If I could earn enough to furnish that, and have time to study besides,-- of course we always gave away a little, however little we had,--it seemed to me a sufficiency. At this time I was receiving two dollars a week, besides my board. Those who were earning much more, and were carefully "laying it up," did not appear to be any happier than I was. I never thought that the possession of money would make me feel rich: it often does seem to have an opposite effect. But then, I have never had the opportunity of knowing, by experience, how it does make one feel. It is something to have been spared the responsibility of taking charge of the Lord's silver and gold. Let us be thankful for what we have not, as well as for what we have! Freedom to live one's life truly is surely more desirable than any earthly acquisition or possession; and at my new work I had hours of freedom every day. I never went back again to the bondage of machinery and a working-day thirteen hours long. The daughter of one of our neighbors, who also went to the same A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY church with us, told me of a vacant place in the cloth-room, where she was, which I gladly secured. This was a low brick building next the counting- room, and a little apart from the mills, where the cloth was folded, stamped, and baled for the market. There were only half a dozen girls of us, who measured the cloth, and kept an account of the pieces baled, and their length in yards. It pleased me much to have something to do which required the use of pen and ink, and I think there must be a good many scraps of verse buried among the blank pages of those old account-books of that found their way there during the frequent half-hours of waiting for the cloth to be brought in from the mills. The only machinery in the room was a hydraulic arrangement for pressing the cloth into bales, managed by two or three men, one of whom was quite a poet, and a fine singer also. His hymns were frequently in request, on public occasions. He lent me the first volume of Whittier's poems that I ever saw. It was a small book, containing mostly Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one of them, fully to appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary to have been a workink-girl in slave-labor times. New England Womanhood crowned Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's spirited response to the slaveholder:-- "0, could ye have seen her--that pride of our girls-- Arise and cast back the dark wealth of her curls, With a scorn in her eye that the gazer could feel, And a glance like the sunshine that flashes on steel! Go back, haughty Southron! Go back! for thy gold Is red with the blood of the hearts thou hast sold!" There was in this volume another poem which is not in any of the later editions, the impression of which, as it remains to me in broken snatches, is very beautiful. It began with the lines "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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 thouht, 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 count- ing-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 "God'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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY "Uncle Tim," and others of the delightful "May-Flower" snatches 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, dignifed 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 class 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 besideher which I liked so much, was not at all a bookish person, but we A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 friendship 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY of as "the cloth-room aristocracy." But that was only in fun. Most of us had served an apprenticeship 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 sunshine 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 class, 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 assistance 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 "Coriolanus," 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY Angeline and I (another of my cloth-room associates) made the "Paradise Lost" a language-study in an evening class, 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 passages 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 title- 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY wished I could look into it again, often and often tbrough 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 Saturday 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 friendship," 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 class 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 pronouncing 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 class 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, A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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-Worship" 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 "Zenobia." A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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" when they were fresh from the fountains of her own heart; and some of us must not be blamed for feeling as if no tales of domestic life half so charming have been written since. Perhaps it is partly because the home-life of Sweden is in itself so delightfully unique. We read George Borrow's "Bible in Spain," and wandered with him among the gypsies to whom he seemed to belong. I have never forgotten a verse that this strange traveler picked up somewhere among the Zincali:-- "I'll joyfully labor, both night and day, To aid my unfortunate brothers; As a laundress tans her own face in the ray To cleanse the garments of others." It suggested a somewhat similar verse to my own mind. Why should not our washerwoman's work have its touch of poetry also?-- This thought flashed by like a ray of light That brightened my homely labor:-- The water is making my own hands white While I wash the robes of my neighbor. And how delighted we were with Mrs. Kirkland's "A New Home: Who'll Follow?" the first real Western book I ever read. Its genuine pioneer-flavor was delicious. And, moreover, it was a prophecy to Sarah, Emilie, and myself, who were one day thankful enough to find an "Aunty Parshall's dish-kettle" in a cabin on an Illinois prairie. So the pleasantly occupied years slipped on, I still nursing my purpose of a more systematic course of study, though I saw no near possibility of its fulfillment. It came in an unexpected way, as almost everything worth having does come. I could never have dreamed that I was going to meet my opportunity nearly or quite a thousand miles away, on the banks of the Mississippi. And yet, with that strange, delightful consciousness of growth into a comprehension of one's self and of one's life that most young persons must occasionally have experienced, I often vaguely felt heavens opening for my half-fledged wings to try themselves in. Things about me were good and enjoyable, but I could not quite rest in them; there was A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY more for me to be, to know, and to do. I felt almost surer of the future than of the present. If the dream of the millennium which brightened the somewhat sombre close of the first ten years of my life had faded a little, out of the very roughnesses of the intervening road light had been kindled which made the end of the second ten years glow with enthusiastic hope. I had early been saved from a great mistake; for it is the greatest of mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so. What a world it would be, if there were no hills to climb! Our powers were given us that we might conquer obstacles, and clear obstructions from the overgrown human path, and grow strong by striving, led onward always by an Invisible Guide. Life to me, as I looked forward, was a bright blank of mystery, like the broad Western tracts of our continent, which in the atlases of those days bore the title of "Unexplored Regions." It was to be penetrated, struggled through; and its difficulties were not greatly dreaded, for I had not lost "The dream of Doing,-- The first bound in the pursuing." I knew that there was no joy like the joy of pressing forward. A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY XII. FROM THE MERRIMACK TO THE MISSISSIPPI. THE years between 1835 and 1845, which nearly cover the time I lived at Lowell, seem to me, as I look back at them, singularly interesting years. People were guessing and experimenting and wondering and prophesying about a great many things,--about almost everything. We were only beginning to get accustomed to steamboats and railroads. To travel by either was scarcely less an adventure to us younger ones than going up in a balloon. Phrenology was much talked about; and numerous "professors" of it came around lecturing, and examining heads, and making charts of cranial "bumps." This was profitable business to them for a while, as almost everybody who invested in a "character" received a good one; while many very commonplace people were flattered into the belief that they were geniuses, or might be if they chose. Mesmerism followed close upon phrenology; and this too had its lecturers, who entertained the stronger portion of their audiences by showing them how easily the weaker ones could be brought under an uncanny influence. The most widespread delusion of the time was Millerism. A great many persons--and yet not so many that I knew even one of them-- believed that the end of the world was coming in the year 1842; though the date was postponed from year to year, as the prophesy failed of fulfillment. The idea in itself was almost too serious to be jested about; and yet its advocates made it so literal a matter that it did look very ridiculous to unbelievers. An irreverent little workmate of mine in the spinning-room made a string of jingling couplets about it, like this:-- "Oh dear! oh dear! what shall we do In eighteen hundred and forty- two? "Oh dear! oh dear! where shall we be In eighteen hundred and forty- three? "Oh dear! oh dear! we shall be no more In eighteen hundred and forty- A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY four, "Oh dear! oh dear! we sha'n't be alive In eighteen hundred and forty- five." I thought it audacious in her, since surely she and all of us were aware that the world would come to an end some time, in some way, for every one of us. I said to myself that I could not have "made up" those rhymes. Nevertheless we all laughed at them together. A comet appeared at about the time of the Miller excitement, and also a very unusual illumination of sky and earth by the Aurora Borealis. This latter occurred in midwinter. The whole heavens were of a deep rose- color--almost crimson--reddest at the zenith, and paling as it radiated towards the horizon. The snow was fresh on the ground, and that, too, was of a brilliant red. Cold as it was, windows were thrown up all around us for people to look out at the wonderful sight. I was gazing with the rest, and listening to exclamations of wonder from surrounding unseen beholders, when somebody shouted from far down the opposite block of buildings, with startling effect,-- "You can't stand the fire In that great day!" It was the refrain of a Millerite hymn. The Millerites believed that these signs in the sky were omens of the approaching catastrophe. And it was said that some of them did go so far as to put on white "ascension robes," and assemble somewhere, to wait for the expected hour. When daguerreotypes were first made, when we heard that the sun was going to take everybody's portrait, it seemed almost too great a marvel to be believed. While it was yet only a rumor that such a thing had been done, somewhere across the sea, I saw some verses about it which impressed me much, but which I only partly remember. These were the opening lines:-- "Oh, what if thus our evil deeds Are mirrored on the sky, And every line of our wild lives Daguerreotyped on high!" My sister and I considered it quite an event when we went to have our daguerreotypes taken just before we started for the West. The photograph was still an undeveloped mystery. Things that looked miraculous then are commonplace now. It almost seems as if the children of to-day could not have so good a time as we did, A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY science has left them so little to wonder about. Our attitude--the attitude of the time--was that of children climbing their dooryard fence, to watch an approaching show, and to conjecture what more remarkable spectacle could be following behind. New England had kept to the quiet old- fashioned ways of living for the first fifty years of the Republic. Now all was expectancy. Changes were coming. Things were going to happen, nobody could guess what. Things have happened, and changes have come. The New England that has grown up with the last fifty years is not at all the New England that our fathers knew. We speak of having been reared under Puritanic influences, but the traditionary sternness of these was much modified, even in the childhood of the generation to which I belong. We did not recognize the grim features of the Puritan, as we used sometimes to read about him, in our parents or relatives. And yet we were children of the Puritans. Everything that was new or strange came to us at Lowell. And most of the remarkable people of the day came also. How strange it was to see Mar Yohannan, a Nestorian bishop, walking through the factory yard in his Oriental robes with more than a child's wonder on his face at the stir and rush of everything! He came from Boston by railroad, and was present at the wedding at the clergyman's house where he visited. The rapidity of the simple Congregational service astonished him. "What? Marry on railroad, too?" he asked. Dickens visited Lowell while I was there, and gave a good report of what he saw in his "American Notes." We did not leave work even to gaze at distinguished strangers, so I missed seeing him. But a friend who did see him sketched his profile in pencil for me as he passed along the street. He was then best known as "Boz." Many of the prominent men of the country were in the habit of giving Lyceum lectures, and the Lyceum lecture of that day was a means of education, conveying to the people the results of study and thought through the best minds. At Lowell it was more patronized by the mill- people than any mere entertainment. We had John Quincy Adams, Edward Everett, John Pierpont, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among our lecturers, A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY with numerous distinguished clergymen of the day. Daniel Webster was once in the city, trying a law case. Some of my girl friends went to the court-room and had a glimpse of his face, but I just missed seeing him. Sometimes an Englishman, who was studying our national institutions, would call and have a friendly talk with us at work. Sometimes it was a traveler from the South, who was interested in some way. I remember one, an editor and author from Georgia, who visited our Improvement Circle, and who sent some of us "Offering" contributors copies of his book after he had returned home. One of the pleasantest visitors that I recall was a young Quaker woman from Philadelphia, a school-teacher, who came to see for herself how the Lowell girls lived, of whom she had heard so much. A deep, quiet friendship grew up between us two. I wrote some verses for her when we parted, and she sent me one cordial, charmingly-written letter. In a few weeks I answered it; but the response was from another person, a near relative. She was dead. But she still remains a real person to me; I often recall her features and the tone of her voice. It was as if a beautiful spirit from an invisible world had slipped in among us, and quickly gone back again. It was an event to me, and to my immediate friends among the mill- girls, when the poet Whittier came to Lowell to stay awhile. I had not supposed that it would be my good fortune to meet him; but one evening when we assembled at the "Improvement Circle," he was there. The "Offering" editor, Miss Harriet Farley, had lived in the same town with him, and they were old acquaintances. It was a warm, summer evening. I recall the circumstance that a number of us wore white dresses; also that I shrank back into myself, and felt much abashed when some verses of mine were read by the editor,--with others so much better, however, that mine received little attention. I felt relieved; for I was not fond of having my productions spoken of, for good or ill. He commended quite highly a poem by another member of the Circle, on "Pentucket," the Indian name of his native place, Haverhill. My subject was "Sabbath Bells." As the Friends do not believe in "steeple-houses," I was at liberty to imagine that it was my theme, and not my verses, that failed to interest him. A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY Various other papers were read,--stories, sketches, etc., and after the reading there was a little conversation, when he came and spoke to me. I let the friend who had accompanied me do my part of the talking for I was too much overawed by the presence of one whose poetry I had so long admired, to say a great deal. But from that evening we knew each other as friends; and, of course, the day has a white mark among memories of my Lowell life. Mr. Whittier's visit to Lowell had some political bearing upon the antislavery cause. It is strange now to think that a cause like that should not always have been our country's cause,--our country,--our own free nation! But antislavery sentiments were then regarded by many as traitorous heresies; and those who held them did not expect to win popularity. If the vote of the mill- girls had been taken, it would doubtless have been unanimous on the antislavery side. But those were also the days when a woman was not expected to give, or even to have, an opinion on subjects of public interest. Occasionally a young girl was attracted to the Lowell mills through her own idealization of the life there, as it had been reported to her. Margaret Foley, who afterwards became distinguished as a sculptor, was one of these. She did not remain many months at her occupation,--which I think was weaving,--soon changing it for that of teaching and studying art. Those who came as she did were usually disappointed. Instead of an Arcadia, they found a place of matter-of-fact toil, filled with a company of industrious, wide-awake girls, who were faithfully improving their opportunities, while looking through them into avenues Toward profit and usefulness, more desirable yet. It has always been the way of the steady- minded New Englander to accept the present situation--but to accept it without boundaries, taking in also the larger prospects--all the heavens above and the earth beneath--towards which it opens. The movement of New England girls toward Lowell was only an impulse of a larger movement which about that time sent so many people from the Eastern States into the West. The needs of the West were constantly kept before us in the churches. We were asked for contributions for Home Missions, which were willingly given; and some of us were A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY appointed collectors of funds for the education of indigent young men to become Western Home Missionary preachers. There was something almost pathetic in the readiness with which this was done by young girls who were longing to fit themselves for teachers, but had not the means. Many a girl at Lowell was working to send her brother to college, who had far more talent and character than he; but a man could preach, and it was not "orthodox" to think that a woman could. And in her devotion to him, and her zeal for the spread of Christian truth, she was hardly conscious of her own sacrifice. Yet our ministers appreciated the intelligence and piety of their feminine parishioners. An agent who came from the West for school-teachers was told by our own pastor that five hundred could easily be furnished from among Lowell mill-girls. Many did go, and they made another New England in some of our Western States. The missionary spirit was strong among my companions. I never thought that I had the right qualifications for that work; but I had a desire to see the prairies and the great rivers of the West, and to get a taste of free, primitive life among pioneers. Before the year 1845, several of my friends had emigrated as teachers or missionaries. One of the editors of the "Operatives' Magazine" had gone to Arkansas with a mill-girl who had worked beside her among the looms. They were at an Indian mission--to the Cherokees and Choctaws. I seemed to breathe the air of that far Southwest, in a spray of yellow jessamine which one of those friends sent me, pressed in a letter. People wrote very long letters then, in those days of twenty-five cent postage. Rachel, at whose house our German class had been accustomed to meet, had also left her work, and had gone to western Virginia to take charge of a school. She wrote alluring letters to us about the scenery there; it was in the neighborhood of the Natural Bridge. 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 be 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 passed through my mind, though not through my lips. My eyes would sometimes tell the story, however, and I fancy that A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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, spacious 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 circumstance 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 shores misty-green with buidding 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 passengers 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- A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 shores of the river, then only thinly populated, were a constantly shifting 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 leafage. Contrasted with the Ohio, the Mississippi had nothing to show but breadth and muddiness. More than one of us glanced at its level shores, 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-Glass Prairie. The nearest cabin to our own was about a mile away, and so small that at that distance it looked like a shingle set up endwise in the grass. 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 grass 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 God was moving upon the face of the earth, and breathing everything into life. We were but specks on the great landscape. But God 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 sunshine, my heart seemed to lie bare beneath the piercing eye of the All- Seeing. I may say with gratitude 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 institution 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 Principal--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 institutions 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 Principal was also our teacher, and her method A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 nobleness of character, her piety, her learning, her power, and her sweetness, it seems to me as if I had once had a Christian Zenobia 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-Principal was surely one of my strong guiding angels, sent to meet me as I went to meet her upon my life-road, A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 Principal 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 friendship of my pupils,--a happiness which must last as long as life itself. A book must end somewhere, and the natural boundary of this A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 Massachusetts. 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 manuscript school journal at Monticello Seminary are in the "Household" collection of my verses, among them those entitled "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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY to spend my whole time with my pen, could I have done so. But it was imperative that I should have an assured 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 apprenticeship 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 nobly 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 title 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 A NEW ENGLAND GIRLHOOD OUTLINED FROM MEMORY 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 fellowpupils, 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."