations, which she always spent among the mountains. The two following letters, one to Mr. James T. Fields and one to Mr. Whittier, are interesting:—

Norton, April 4, 1861.

Dear Mr. Fields,—My thoughts ran into a kind of rhapsody, all to themselves, after that evening of pleasant surprises at your house. I did not know it was fairy-land at 37 Charles Street, nor did I dream of meeting so many of the Genii,—if I had foredreamed or foreknown, I suppose I should have thought it even more of an impossibility for me to go than I did.

I wasn’t going to be so foolish as to send you this rhapsody, but I have just got back to my own room after the wanderings of vacation, and have hung up my ruined arch. It is Dolabella’s, on the Coelian Hill, and it brings back so many pleasant reminiscences of those few hours among the treasures of your home-grotto that I am just in the mood for inflicting this out-of-date expression of my enjoyment upon Mrs. Fields and you. I don’t pretend that it is poetry, and if you are ashamed of me, for running on so, please remember that you shouldn’t have shown me so many curious and beautiful things;—I am not used to them.

I have heard that Miss Cushman is to play next week. Is it true? If it is, and if you know before-hand what evenings she will appear as Lady Macbeth or Meg Merrilies, will you be so kind as to tell Mr. Robinson, who will let me know, and who has promised to accompany me to the theatre? I have always wanted to see her in some of her great rÔles, and now more than ever, since I have seen her as a noble woman.

What a wonderful statue that “Lotus Eater” is! I was never so “carried away” with anything in marble!

With remembrances to Mrs. Fields,

Gratefully yours,

Lucy Larcom.

This poem was enclosed in the above letter:—

TO J. G. WHITTIER.

Norton, Mass., September 8, 1861.

Why is it that I always miss thy visits? Why of all things should I have lost sight of thee at the mountains? and when I was so near thee too! I cannot think why so pleasant a thing should be withheld from me, unless because I enjoy it too much. I have no other such friends as thee and Elizabeth, and when anything like this happens it is a great disappointment. But I said all the time that seeing the hills with you could only be a beautiful dream.

I felt the beauty of those mountains around the Lake, as I floated among them, but I wished for thee all the while; because I have always associated thee with my first glimpse of them, and somehow it seems as if they belonged to thee or thee to them, or both. They would not speak to me much; I needed an interpreter: and when they grew so dim and spectral in the noon haze, they gave me a strange almost shuddering feeling of distance and loneliness.

But I am glad thee saw the Notch Mountains, and those grand blue hills up the river that I used to watch through all their changes. I am glad Miss B—— saw thee, for she was as much disappointed as I when we gave up the hope of your coming. I felt almost certain you would both come; I wanted Lizzie to know the mountains.

Is it right to dream and plan for another year? How I should like to go to Franconia with thee and Elizabeth to see those great gates of the Notch open gradually wider and wider, and then to pass through to a vision of the vast range beyond! It is but a vague memory to me; I long to take that journey again.

But everything has wearied me this summer, and I feel almost like dropping my dreams and never expecting anything more. It is doubtless wiser to take what a kind Providence sends, just as it comes: yet who is always wise? Twice I rested in the sight of your beautiful river and on that cottage doorstep at Campton, looking off to the mountains. But the sea tired me with its restlessness. I wanted to tell it to be still. And I was very willing to get back from it to the quiet of my room, to the shelter of these friendly elms, and to the steady cheerful music of crickets and grasshoppers.

I shall be very happy to try to write a hymn for the Horticultural Association, as you request; and will send you something as soon as I can....

In the autumn of 1862, Miss Larcom decided to give up teaching at Wheaton Seminary. Ill health for some time had made her complain of a constant sense of weariness in her head. Living in the crowded school when she longed for quiet, and preparing her work for extra classes, she became nervously exhausted; so that when an invitation came from Esther’s mother, requesting her to spend the winter in Waterbury, Connecticut, she readily accepted it. She longed to be in the peaceful home made sacred by the presence of her beloved friend, where she felt that by occupying Esther’s room, sitting at her writing-desk, and using her very bed, she would enter into her spirit, and help to fill the vacant place in a mother’s heart. At first there was something hallowed in the home of one so pure,—she “felt it was holy ground,” and was “half afraid to live my common life here;” but the close association with sad memories was depressing, and the solitude, while it gave her rest, did not refresh her. After having formed a lifelong friendship with Franklin Carter, a half-brother of Esther and afterwards President of Williams College, she returned, first to Norton for a little while,—then to Beverly, where she secured time for her writing, which was now constantly absorbing her attention.

Her poems, written chiefly for weekly papers—since they were either on homely fireside topics or incidents of the war, or else were religious meditations—were widely copied, and found their way into the scrap-books of thoughtful households all over the land. Referring to the winter of 1863, she said, “I have written for the newspapers this winter. My ideas of the ‘Atlantic’ are too high for me often to offer it anything my thoughts let slip. My standard is so far beyond my performances, that I am very glad to let them glide away unnoticed, and unnamed, on the path of the weekly tide wave of print.” Though Mr. Fields was equal to the task of polite editorial refusal, he gladdened her heart by occasionally accepting a poem. It was through his literary judgment that “Hilary,” that tender lyric of sea-sorrow, with its wistfulness and pathos, first saw the light; and the indignant strains of “A Loyal Woman’s No” were first heard from the pages of the “Atlantic.” These successes opened the way for poems of greater merit, like the “Rose Enthroned.”

Her interest in the war was intense. She followed eagerly the progress of the campaigns, and rejoiced in every victory, often writing verses to celebrate the events, as in the case of the sinking Merrimac:—

Her satire was ready for those able-bodied men who, when the drafting was talked of, were suddenly seized with many varieties of disease, or those who went a-fishing for the season—because mariners were exempt—or, like one man, who cut off three fingers, hoping that the loss of these members would be sufficient to keep him at home. She wanted to do something herself: “I am almost ashamed of these high sentiments in print, because I really have done nothing for our dear country as yet. These things sound conceited and arrogant to me, under the circumstances, but I only write from an ideal of patriotic womanhood, and for my country-women.” She came near offering herself as a teacher for the “Contrabands,” but some of her friends thought it unwise in the state of her health at the time, and she concluded that she was not fitted for the work, with the rather sad confession, “I have an unconquerable distrust of my own fitness for these angel ministries; I fear I am not worthy to suffer. I can think, write, and teach, but can I live?”In August, 1863, she was called to the West by the serious illness of her sister Louisa, which terminated fatally.

TO MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS.

Hammond, Wis., September 11, 1863.

... and with her, my pleasant dreams of home dissolve; it was she who said she would make a home for me, wherever I would choose. The earthly outlook is lonelier than before; but I must not yield to selfish regrets. She has gone home, in a sense more real than we often say of the dead. Her whole family had gone before her,—husband and four children had left her one after another. Her heart seemed broken when her youngest son died in the army, last year; she never recovered her strength after that blow. I cannot mourn when I think of that glad reunion of a household in heaven, but I cannot help the great blank that her death and my brother’s have left in my life. These family ties, I find, grow stronger as I grow older.

This prairie life does not now attract me at all. A broad, grand world opens out on every side, but there is no choice in it. You might as well take one level road as another....

With the death of this sister, in reality, did dissolve the “pleasant dreams of a home,” for Miss Larcom never had a home of her own, though she longed for one, and used to delight in speaking of the possibility of having one. “I will build my long-planned home among the mountains,” she used to say, “and my friends shall bivouac with me all summer.” But her life was spent principally in boarding-houses, or in the homes of others. Her resources never permitted her to own the bed on which she slept; however, she did own an old wooden lounge, which was her only bed for years. But she made the best of it, in her usual way; “I like this old couch. I like to be independent of things; there is a charm in Bohemian life.”

On her return to Beverly in 1864, she took a few pupils again, and spent a good deal of time in painting,—even weeds, for she “loved the very driest old stick that had a bit of lichen or moss on it.” She exhausted her friend’s libraries in reading, and received from Mrs. Fields a large valise filled with precious volumes, which she returned only after having read them all. “I like to be here in Beverly with my sister and the children. I think I am more human here than at school.”

The following records were made with feeling in her diary.

April 10, 1865. Waked at five o’clock this morning, to hear bells ringing for the surrender of Lee’s army; robins screaming, and guns booming from the fort. The war’s “Finis;” Glory Hallelujah!

April 15. Starting for Boston, the bells began to toll. The President’s assassination is the report. The morning papers confirm the truth. Sadness and indignation everywhere. The Rebellion has struck its most desperate blow, but the Nation moves calmly on.

April 19. The President’s funeral. Every place of business closed. Services in all the churches. I went to the Old South, and heard a brief and indignant speech, which received the people’s earnest response.

May 14, Sunday. Bells ringing for the capture of Jeff Davis.

In 1865, Miss Larcom became one of the editors of the new magazine for young people, “Our Young Folks,” and retained this position until 1872, when “St. Nicholas” inherited the good-will and patronage of the earlier magazine. The orange-colored periodical bore her name, and those of Gail Hamilton and Trowbridge, and usually contained a ballad or prose sketch by her, or else she contributed some of the answers in the “Letter Box.” Her work was performed with conscientiousness and good taste; her sympathy with child-life made her a valuable assistant in making the magazine popular. She was interested in its success: “‘Our Young Folks’ greatly delights grown people everywhere. I am very glad of an occasional criticism that offers a hint of an improvement. It must be made to distance all competitors in value, as it does in patronage.”

To be in a position where she had the power to reject or accept hundreds of manuscripts sent for approval, interested her, but she had so much sympathy for the struggling author, that, contrary to the usual custom of the “Editorial Department,” she often sent a personal note of explanation. She could not help laughing over the strange letters she received, though she usually answered them politely. One woman wrote, asking her advice as to the sale of three hundred barrels of apples. Musicians sent her music, requesting her to write words to suit. A young girl wrote that she was “young, poor, and orphaned,” thus appealing to the editorial sympathies, and requested her to arbitrate concerning the merit of two poems, “The Angel Whisper” and “One of the Chosen,” for some one had promised to give her five dollars and a new hat, if her own poem should be successful. Modesty was not always a virtue with these applicants. One wrote: “Editors, Sir and Madam,—I send you a palindrome, which you know is a curiosity. I saw a list, the other day, said to be the best in the language, but this excels them all, as it represents a complete idea of spiritual philosophy. I should like to open a school of ideas for children. I believe this would add to your subscription list.” Another announced the strange theory, that “languages were originated with references to correspondence between the visible and invisible world.” Another facetiously remarked, making application for a position, “Anything but to count money, for I have not had experience in this form of labor.”

Miss Larcom published, in 1866, the valuable collection of extracts from religious writings,—“Breathings of the Better Life.” It was received with warm welcome, and reprinted in England, without, however, being accredited to the author. It contained the passages she had discovered in her reading of many books, to which she wanted to give a wider circulation among those who might not possess the volumes. This little book represents the development of her religious thought along deeply spiritual lines. Her favorite authors are represented,—Robertson, Bushnell, Tholuck, and now and then a little poem by George Herbert, Madame Guyon, or Mrs. Browning is given. The subjects treated are characteristic of her thought: “The Kingdom within the Soul,” “The Way of Access,” “Life Eternal,” “Shadows cast over Other Lives,” “The Bearing of the Cross,” “The Fullness of Life,” “The Illuminated Gateway,” and “The Glory Beyond.”

TO MR. J. T. FIELDS.

Beverly, Mass., May 20, 1866.

My dear Mr. Fields,—Before you escape for the summer, I want to bother you with a word or two about the “Breathings.” I find that people are imagining I have been very industrious this winter, by the way they talk about my new book, which they suppose is something original. I don’t want to give wrong impressions in that way, as the selections are more valuable on their own account than on mine.

When it is time to announce it, can it not be described as “a compilation of brief extracts in prose and verse, from favorite religious writers,” or something to that effect. And must my name appear in full? The commonplace “Miss Larcom” I should like better than my usual staring alliteration; as less obtrusive, “L. L.” is better still.

And please let the book be as inexpensive as possible, because it is my “little preach,” and I want a large congregation of poor folks like myself. My object in preparing it will be defeated, if they cannot have it.

I don’t calculate upon a “paper fractional” from it for myself, so you can leave that entirely out of consideration. It has been altogether a labor of love with me. I wanted the good people to know who their best instructors are. Robertson above all, who is the true apostle of this age, within the Church.

Yours sincerely,

Lucy Larcom.

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TO MRS. J. T. FIELDS.

Beverly, Mass., May 26, 1866.

Dear Annie,—If I could only make you feel the difference in myself coming home through the apple-blooms last night, and going to Boston Wednesday morning, I think you would know that you had not lived in vain, for a few of the beautiful May-day hours. I bring such refreshment from you always! I wonder if you do not feel that something is gone out from you, or are you like the flowers, that find an infinite sweetness in their hearts, replacing constantly what they give away? So much I must say in love and gratitude, and you must pardon it, because it is sincere.

I have copied the rhyme note for you. If I did not feel so very “stingy” (it’s the word!) about our Mr. Whittier’s letters, I should give you the original, for I think it belongs to you almost as much as to me. But possession is nine tenths of the law, you know, and I am a real miser about the letters of a friend,—ashamed as I am to own it to one so generous to me as you are....

The “rhyme note” mentioned was a delightful doggerel from Mr. Whittier.

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TO MRS. J. T. FIELDS.

Beverly, June 21, 1866.

Dear Annie,—Here I am once more by the salt sea, and out of the beautiful retreat of the Shakers, where we said “Good-by.”

“Aunt Mary” told me I might come again, and if it were not for the vision of that great dining-room, and the “two settings” of brethren and sisters, and the general wash-basin, I should almost be tempted to go also, and steep myself in that great quietness: only one would need a book now and then, and literature seems to be tabooed among them.

Mr. Whittier was much interested to hear of our adventures. I think I must have been eloquent about cider, for he said, “I wish I had some of it this minute,” so earnestly that I wished I had my hand upon that invisible Shaker barrel....

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TO MRS. CELIA THAXTER.

Beverly, July 16, 1867.

My dear Friend,—To think that yesterday I was among the Enchanted Isles, and to-day here, with only the warm murmur of the west wind among the elms! The glory of the day and the far eastern sea lingers with me yet. How I do thank you for those three bright days! The undercurrent of memory would have been too much but for your kindness.

I think I kept it well covered, but there was a vast unrest in me, all those days. I seemed to myself wandering over the turfy slopes, and the rocks, and the sea, in search of a dream, a sweet, impalpable presence that ever eluded me. I never knew how fully dear Lizzie[6] filled my heart, until she was gone. Is it always so? But that Island is Lizzie to me, now. It was the refuge of her dreams, when she could not be there in reality. Her whole being seemed to blossom out into the immense spaces of the sea. I am glad that I have been there once again, and with only the dear brother, and you whom she loved and admired so much. For you are an enchantress. It is a great gift to attract and to hold as you can, and rare, even among women. To some it is a snare, but I do not believe it ever can be to you, because the large generosity of the sea was born into you. How can you help it, if your waves overblow with music, and all sorts of mysterious wealth upon others of us humans? I hope you beguiled our friend into a stay of more than the one day he spoke of. It was doing him so much good to be there, in that free and easy way; just the life he ought to lead for half the year, at least. I shall always use my meagre arts most earnestly to get him to the Island when you are there. There is such a difference in human atmospheres, you know; the petty, east-wind blighted inhabitants of towns are not good for the health of such as he. I esteem it one of the wonderful blessings of my life that he does not feel uncomfortable when I am about. With you, there is the added element of exhilaration, the rarest thing to receive, as one gets into years.

It is a sacred trust, the friendship of such a man.

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TO MISS JEAN INGELOW.

Beverly, Mass., December 15, 1867.

My dear Miss Ingelow,—It was very kind of you to write to me, and I can hardly tell you how much pleasure your letter gave me, in my at present lonely and unsettled life. I think a woman’s life is necessarily lonely, if unsettled: the home-instinct lies so deep in us. But I have never had a real home since I was a little child. I have married sisters, with whom I stay, when my work allows it, but that is not like one’s own place. I want a corner exclusively mine, in which to spin my own web and ravel it again, if I wish.

I wish I could learn to think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives, but I never could, and I am too old to begin now. However, there are compensations in all things, and I would not be out of reach of the happy children’s voices, which echo round me, although they will break in upon me rather suddenly, sometimes.

You asked about the sea,—our sea. The coast here is not remarkable. Just here there is a deep, sunny harbor, that sheltered the second company of the Pilgrim settlers from the Mother-Country, more than two centuries ago. A little river, which has leave to be such only at the return of the tide, half clasps the town in its crooked arm, and makes many an opening of beauty twice a day, among the fields and under the hills. The harbor is so shut in by islands, it has the effect of a lake; and the tide comes up over the wide, weedy flats, with a gentle and gradual flow. There are never any dangerous “High Tides” here. But up the shore a mile or two, the islands drift away, and the sea opens gradually as we near the storm-beaten point of Cape Ann, where we can see nothing but the waves and the ships, between us and Great Britain. The granite cliffs grow higher towards the Cape, but their hollows are relieved by little thickets of intensely red wild roses, and later, by the purple twinkling asters and the golden-rod’s embodied sunshine.

The east wind is bitter upon our coast. The wild rocks along the Cape are strewn with memories of shipwreck. Perhaps you remember Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus.” The “Reef of Norman’s Woe” is at Cape Ann, ten miles or so from here. About the same distance out, there is a group of islands,—the Isles of Shoals, which are a favorite resort in the summer, and getting to be somewhat too fashionable, for their charm is the wildness which they reveal and allow. Dressed up people spoil nature, somehow; unintentionally, I suppose; but the human butterflies are better in their own parterres. At Appledore, one of the larger of these islands, I have spent many happy days with the sister of our poet Whittier, now passed to the eternal shores,—and the last summer was there again, without her, alas! I missed her so, even though her noble brother was there! Perhaps that only recalled the lost, lovely days too vividly. I have seldom loved any one as I loved her.

These islands are full of strange gorges and caverns, haunted with stories of pirate and ghost. The old-world romance seems to have floated to them. And there I first saw your English pimpernel. It came here with the Pilgrims, I suppose, as it is not a native. It is pleasant to meet with these emigrant flowers. Most of them are carefully tended in gardens, but some are healthily naturalized in the bleakest spots. I should so like to see the daisies—Chaucer’s daisies—in their native fields; and the “yellow primrose,” too. Neither of these grows readily in our gardens. I have seen them only as petted house-plants.

I recognize some of our wild flowers in your “Songs of Seven.” By the way, Mr. Niles has sent me an illustrated copy of it, and what a gem it is! But I hardly know what are especially ours. Have you the tiny blue four-petaled “Houstonia CÆrulia”?—our first flower of spring, that and the rock-saxifrage! And is October in England gladdened with the heavenly azure of the fringed gentian? And does the climbing bitter-sweet hang its orange-colored fruit high in the deep green of the pine-trees, in the autumn? The most wonderful climber I ever saw was the trumpet-vine of the West. It grew on the banks of the Mississippi, climbing to the top of immense primeval trees, bursting out, there, into great red, clarion-like flowers. It seems literally to fix a foot in the trees as it climbs,—and it has an uncivilized way of pulling the shingles off the roofs of the houses over which it is trained. I am glad that violets are common property in the world. The prairies are blue with them. How at home they used to make me feel! for they are New England blossoms too.

I wonder if you like the mountains as well as you do the sea. I am afraid I do, and better, even. It seems half disloyal to say so, for I was born here; to me there is rest and strength, and aspiration and exultation, among the mountains. They are nearly a day’s journey from us—the White Mountains—but I will go, and get a glimpse and a breath of their glory, once a year, always. I was at Winnipiseogee, a mountain-girdled lake, in New Hampshire, when I saw your handwriting, first,—in a letter which told of your having been in Switzerland. We have no sky-cleaving Alps,—there is a massiveness, a breadth, about the hill scenery here, quite unlike them, I fancy. But such cascades, such streams as rise in the hard granite, pure as liquid diamonds, and with a clear little thread of music!

I usually stop at a village on the banks of the Pemigewasset, a small silvery river that flows from the Notch Mountains,—a noble pile, that hangs like a dream, and flits like one too, in the cloudy air, as you follow the stream’s winding up to the Flume, which is a strange grotto, cut sharply down hundreds of feet through a mountain’s heart; an immense boulder was lodged in the cleft when it was riven, half way down, and there it forever hangs, over the singing stream. The sundered rocks are dark with pines, and I never saw anything lovelier than the green light with which the grotto is flooded by the afternoon sun. But I must not go on about the mountains, or I shall never stop,—I want to say something about our poets, but I will not do that, either.

Beauty drifts to us from the mother-land, across the sea, in argosies of poetry. How rich we are with Old England’s wealth! Our own lies yet somewhat in the ore, but I think we have the genuine metal.

How true it is, as you say, that we can never utter the best that is in us, poets or not. And the great true voices are so, not so much because they can speak for themselves, but because they are the voices of our common humanity.

The poets are but leaders in the chorus of souls—they utter our pÆans and our misereres, and so we feel that they belong to us. It is indeed a divine gift, the power of drawing hearts upward through the magic of a song; and the anointed ones must receive their chrism with a holy humility. They receive but to give again,—“more blessed” so. And they may also receive the gratitude of those they bless, to give it back to God.

I hope you will write to me again some time, though I am afraid I ought not to expect it. I know what it is to have the day too short for the occupations which must fill it,—to say nothing of what might, very pleasantly, too.

But I shall always be sincerely and gratefully yours,

Lucy Larcom.

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TO J. G. WHITTIER.

Beverly, February 28, 1868.

My dear Friend,—Nothing would be pleasanter to me than a visit to Amesbury, and the cold weather is no especial drawback. But I cannot be away from Beverly now, my mother is so ill. She has been suffering very much all winter, but is now nearly helpless, and I think she is rapidly failing. She has an experienced nurse with her, and there is little that any of us can do for her, except to look in now and then, and let her know that her children are not far away. That seems to be her principal earthly comfort. The coming rest is very welcome to her. She lies peacefully hoping for it, and she has suffered, and still does, such intense pain, I cannot feel as I otherwise would about her leaving us. But the rending of these familiar ties is always very hard to bear. She has been a good, kind mother to me, and it is saddest of all to see her suffer without the power of relief; to know that death only can end her pain.

I think of you often, and wish I could sit down for an evening by the light of your cheery wood fire, and have one of the old-time chats. I am so glad that A—— is there, to make it home-like. I think my most delightful remembrances of Amesbury are of that fireside, and the faces gathered about it, upon which the soft flow of the flames flickered and kindled, with the playful and varying interchange of thought. Last Sunday night I spent at Harriet Pitman’s. Cold enough it was, too. But the greenhouse is a small edition of the tropics, and full of blossoms and sweet odors. I should want to live in it, if I were there.

I do not know what to make of the aspect of things at Washington. It cannot be that we shall be left to plunge into another war, and yet we may need it. I do not see that our terrible struggle made the deep impression it should in establishing national principles. Only apathy to the most vital interests could have brought us to this pass. It seems as if A. J. must show himself an absolute fiend, before his removal is insisted upon.

Miss Larcom’s mother died March 14, 1868. The bereavement was great; but the long illness had prepared her daughter for the affliction. Years afterwards she used to say that when in trouble or despondency, like a child she wanted to cry out for her mother.