A New England Girlhood Part 17

"Bind up thy tresses, thou beautiful one, Of brown in the shadow, and gold in the sun."

It was a refreshment and an inspiration to look into this book between my long rows of figures, and read such poems as "The Angel of Patience," "Follen," "Raphael," and that wonderfully rendered "Hymn"

from Lamartine, that used to whisper itself through me after I had read it, like the echo of a spirit's voice:--

"When the Breath Divine is flowing, Zephyr-like o'er all things going, And, as the touch of viewless fingers, Softly on my soul it lingers, Open to a breath the lightest, Conscious of a touch the slightest,--

Then, O Father, Thou alone, From the shadow of thy throne, To the sighing of my breast And its rapture answerest."

I grew so familiar with this volume that I felt acquainted with the poet long before I met him. It remained in my desk-drawer for months. I thought it belonged to my poetic friend, the baler of cloth. But one day he informed me that it was a borrowed book; he thought, however, he should claim it for his own, now that he had kept it so long. Upon which remark I delivered it up to the custody of his own conscience, and saw it no more.

One day, towards the last of my stay at Lowell (I never changed my work-room again), this same friendly fellow-toiler handed me a poem to read, which some one had sent in to us from the counting-room, with the penciled comment, "Singularly beautiful." It was Poe's "Raven," which had just made its first appearance in some magazine. It seemed like an apparition in literature, indeed; the sensation it created among the staid, measured lyrics of that day, with its flit of spectral wings, and its ghostly refrain of "Nevermore!" was very noticeable. Poe came to Lowell to live awhile, but it was after I had gone away.

Our national poetry was at this time just beginning to be well known and appreciated. Bryant had published two volumes, and every school child was familiar with his "Death of the Flowers" and "G.o.d's First Temples." Some one lent me the "Voices of the Night," the only collection of Longfellow's verse then issued, I think. The "Footsteps of Angels" glided at once into my memory, and took possession of a permanent place there, with its tender melody. "The Last Leaf" and "Old Ironsides" were favorites with everybody who read poetry at all, but I do not think we Lowell girls had a volume of Dr. Holmes's poems at that time.

"The Lady's Book" and "Graham's Magazine" were then the popular periodicals, and the mill-girls took them. I remember that the "nuggets" I used to pick out of one or the other of them when I was quite a child were labeled with the signature of Harriet E. Beecher.

"Father Morris," and "Uncle Tim," and others of the delightful "May-Flower" s.n.a.t.c.hes first appeared in this way. Irving's "Sketch-Book" all reading people were supposed to have read, and I recall the pleasure it was to me when one of my sisters came into possession of "Knickerbocker's History of New York." It was the first humorous book, as well as the first history, that I ever cared about.

And I was pleased enough--for I was a little girl when my fondness for it began--to hear our minister say that he always read Diedrich Knickerbocker for his tired Monday's recreation.

We were allowed to have books in the cloth-room. The absence of machinery permitted that privilege. Our superintendent, who was a man of culture and a Christian gentleman of the Puritan-school, dignified and reserved, used often to stop at my desk in his daily round to see what book I was reading. One day it was Mather's "Magnalia," which I had brought from the public library, with a desire to know something of the early history of New England. He looked a little surprised at the archaeological turn my mind had taken, but his only comment was, "A valuable old book that." It was a satisfaction to have a superintendent like him, whose granite principles, emphasized by his stately figure and bearing, made him a tower of strength in the church and in the community. He kept a silent, kindly, rigid watch over the corporation-life of which he was the head; and only those of us who were incidentally admitted to his confidence knew how carefully we were guarded.

We had occasional glimpses into his own well-ordered home-life, at social gatherings. His little daughter was in my infant Sabbath-school cla.s.s from her fourth to her seventh or eighth year. She sometimes visited me at my work, and we had our frolics among the heaps of cloth, as if we were both children. She had also the same love of hymns that I had as a child, and she would sit by my side and repeat to me one after another that she had learned, not as a task, but because of her delight in them. One of my sincerest griefs in going off to the West was that I should see my little pupil Mary as a child no more. When I came back, she was a grown-up young woman.

My friend Anna, who had procured for me the place and work beside her which I liked so much, was not at all a bookish person, but we had perhaps a better time together than if she had been. She was one who found the happiness of her life in doing kindnesses for others, and in helping them bear their burdens. Family reverses had brought her, with her mother and sisters, to Lowell, and this was one strong point of sympathy between my own family and hers. It was, indeed, a bond of neighborly union between a great many households in the young manufacturing city. Anna's manners and language were those of a lady, though she had come from the wilds of Maine, somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Desert, the very name of which seemed in those days to carry one into a wilderness of mountains and waves. We chatted together at our work on all manner of subjects, and once she astonished me by saying confidentially, in a low tone, "Do you know, I am thirty years old!" She spoke as if she thought the fact implied something serious.

My surprise was that she should have taken me into her intimate friends.h.i.+p when I was only seventeen. I should hardly have supposed her older than myself, if she had not volunteered the information.

When I lifted my eyes from her tall, thin figure to her fair face and somewhat sad blue eyes, I saw that she looked a little worn; but I knew that it was from care for others, strangers as well as her own relatives; and it seemed to me as if those thirty loving years were her rose-garland. I became more attached to her than ever.

What a foolish dread it is,--showing unripeness rather than youth,--the dread of growing old! For how can a life be beautified more than by its beautiful years? A living, loving, growing spirit can never be old.

Emerson says:

"Spring still makes spring in the mind, When sixty years are told;"

and some of us are thankful to have lived long enough to bear witness with him to that truth.

The few others who measured cloth with us were nice, bright girls, and some of them remarkably pretty. Our work and the room itself were so clean that in summer we could wear fresh muslin dresses, sometimes white ones, without fear of soiling them. This slight difference of apparel and our fewer work-hours seemed to give us a slight advantage over the toilers in the mills opposite, and we occasionally heard ourselves spoken of as "the cloth-room aristocracy." But that was only in fun. Most of us had served an apprentices.h.i.+p in the mills, and many of our best friends were still there, preferring their work because it brought them more money than we could earn.

For myself, no amount of money would have been a temptation, compared with my precious daytime freedom. Whole hours of suns.h.i.+ne for reading, for walking, for studying, for writing, for anything that I wanted to do! The days were so lovely and so long! and yet how fast they slipped away! I had not given up my dream of a better education, and as I could not go to school, I began to study by myself.

I had received a pretty thorough drill in the common English branches at the grammar school, and at my employment I only needed a little simple arithmetic. A few of my friends were studying algebra in an evening cla.s.s, but I had no fancy for mathematics. My first wish was to learn about English Literature, to go back to its very beginnings. It was not then studied even in the higher schools, and I knew no one who could give me any a.s.sistance in it, as a teacher. "Percy's Reliques"

and "Chambers' Cyclopoedia of English Literature" were in the city library, and I used them, making extracts from Chaucer and Spenser, to fix their peculiarities in my memory, though there was only a taste of them to be had from the Cyclopaedia.

Shakespeare I had read from childhood, in a fragmentary way. "The Tempest," and "Midsummer Night's Dream," and "King Lear," I had swallowed among my fairy tales. Now I discovered that the historical plays, notably, "Julius Caesar" and "Coriola.n.u.s," had no less attraction for me, though of a different kind. But it was easy for me to forget that I was trying to be a literary student, and slip off from Belmont to Venice with Portia to witness the discomfiture of Shylock; although I did pity the miserable Jew, and thought he might at least have been allowed the comfort of his paltry ducats. I do not think that any of my studying at this time was very severe; it was pleasure rather than toil, for I undertook only the tasks I liked. But what I learned remained with me, nevertheless.

With Milton I was more familiar than with any other poet, and from thirteen years of age to eighteen he was my preference. My friend Angeline and I (another of my cloth-room a.s.sociates) made the "Paradise Lost" a language-study in an evening cla.s.s, under one of the grammar school masters, and I never open to the majestic lines,--

"High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,"--

Without seeing Angeline's kindly, homely face out-lined through that magnificence, instead of the lineaments of the evil angel

"by merit raised To that bad eminence."

She, too, was much older than I, and a most excellent, energetic, and studious young woman. I wonder if she remembers how hard we tried to get

"Beelzebub--than whom, Satan except, none higher sat,"

into the limits of our grammatical rules,--not altogether with success, I believe.

I copied pa.s.sages from Jeremy Taylor and the old theologians into my note-books, and have found them useful even recently, in preparing compilations. Dryden and the eighteenth century poets generally did not interest me, though I tried to read them from a sense of duty. Pope was an exception, however. Aphorisms from the "Essay on Man" were in as common use among us as those from the Book of Proverbs.

Some of my choicest extracts were in the first volume of collected poetry I ever owned, a little red morocco book called "The Young Man's Book of Poetry." It was given me by one of my sisters when I was about a dozen years old, who rather apologized for the young man on the t.i.tle-page, saying that the poetry was just as good as if he were not there.

And, indeed, no young man could have valued it more than I did. It contained selections from standard poets, and choice ones from less familiar sources. One of the extracts was Wordsworth's "Sunset among the Mountains," from the "Excursion," to read which, however often, always lifted me into an ecstasy. That red morocco book was my treasure. It traveled with me to the West, and I meant to keep it as long as I lived. But alas! it was borrowed by a little girl out on the Illinois prairies, who never brought it back. I do not know that I have ever quite forgiven her. I have wished I could look into it again, often and often through the years. But perhaps I ought to be grateful to that little girl for teaching me to be careful about returning borrowed books myself. Only a lover of them can appreciate the loss of one which has been a possession from childhood.

Young and Cowper were considered religious reading, and as such I had always known something of them. The songs of Burns were in the air.

Through him I best learned to know poetry as song. I think that I heard the "Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night" and "A man's a man for a' that" more frequently quoted than any other poems familiar to my girlhood.

Some of my work-folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to "Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster" and "Edinburgh" reviews, and they lent them to me. These, and Macaulay's "Essays," were a great help and delight. I had also the reading of the "Bibliotheca Sacra" and the "New Englander;" and sometimes of the "North American Review."

By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and Coleridge in my readings of English poetry, I was enjoying it all so much that I could not any longer call it study.

A gift from a friend of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of England" gave me my first knowledge of Tennyson. It was a great experience to read "Locksley Hall" for the first time while it was yet a new poem, and while one's own young life was stirred by the prophetic spirit of the age that gave it birth.

I had a friend about my own age, and between us there was something very much like what is called a "school-girl friends.h.i.+p," a kind of intimacy supposed to be superficial, but often as deep and permanent as it is pleasant.

Eliza and I managed to see each other every day; we exchanged confidences, laughed and cried together, read, wrote, walked, visited, and studied together. Her dress always had an airy touch which I admired, although I was rather indifferent as to what I wore myself.

But she would endeavor to "fix me up" tastefully, while I would help her to put her compositions for the "Offering" into proper style. She had not begun to go to school at two years old, repeating the same routine of study every year of her childhood, as I had. When a child, I should have thought it almost as much of a disgrace to spell a word wrong, or make a mistake in the multiplication table, as to break one of the Ten Commandments. I was astonished to find that Eliza and other friends had not been as particularly dealt with in their early education. But she knew her deficiencies, and earned money enough to leave her work and attend a day-school part of the year.

She was an ambitious scholar, and she persuaded me into studying the German language with her. A native professor had formed a cla.s.s among young women connected with the mills, and we joined it. We met, six or eight of us, at the home of two of these young women,--a factory boarding-house,--in a neat little parlor which contained a piano. The professor was a music-teacher also, and he sometimes brought his guitar, and let us finish our recitation with a concert. More frequently he gave us the songs of Deutschland that we begged for. He sang the "Erl-King" in his own tongue admirably. We went through Follen's German Grammar and Reader:--what a choice collection of extracts that "Reader" was! We conquered the difficult gutturals, like those in the numeral "acht und achtzig" (the test of our p.r.o.nouncing abilities) so completely that the professor told us a native really would understand us! At his request, I put some little German songs into English, which he published as sheet-music, with my name. To hear my words sung quite gave me the feeling of a successful translator. The professor had his own distinctive name for each of his pupils. Eliza was "Naivete," from her artless manners; and me he called "Etheria,"

probably on account of my star-gazing and verse-writing habits.

Certainly there was never anything ethereal in my visible presence.

A botany cla.s.s was formed in town by a literary lady who was preparing a school text-book on the subject, and Eliza and I joined that also.

The most I recall about that is the delightful flower-hunting rambles we took together. The Linnaean system, then in use, did not give us a very satisfactory key to the science. But we made the acquaintance of hitherto unfamiliar wild flowers that grew around us, and that was the opening to us of another door towards the Beautiful.

Our minister offered to instruct the young people of his parish in ethics, and my sister Emilie and myself were among his pupils. We came to regard Wayland's "Moral Science" (our text-book) as most interesting reading, and it furnished us with many subjects for thought and for social discussion.

Carlyle's "Hero-Wors.h.i.+p" brought us a startling and keen enjoyment. It was lent me by a Dartmouth College student, the brother of one of my room-mates, soon after it was first published in this country. The young man did not seem to know exactly what to think of it, and wanted another reader's opinion. Few persons could have welcomed those early writings of Carlyle more enthusiastically than some of us working-girls did. The very ruggedness of the sentences had a fascination for us, like that of climbing over loose bowlders in a mountain scramble to get sight of a wonderful landscape.

My room-mate, the student's sister, was the possessor of an electrifying new poem,--"Festus,"--that we sat up nights to read. It does not seem as if it could be more than forty years since Sarah and I looked up into each other's face from the page as the lamplight grew dim, and said, quoting from the poem,--

"Who can mistake great thoughts?"

She gave me the volume afterwards, when we went West together, and I have it still. Its questions and conjectures were like a glimpse into the chaos of our own dimly developing inner life. The fascination of "Festus" was that of wonder, doubt, and dissent, with great outbursts of an overmastering faith sweeping over our minds as we read. Some of our friends thought it not quite safe reading; but we remember it as one of the inspirations of our workaday youth.

We read books, also, that bore directly upon the condition of humanity in our time. "The Glory and Shame of England" was one of them, and it stirred us with a wonderful and painful interest.

We followed travelers and explorers,--Layard to Nineveh, and Stephens to Yucatan. And we were as fond of good story-books as any girls that live in these days of overflowing libraries. One book, a character-picture from history, had a wide popularity in those days. It is a pity that it should be unfamiliar to modern girlhood,--Ware's "Zen.o.bia." The Queen of Palmyra walked among us, and held a lofty place among our ideals of heroic womanhood, never yet obliterated from admiring remembrance.

We had the delight of reading Frederika Bremer's "Home" and "Neighbors"