A New England Girlhood Part 19

My friend Angeline, with whom I used to read "Paradise Lost," went to Ohio as a teacher, and returned the following year, for a very brief visit, however,--and with a husband. Another acquaintance was in Wisconsin, teaching a pioneer school. Eliza, my intimate companion, was about to be married to a clergyman. She, too, eventually settled at the West.

The event which brought most change into my own life was the marriage of my sister Emilie. It involved the breaking up of our own little family, of which she had really been the "houseband," the return of my mother to my sisters at Beverly, and my going to board among strangers, as other girls did. I found excellent quarters and kind friends, but the home-life was ended.

My sister's husband was a grammar school master in the city, and their cottage, a mile or more out, among the open fields, was my frequent refuge from homesickness and the general clatter. Our partial separation showed me how much I had depended upon my sister. I had really let her do most of my thinking for me. Henceforth I was to trust to my own resources. I was no longer the "little sister" who could ask what to do, and do as she was told. It often brought me a feeling of dismay to find that I must make up my own mind about things small and great. And yet I was naturally self-reliant. I am not sure but self-reliance and dependence really belong together. They do seem to meet in the same character, like other extremes.

The health of Emilie's husband failing, after a year or two, it was evident that he must change his employment and his residence. He decided to go with his brother to Illinois and settle upon a prairie farm. Of course his wife and baby boy must go too, and with the announcement of this decision came an invitation to me to accompany them. I had no difficulty as to my response. It was just what I wanted to do. I was to teach a district school; but what there was beyond that, I could not guess. I liked to feel that it was all as vague as the unexplored regions to which I was going. My friend and room-mate Sarah, who was preparing herself to be a teacher, was invited to join us, and she was glad to do so. It was all quickly settled, and early in the spring of 1846 we left New England.

When I came to a realization of what I was leaving, when good-bys had to be said, I began to feel very sorrowful, and to wish it was not to be. I said positively that I should soon return, but underneath my protestations I was afraid that I might not. The West was very far off then, a full week's journey. It would be hard getting back. Those I loved might die; I might die myself. These thoughts pa.s.sed through my mind, though not through my lips. My eyes would sometimes tell the story, however, and I fancy that my tearful farewells must have seemed ridiculous to many of my friends, since my going was of my own cheerful choice.

The last meeting of the Improvement Circle before I went away was a kind of surprise party to me. Several original poems were read, addressed to me personally. I am afraid that I received it all in a dumb, undemonstrative way, for I could not make it seem real that I was the person meant, or that I was going away at all. But I treasured those tributes of sympathy afterwards, under the strange, s.p.a.cious skies where I sometimes felt so alone.

The editors of the "Offering" left with me a testimonial in money, accompanied by an acknowledgment of my contributions during several years; but I had never dreamed of pay, and did not know how to look upon it so. I took it gratefully, however, as a token of their appreciation, and twenty dollars was no small help toward my outfit.

Friends brought me books and other keepsakes. Our minister, gave me D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation" as a parting gift. It was quite a circ.u.mstance to be "going out West."

The exhilaration of starting off on one's first long journey, young, ignorant, buoyant, expectant, is unlike anything else, unless it be youth itself, the real beginning of the real journey--life. Annoyances are overlooked. Everything seems romantic and dreamlike.

We went by a southerly route, on account of starting so early in the season there was snow on the ground the day we left. On the second day, after a moonlight night on Long Island Sound, we were floating down the Delaware, between sh.o.r.es misty-green with budding willows; then (most of us seasick, though I was not) we were tossed across Chesapeake Bay; then there was a railway ride to the Alleghanies, which gave us glimpses of the Potomac and the Blue Ridge, and of the lovely scenery around Harper's Ferry; then followed a stifling night on the mountains, when we were packed like sardines into a stagecoach, without a breath of air, and the pa.s.sengers were cross because the baby cried, while I felt inwardly glad that one voice among us could give utterance to the general discomfort, my own part of which I could have borne if I could only have had an occasional peep out at the mountain-side. After that it was all river-voyaging, down the Monongahela into the Ohio, and up the Mississippi.

As I recall this part of it, I should say that it was the perfection of a Western journey to travel in early spring by an Ohio River steamboat,--such steamboats as they had forty years ago, comfortable, roomy, and well ordered. The company was social, as Western emigrants were wont to be when there were not so very many of them, and the sh.o.r.es of the river, then only thinly populated, were a constantly s.h.i.+fting panorama of wilderness beauty. I have never since seen a combination of spring colors so delicate as those shown by the uplifted forests of the Ohio, where the pure white of the dogwood and the peach-bloom tint of the red-bud (Judas tree) were contrasted with soft shades of green, almost endlessly various, on the unfolding leaf.a.ge.

Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show but breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced at its level sh.o.r.es, edged with a monotonous growth of cottonwood, and sent back a sigh towards the banks of the Merrimack. But we did not let each other know what the sigh was for, until long after. The breaking-up of our little company when the steamboat landed at Saint Louis was like the ending of a pleasant dream. We had to wake up to the fact that by striking due east thirty or forty miles across that monotonous Greenness, we should reach our destination, and must accept whatever we should find there, with such grace as we could.

What we did find, and did not find, there is not room fully to relate here. Ours was at first the roughest kind of pioneering experience; such as persons brought up in our well-to-do New England could not be in the least prepared for, though they might imagine they were, as we did. We were dropped down finally upon a vast green expense, extending hundreds of miles north and south through the State of Illinois, then known as Looking-Gla.s.s Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away, and so small that at that distance it looked like a s.h.i.+ngle set up endwise in the gra.s.s. Nothing else was in sight, not even a tree, although we could see miles and miles in every direction.

There were only the hollow blue heavens above us and the level green prairie around us,--an immensity of intense loneliness. We seldom saw a cloud in the sky, and never a pebble beneath our feet. If we could have picked up the commonest one, we should have treasured it like a diamond. Nothing in nature now seemed so beautiful to us as rocks. We had never dreamed of a world without them; it seemed like living on a floor without walls or foundations.

After a while we became accustomed to the vast sameness, and even liked it in a lukewarm way. And there were times when it filled us with emotions of grandeur. Boundlessness in itself is impressive; it makes us feel our littleness, and yet releases us from that littleness.

The gra.s.s was always astir, blowing one way, like the waves of the sea; for there was a steady, almost an unvarying wind from the south. It was like the sea, and yet even more wonderful, for it was a sea of living and growing things. The Spirit of G.o.d was moving upon the face of the earth, and breathing everything into life. We were but specks on the great landscape. But G.o.d was above it all, penetrating it and us with his infinite warmth. The distance from human beings made the Invisible One seem so near! Only Nature and ourselves now, face to face with Him!

We could scarcely have found in all the world a more complete contrast to the moving crowds and the whir and dust of the City of Spindles, than this unpeopled, silent prairie.

For myself, I know that I was sent in upon my own thoughts deeper than I had ever been before. I began to question things which I had never before doubted. I must have reality. Nothing but transparent truth would bear the test of this great, solitary stillness. As the prairies lay open to the suns.h.i.+ne, my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the piercing eye of the All-Seeing. I may say with grat.i.tude that only some superficial rubbish of acquired opinion was scorched away by this searching light and heat. The faith of my childhood, in its simplest elements, took firmer root as it found broader room to grow in.

I had many peculiar experiences in my log-cabin school-teaching, which was seldom more than three months in one place. Only once I found myself among New England people, and there I remained a year or more, fairly reveling in a return to the familiar, thrifty ways that seem to me to shape a more comfortable style of living than any under the sun.

"Vine Lodge" (so we named the cottage for its embowering honey-suckles), and its warm-hearted inmates, with my little white schoolhouse under the oaks, make one of the brightest of my Western memories.

Only a mile or two away from this pretty retreat there was an edifice towards which I often looked with longing. It was a seminary for young women, probably at that time one of the best in the country, certainly second to none in the West. It had originated about a dozen years before, in a plan for Western collegiate education, organized by Yale College graduates. It was thought that women as well as men ought to share in the benefits of such a plan, and the result was Monticello Seminary. The good man whose wealth had made the inst.i.tution a possibility lived in the neighborhood. Its trustees were of the best type of pioneer manhood, and its pupils came from all parts of the South and West.

Its Princ.i.p.al--I wonder now that I could have lived so near her for a year without becoming acquainted with her,--but her high local reputation as an intellectual woman inspired me with awe, and I was foolishly diffident. One day, however, upon the persuasion of my friends at Vine Lodge, who knew my wishes for a higher education, I went with them to call upon her. We talked about the matter which had been in my thoughts so long, and she gave me not only a cordial but an urgent invitation to come and enroll myself as a student. There were arrangements for those who could not incur the current expenses, to meet them by doing part of the domestic work, and of these I gladly availed myself. The stately limestone edifice, standing in the midst of an original growth of forest-trees, two or three miles from the Mississippi River, became my home--my student-home--for three years.

The benefits of those three years I have been reaping ever since, I trust not altogether selfishly. It was always my desire and my ambition as a teacher, to help my pupils as my teachers had helped me.

The course of study at Monticello Seminary was the broadest, the most college-like, that I have ever known; and I have had experience since in several inst.i.tutions of the kind. The study of mediaeval and modern history, and of the history of modern philosophy, especially, opened new vistas to me. In these our Princ.i.p.al was also our teacher, and her method was to show us the tendencies of thought, to put our minds into the great current of human affairs, leaving us to collect details as we could, then or afterward. We came thus to feel that these were life-long studies, as indeed they are.

The course was somewhat elective, but her advice to me was, not to omit anything because I did not like it. I had a natural distaste for mathematics, and my recollections of my struggles with trigonometry and conic sections are not altogether those of a conquering heroine. But my teacher told me that my mind had need of just that exact sort of discipline, and I think she was right.

A habit of indiscriminate, unsystematized reading, such as I had fallen into, is entirely foreign to the scholarly habit of mind. Attention is the secret of real acquirement; but it was months before I could command my own attention, even when I was interested in the subject I was examining. It seemed as if all the pages of all the books I had ever read were turning themselves over between me and this one page that I wanted to understand. I found that mere reading does not by any means make a student.

It was more to me to come into communication with my wise teacher as a friend than even to receive the wisdom she had to impart. She was dignified and reticent, but beneath her reserve, as is often the case, was a sealed fountain of sympathy, which one who had the key could easily unlock. Thinking of her n.o.bleness of character, her piety, her learning, her power, and her sweetness, it seems to me as if I had once had a Christian Zen.o.bia or Hypatia for my teacher.

We speak with awed tenderness of our unseen guardian angels, but have we not all had our guiding angels, who came to us in visible form, and, recognized or unknown, kept beside us on our difficult path until they had done for us all they could? It seems to me as if one had succeeded another by my side all through the years,--always some one whose influence made my heart stronger and my way clearer; though sometimes it has been only a little child that came and laid its hand into my hand as if I were its guide, instead of its being mine.

My dear and honored Lady-Princ.i.p.al was surely one of my strong guiding angels, sent to meet me as I went to meet her upon my life-road, just at the point where I most needed her. For the one great thing she gave her pupils,--scope, often quite left out of woman's education,--I especially thank her. The true education is to go on forever. But how can there be any hopeful going on without outlook? And having an infinite outlook, how can progress ever cease? It was worth while for me to go to those Western prairies, if only for the broader mental view that opened upon me in my pupilage there.

During my first year at the seminary I was appointed teacher of the Preparatory Department,--a separate school of thirty or forty girls,--with the opportunity to go on with my studies at the same time.

It was a little hard, but I was very glad to do it, as I was unwilling to receive an education without rendering an equivalent, and I did not wish to incur a debt.

I believe that the postponement of these maturer studies to my early womanhood, after I had worked and taught, was a benefit to me. I had found out some of my special ignorances, what the things were which I most needed to know. I had learned that the book-knowledge I so much craved was not itself education, was not even culture, but only a help, an adjunct to both. As I studied more earnestly, I cared for fewer books, but those few made themselves indispensable. It still seems to me that in the Lowell mills, and in my log-cabin schoolhouse on the Western prairies, I received the best part of my early education.

The great advantage of a seminary course to me was that under my broad-minded Princ.i.p.al I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process an infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school.

Returning from the West immediately after my graduation, I was for ten years or so a teacher of young girls in seminaries much like my own Alma Mater. The best result to me of that experience has been the friends.h.i.+p of my pupils,--a happiness which must last as long as life itself.

A book must end somewhere, and the natural boundary of this narrative is drawn with my leaving New England for the West. I was to outline the story of my youth for the young, though I think many a one among them might tell a story far more interesting than mine. The most beautiful lives seldom find their way into print. Perhaps the most beautiful part of any life never does. I should like to flatter myself so.

I could not stay at the West. It was never really home to me there, and my sojourn of six or seven years on the prairies only deepened my love and longing for the dear old State of Ma.s.sachusetts. I came back in the summer of 1852, and the unwritten remainder of my sketch is chiefly that of a teacher's and writer's experience; regarding which latter I will add, for the gratification of those who have desired them, a few personal particulars.

While a student and teacher at the West I was still writing, and much that I wrote was published. A poem printed in "Sartain's Magazine,"

sent there at the suggestion of the editor of the "Lowell Offering" was the first for which I received remuneration--five dollars. Several poems written for the ma.n.u.script school journal at Monticello Seminary are in the "Household" collection of my verses, among them those ent.i.tled "Eureka," "Hand in Hand with Angels," and "Psyche at School."

These, and various others written soon after, were printed in the "National Era," in return for which a copy of the paper was sent me.

Nothing further was asked or expected.

The little song "Hannah Binding Shoes"--written immediately after my return from the West,--was a study from life--though not from any one life--in my native town. It was brought into notice in a peculiar way,--by my being accused of stealing it, by the editor of the magazine to which I had sent it with a request for the usual remuneration, if accepted. Accidentally or otherwise, this editor lost my note and signature, and then denounced me by name in a newspaper as a "literary thiefess;" having printed the verses with a nom de plume in his magazine without my knowledge. It was awkward to have to come to my own defense. But the curious incident gave the song a wide circulation.

I did not attempt writing for money until it became a necessity, when my health failed at teaching, although I should long before then have liked to spend my whole time with my pen, could I have done so. But it was imperative that I should have an a.s.sured income, however small; and every one who has tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is, unless it has become very famous indeed. My life as a teacher, however, I regard as part of my best preparation for whatever I have since written. I do not know but I should recommend five or ten years of teaching as the most profitable apprentices.h.i.+p for a young person who wished to become an author. To be a good teacher implies self-discipline, and a book written without something of that sort of personal preparation cannot be a very valuable one.

Success in writing may mean many different things. I do not know that I have ever reached it, except in the sense of liking better and better to write, and of finding expression easier. It is something to have won the privilege of going on. Sympathy and recognition are worth a great deal; the power to touch human beings inwardly and n.o.bly is worth far more. The hope of attaining to such results, if only occasionally, must be a writer's best inspiration.

So far as successful publication goes, perhaps the first I considered so came when a poem of mine was accepted by the "Atlantic Monthly." Its t.i.tle was "The Rose Enthroned," and as the poet Lowell was at that time editing the magazine I felt especially gratified. That and another poem, "The Loyal Woman's No," written early in the War of the Rebellion, were each attributed to a different person among our prominent poets, the "Atlantic" at that time not giving authors'

signatures. Of course I knew the unlikeness; nevertheless, those who made the mistake paid me an unintentional compliment. Compliments, however, are very cheap, and by no means signify success. I have always regarded it as a better ambition to be a true woman than to become a successful writer. To be the second would never have seemed to me desirable, without also being the first.

In concluding, let me say to you, dear girls, for whom these pages have been written, that if I have learned anything by living, it is this,--that the meaning of life is education; not through book-knowledge alone, sometimes entirely without it. Education is growth, the development of our best possibilities from within outward; and it cannot be carried on as it should be except in a school, just such a school as we all find ourselves in--this world of human beings by whom we are surrounded. The beauty of belonging to this school is that we cannot learn anything in it by ourselves alone, but for and with our fellow pupils, the wide earth over. We can never expect promotion here, except by taking our place among the lowest, and sharing their difficulties until they are removed, and we all become graduates together for a higher school.

Humility, Sympathy, Helpfulness, and Faith are the best teachers in this great university, and none of us are well educated who do not accept their training. The real satisfaction of living is, and must forever be, the education of all for each, and of each for all. So let us all try together to be good and faithful women, and not care too much for what the world may think of us or of our abilities!

My little story is not a remarkable one, for I have never attempted remarkable things. In the words of one of our honored elder writers, given in reply to a youthful aspirant who had asked for some points of her "literary career,"--"I never had a career."