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Benedict de Spinoza - "A Theologico Political Treatise [Part IV]"

William Blake - "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience"

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A New England Girlhood

L >> Lucy Larcom >> A New England Girlhood



A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD
OUTLINED FROM MEMORY

By LUCY LARCOM




I dedicated this sketch
To my girlfriends in general;
And in particular
To my namesake-niece,
Lucy Larcom Spaulding.


Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my angel-infancy!
--When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity:--
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience by a sinful sound;--
But felt through all this fleshy dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

HENRY VAUGHAN


The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction.

WORDSWORTH




PREFACE

THE following sketch was written for the young, at the suggestion
of friends.

My audience is understood to be composed of girls of all ages,
and of women who have not forgotten their girlhood. Such as have
a friendly appreciation of girls--and of those who write for
them--are also welcome to listen to as much of my narrative as
they choose. All others are eavesdroppers, and, of course, have
no right to critise.

To many, the word "autobiography" implies nothing but conceit and
egotism. But these are not necessarily its characteristics. If an
apple blossom or a ripe apple could tell its own story, it would
be, still more than its own, the story of the sunshine that
smiled upon it, of the winds that whispered to it, of the birds
that sang around it, of the storms that visited it, and of the
motherly tree that held it and fed it until its petals were
unfolded and its form developed.

A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer
and inner universe photographed upon one little life's
consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen

go to the making up of every human being? The commonest personal
history has its value when it is looked at as a part of the One
Infinite Life. Our life--which is the very best thing we have--is
ours only that we may share it with Our Father's family, at their
need. If we have anything, within us worth giving away, to
withhold it is ungenerous; and we cannot look honestly into
ourselves without acknowledging with humility our debt to the
lives around us for whatever of power or beauty has been poured
into ours.

None of us can think of ourselves as entirely separate beings.
Even an autobiographer has to say "we" much oftener than "I."
Indeed, there may be more egotism in withdrawing mysteriously
into one's self, than in frankly unfolding one's life--story, for
better or worse. There may be more vanity in covering, one's face
with a veil, to be wondered at and guessed about, than in draw-
ing it aside, and saying by that act, "There! you see that I am
nothing remarkable."

However, I do not know that I altogether approve of autobiography
myself, when the subject is a person of so little importance as
in the present instance. Still, it may have a reason for being,
even in a case like this.

Every one whose name is before the public at all must be aware of
a common annoyance in the frequent requests which are made for
personal facts, data for biographical paragraphs, and the like.
To answer such requests and furnish the material asked for, were
it desirable, would interfere seriously with the necessary work
of almost any writer. The first impulse is to pay no attention to
them, putting them aside as mere signs of the ill-bred, idle
curiosity of the age we live in about people and their private
affairs. It does not seem to be supposed possible that authors
can have any natural shrinking from publicity, like other
mortals.

But while one would not willingly encourage an intrusive custom,
there is another view of the matter. The most enjoyable thing
about writing is that the relation between writer and reader may
be and often does become that of mutual friendship; an friends
naturally like to know each other in a neighborly way.

We are all willing to gossip about ourselves, sometimes, with
those who are really interested in us. Girls especially are fond
of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can
trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple,
earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who
never lose it entirely.

I should like far better to listen to my girlreaders' thoughts
about life and themselves than to be writing out my own
experiences. It is to my disadvantage that the confidences, in
this case, must all be on one side. But I have known so
many girls so well in my relation to them of schoolmate,
workmate, and teacher, I feel sure of a fair share of their
sympathy and attention.

It is hardly possible for an author to write anything sincerely
without making it something of an autobiography. Friends can
always read a personal history, or guess at it, between the
lines. So I sometimes think I have already written mine, in my
verses. In them, I have found the most natural and free
expression of myself. They have seemed to set my life to music
for me, a life that has always had to be occupied with many
things besides writing. Not, however, that I claim to have
written much poetry: only perhaps some true rhymes: I do not see
how there could be any pleasure in writing insincere ones.

Whatever special interest this little narrative of mine may have
is due to the social influences under which I was reared, and
particularly to the prominent place held by both work and
religion in New England half a century ago. The period of my
growing-up had peculiarities which our future history can never
repeat, although something far better is undoubtedly already
resulting thence. Those peculiarities were the natural de-
velopment of the seed sown by our sturdy Puritan ancestry. The
religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a
mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked
up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half
revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so
that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky, than our
elders; but the tree was sound at its heart. There was life in it
that can never be lost to the world.

One thing we are at last beginning to understand, which our
ancestors evidently had not learned; that it is far more needful
for theologians to become as little children, than for little
children to become theologians. They considered it a duty that
they owed to the youngest of us, to teach us doctrines. And we
believed in our instructors, if we could not always digest their
instructions. We learned to reverence truth as they received it
and lived it, and to feel that the search for truth was one chief
end of our being.

It was a pity that we were expected to begin thinking upon hard
subjects so soon, and it was also a pity that we were set to hard
work while so young. Yet these were both inevitable results of
circumstances then existing; and perhaps the two belong together.
Perhaps habits of conscientious work induce thought. Certainly,
right thinking naturally impels people to work.

We learned no theories about "the dignity of labor," but we were
taught to work almost as if it were a religion; to keep at work,
expecting nothing else. It was our inheritance, banded down from
the outcasts of Eden. And for us, as for them, there was a
blessing hidden in the curse. I am glad that I grew up under
these wholesome Puritanic influences, as glad as I am that I was
born a New Englander; and I surely should have chosen New England
for my birthplace before any region under the sun.

Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some
imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality. I
believe it was Grotius who said, "Books are necessities of my
life. Food and clothing I can do without, if I must."

My "must-have " was poetry. From the first, life meant that to
me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an
atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere
about me. The children of old New England were always surrounded,
it is true, with stubborn matter of fact,--the hand to hand
struggle for existence. But that was no hindrance. Poetry must
have prose to root itself in; the homelier its earth-spot, the
lovelier, by contrast, its heaven-breathing flowers.

To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me,
the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their
faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue
skies were poetry. God himself was poetry. As I grew up and lived
on, friendship became to me the deepest and sweetest ideal of
poetry. To live in other lives, to take their power and
beauty into our own, that is poetry experienced, the most
inspiring of all. Poetry embodied in persons, in lovely and lofty
characters, more sacredly than all in the One Divine Person who
has transfigured our human life with the glory of His sacrifice,
--all the great lyrics and epics pale before that, and it is
within the reach and comprehension of every human soul.

To care for poetry in this way does not make one a poet, but it
does make one feel blessedly rich, and quite indifferent to many
things which are usually looked upon as desirable possessions. I
am sincerely grateful that it was given to me, from childhood, to
see life from this point of view. And it seems to me that every
young girl would be happier for beginning her earthly journey
with the thankful consciousness that her life does not consist in
the abundance of things that she possesses.

The highest possible poetic conception is that of a life
consecrated to a noble ideal. It may be unable to find expression
for itself except through humble, even menial services, or
through unselfish devotion whose silent song is audible to God
alone; yet such music as this might rise to heaven from every
young girl's heart and character if she would set it free. In
such ways it was meant that the world should be filled with the
true poetry of womanhood.

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of
ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most
vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on
in us forever. My childhood was by no means a cloudless one. It
had its light and shade, each contributing a charm which makes it
wholly delightful in the retrospect.

I can see very distinctly the child that I was, and I know how
the world looked to her, far off as she is now. She seems to me
like my little sister, at play in a garden where I can at any
time return and find her. I have enjoyed bringing her back, and
letting her tell her story, almost as if she were somebody else.
I like her better than I did when I was really a child, and I
hope never to part company with her.

I do not feel so much satisfaction in the older girl who comes
between her and me, although she, too, is enough like me to be my
sister, or even more like my young, undisciplined mother; for the
girl is mother of the woman. But I have to acknowledge her faults
and mistakes as my own, while I sometimes feel like reproving her
severely for her carelessly performed tasks, her habit of lapsing
into listless reveries, her cowardly shrinking from
responsibility and vigorous endeavor, and many other faults that
I have inherited from her. Still, she is myself, and I could not
be quite happy without her comradeship.

Every phase of our life belongs to us. The moon does not, except
in appearance, lose her first thin, luminous curve, nor her
silvery crescent, in rounding to her full. The woman is still
both child and girl, in the completeness of womanly character.
We have a right to our entire selves, through all the changes of
this mortal state, a claim which we shall doubtless carry along
with us into the unfolding mysteries of our eternal being.
Perhaps in this thought lies hidden the secret of immortal youth;
for a seer has said that "to grow old in heaven is to grow
young."

To take life as it is sent to us, to live it faithfully, looking
and striving always towards better life, this was the lesson that
came to me from my early teachers. It was not an easy lesson,
but it was a healthful one; and I pass it on to younger pupils,
trusting that they will learn it more thoroughly than I ever
have.

Young or old, we may all win inspiration to do our best, from the
needs of a world to which the humblest life may be permitted to
bring immeasurable blessings:--

"For no one doth know
What he can bestow,
What light, strength, and beauty may after him go:
Thus onward we move,
And, save God above,
None guesseth how wondrous the journey will prove."

L.L.
BEVERLY, MASSACHUSETTS,
October, 1889.


CONTENTS.


CHAPTER

I. UP AND DOWN THE LANE
II. SCHOOLROOM AND MEETING-HOUSE
III. THE HYMN-BOOK
IV. NAUGHTY CHILDREN AND FAIRY TALES
V. OLD NEW ENGLAND
VI. GLIMPSES OF POETRY
VII. BEGINNING TO WORK
VIII.BY THE RIVER
IX. MOUNTAIN-FRIENDS
X. MILL-GIRLS' MAGAZINES
XI. READING AND STUDYING
XII. FROM THE MERRIMACK TO THE MISSISSIPPI



A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD

I.

UP AND DOWN THE LANE.

IT is strange that the spot of earth where we were born should
make such a difference to us. People can live and grow anywhere,
but people as well as plants have their habitat,--the place
where they belong, and where they find their happiest, because
their most natural life. If I had opened my eyes upon this planet
elsewhere than in this northeastern corner of Massachusetts,
elsewhere than on this green, rocky strip of shore between
Beverly Bridge and the Misery Islands, it seems to me as if I
must have been somebody else, and not myself. These gray ledges
hold me by the roots, as they do the bayberry bushes, the sweet-
fern, and the rock-saxifrage.

When I look from my window over the tree-tops to the sea, I could
almost fancy that from the deck of some one of those inward bound
vessels the wistful eyes of the Lady Arbella might be turned
towards this very hillside, and that mine were meeting hers in
sympathy, across the graves of two hundred and fifty years. For
Winthrop's fleet, led by the ship that bore her name, must have
passed into harbor that way. Dear and gracious spirit! The memory
of her brief sojourn here has left New England more truly
consecrated ground. Sweetest of womanly pioneers! It is as if an
angel in passing on to heaven just touched with her wings this
rough coast of ours.

In those primitive years, before any town but Salem had been
named, this whole region was known as Cape Ann Side; and about
ten years after Winthrop's arrival, my first ancestor's name
appears among those of other hardy settlers of the neighborhood.
No record has been found of his coming, but emigration by that
time had grown so rapid that ships' lists were no longer
carefully preserved. And then he was but a simple yeoman, a
tiller of the soil; one who must have loved the sea, however, for
he moved nearer and nearer towards it from Agawam through Wenham
woods, until the close of the seventeenth century found his
descendants--my own great-great-grandfatber's family--planted in
a romantic homestead-nook on a hillside, overlooking wide gray
spaces of the bay at the part of Beverly known as "The Farms."
The situation was beautiful, and home attachments proved
tenacious, the family claim to the farm having only been resigned
within the last thirty or forty years.

I am proud of my unlettered forefathers, who were also too humbly
proud to care whether their names would be remembered or not; for
they were God-fearing men, and had been persecuted for their
faith long before they found their way either to Old or New
England.

The name is rather an unusual one, and has been traced back from
Wales and the Isle of Wight through France to Languedoc and Pied-
mont; a little hamlet in the south of France still bearing it in
what was probably the original spelling-La Combe. There is a
family shield in existence, showing a hill surmounted by a tree,
and a bird with spread wings above. It might symbolize flight in
times of persecution, from the mountains to the forests, and
thence to heaven, or to the free skies of this New World.

But it is certain that my own immediate ancestors were both
indifferent and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and
accepted with sturdy dignity an inheritance of hard work and the
privileges of poverty, leaving the same bequest to their
descendants. And poverty has its privileges. When there is very
little of the seen and temporal to intercept spiritual vision,
unseen and eternal realities are, or may be, more clearly beheld.

To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in
God, is better than to have inherited material wealth of any
kind. And to those serious-minded, reticent progenitors of mine,
looking out from their lonely fields across the lonelier sea,
their faith must have been everything.

My father's parents both died years before my birth. My
grandmother had been left a widow with a large family in my
father's boyhood, and he, with the rest, had to toil early for a
livelihood. She was an earnest Christian woman, of keen
intelligence and unusual spiritual perception. She was supposed
by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight"; and some
remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events
while they were occurring, or just before they took place. Her
dignity of presence and character must have been noticeable.
A relative of mine, who as a very little child, was taken by her
mother to visit my grandmother, told me that she had always
remembered the aged woman's solemnity of voice and bearing, and
her mother's deferential attitude towards her: and she was so
profoundly impressed by it all at the time, that when they had
left the house, and were on their homeward path through the
woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a
whisper, "Mother, was that God?"

I used sometimes to feel a little resentment at my fate in not
having been born at the old Beverly Farms home-place, as my
father and uncles and aunts and some of my cousins had been. But
perhaps I had more of the romantic and legendary charm of it than
if I had been brought up there, for my father, in his
communicative moods, never wearied of telling us about his
childhood; and we felt that we still held a birthright claim upon
that picturesque spot through him. Besides, it was only three or
four miles away, and before the day of railroads, that was
thought nothing of as a walk, by young or old.

But, in fact, I first saw the light in the very middle of
Beverly, in full view of the town clock and the Old South
steeple. (I believe there is an "Old South" in nearly all these
first-settled cities and villages of Eastern Massachusetts. The
town wore a half-rustic air of antiquity then, with its old-
fashioned people and weather-worn houses; for I was born while my
mother-century was still in her youth, just rounding the first
quarter of her hundred years.

Primitive ways of doing things had not wholly ceased during, my
childhood; they were kept up in these old towns longer than
elsewhere. We used tallow candles and oil lamps, and sat by open
fireplaces. There was always a tinder-box in some safe corner or
other, and fire was kindled by striking flint and steel upon the
tinder. What magic it seemed to me, when I was first allowed to
strike that wonderful spark, and light the kitchen fire!

The fireplace was deep, and there was a "settle" in the chimney
corner, where three of us youngest girls could sit together and
toast our toes on the andirons (two Continental soldiers in full
uniform, marching one after the other), while we looked up the
chimney into a square of blue sky, and sometimes caught a snow-
flake on our foreheads; or sometimes smirched our clean aprons
(high-necked and long sleeved ones, known as "tiers") against the
swinging crane with its sooty pot-hooks and trammels.

The coffee-pot was set for breakfast over hot coals, on a three-
legged bit of iron called a "trivet." Potatoes were roasted in
the ashes, and the Thanksgiving turkey in a "tin-kitchen,"
the business of turning the spit being usually delegate to some
of us, small folk, who were only too willing to burn our faces in
honor of the annual festival.

There were brick ovens in the chimney corner, where the great
bakings were done; but there was also an iron article called a
"Dutch oven," in which delicious bread could be baked over the
coals at short notice. And there was never was anything that
tasted better than my mother's "firecake,"--a short-cake spread
on a smooth piece of board, and set up with a flat-iron before
the blaze, browned on one side, and then turned over to be
browned on the other. (It required some sleight of hand to do
that.) If I could only be allowed to blow the bellows--the very
old people called them "belluses"--when the fire began to get
low, I was a happy girl.

Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy
affairs, and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so
nice as that which was done by an open fire. We younger ones
reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a
remembered sunset. There is no such home-splendor now.

When supper was finished, and the tea-kettle was pushed back on
the crane, and the backlog had been reduced to a heap of fiery
embers, then was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost
and witch legends. The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of
those tales of eld since the gleam of red-hot coals died away
from the hearthstone. The shutting up of the great fireplaces
and the introduction of stoves marks an era; the abdication of
shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant Commonplace--
sometimes, alas! the opposite of elegant--at the New England
fireside.

Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense? It hardly
seems as if the young people of to-day can really understand the
poetry of English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a
reflected illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's
Saturday Night" have been, if Burns had written it by the opaque
heat of a stove instead of at his

"Wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnilie?"

New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in many of
its ways of doing and thinking, that it almost seems as if that
tender poem of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too.
I can see the features of my father, who died when I was a little
child, whenever I read the familiar verse:--

"The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face
They round the ingle form a circle wide:
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride."

A grave, thoughtful face his was, lifted up so grandly amid that
blooming semicircle of boys and girls, all gathered silently in
the glow of the ruddy firelight! The great family Bible had the
look upon its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new,
and we honored it the more for its apparent age. Its companion
was the Westminster Assembly's and Shorter Catechism, out of
which my father asked us questions on Sabbath afternoons, when
the tea-table had been cleared. He ended the exercise with a
prayer, standing up with his face turned toward the wall. My most
vivid recollection of his living face is as I saw it reflected in
a mirror while he stood thus praying. His closed eyes, the
paleness and seriousness of his countenance, awed me. I never
forgot that look. I saw it but once again, when, a child of
six or seven years, I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin
to gaze upon his face for the last time. It wore the same
expression that it did in prayer; paler, but no longer care-worn;
so peaceful, so noble! They left me standing there a long time,
and I could not take my eyes away. I had never thought my
father's face a beautiful one until then, but I believe it must
have been so, always.

I know that he was a studious man, fond of what was called "solid
reading." He delighted in problems of navigation (he was for many
years the master of a merchant-vessel sailing to various European
ports), in astronomical calculations and historical computations.
A rhyming genius in the town, who undertook to hit off the
peculiarities of well-known residents, characterized my father as

"Philosophic Ben,
Who, pointing to the stars, cries, Land ahead!"

His reserved, abstracted manner,--though his gravity concealed a
fund of rare humor,--kept us children somewhat aloof from him;
but my mother's temperament formed a complete contrast to his.
She was chatty and social, rosy-cheeked and dimpled, with bright
blue eyes and soft, dark, curling hair, which she kept pinned up
under her white lace cap-border. Not even the eldest child
remembered her without her cap, and when some of us asked her why
she never let her pretty curls be visible, she said,--
"Your father liked to see me in a cap. I put it on soon after we
were married, to please him; I always have worn it, and I always
shall wear it, for the same reason."

My mother had that sort of sunshiny nature which easily shifts to
shadow, like the atmosphere of an April day. Cheerfulness held
sway with her, except occasionally, when her domestic cares grew
too overwhelming; but her spirits rebounded quickly from
discouragement.

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