A New England Girlhood Part 15

The vague, fitful desire I had felt from my childhood to be something to the world I lived in, to give it something of the the inexpressible sweetness that often seemed pouring through me, I knew not whence, now began to shape itself into a definite outreach towards the Source of all spiritual life. To draw near to the One All-Beautiful Being, Christ, to know Him as our spirits may know The Spirit, to receive the breath of his infinitely loving Life into mine, that I might breathe out that fragrance again into the lives around me--this was the longing wish that, half hidden from myself, lay deep beneath all other desires of my soul. This was what religion grew to mean to me, what it is still growing to mean, more simply and more clearly as the years go on.

The heart must be very humble to which this heavenly approach is permitted. It knows that it has nothing in itself, nothing for others, which it has not received. The loving Voice of Him who gives his friends his errands to do whispers through them constantly, "Ye are not your own."

There may be those who would think my narrative more entertaining, if I omitted these inner experiences, and related only lighter incidents.

But one thing I was aware of, from the time I began to think and to wonder about my own life--that what I felt and thought was far more real to me than the things that happened.

Circ.u.mstances are only the keys that unlock for us the secret of ourselves; and I learned very early that though there is much to enjoy in this beautiful outside world, there is much more to love, to believe in, and to seek, in the invisible world out of which it all grows.

What has best revealed our true selves to ourselves must be most helpful to others, and one can willingly sacrifice some natural reserves to such an end. Besides, if we tell our own story at all, we naturally wish to tell the truest part of it.

Work, study, and worship were interblended in our life. The church was really the home-centre to many, perhaps to most of us; and it was one of the mill regulations that everybody should go to church somewhere.

There must have been an earnest group of ministers at Lowell, since nearly all the girls attended public worship from choice.

Our minister joined us in our social gatherings, often inviting us to his own house, visiting us at our work, accompanying us on our picnics down the river-bank,--a walk of a mile or so took us into charmingly picturesque scenery, and we always walked,--suggesting books for our reading, and a.s.sisting us in our studies.

The two magazines published by the mill-girls, the "Lowell Offering"

and the "Operatives' Magazine," originated with literary meetings in the vestry of two religious societies, the first in the Universalist Church, the second in the First Congregational, to which my sister and I belonged.

On account of our belonging there, our contributions were given to the "Operatives' Magazine," the first periodical for which I ever wrote, issued by the literary society of which our minister took charge. He met us on regular evenings, read aloud our poems and sketches, and made such critical suggestions as he thought desirable. This magazine was edited by two young women, both of whom had been employed in the mills, although at that time the were teachers in the public schools--a change which was often made by mill-girls after a few months' residence at Lowell. A great many of them were district-school teachers at their homes in the summer, spending only the winters at their work.

The two magazines went on side by side for a year or two, and then were united in the "Lowell Offering" which had made the first experiment of the kind by publishing a trial number or two at irregular intervals. My sister had sent some verses of mine, on request, to be published in one of those specimen numbers. But we were not acquainted with the editor of the "Offering," and we knew only a few of its contributors. The Universalist Church, in the vestry of which they met, was in a distant part of the city. Socially, the place where we worshiped was the place where we naturally came together in other ways. The churches were all filled to overflowing, so that the grouping together of the girls by their denominational preferences was almost unavoidable. It was in some such way as this that two magazines were started instead of one. If the girls who enjoyed writing had not been so many and so scattered, they might have made the better arrangement of joining their forces from the beginning.

I was too young a contributor to be at first of much value to either periodical. They began their regular issues, I think, while I was the nursemaid of my little nephews at Beverly. When I returned to Lowell, at about sixteen, I found my sister Emilie interested in the "Operatives' Magazine," and we both contributed to it regularly, until it was merged in the "Lowell Offering," to which we then transferred our writing efforts. It did not occur to us to call these efforts "literary." I know that I wrote just as I did for our little "Diving Bell,"--as a sort of pastime, and because my daily toil was mechanical, and furnished no occupation for my thoughts. Perhaps the fact that most of us wrote in this way accounted for the rather sketchy and fragmentary character of our "Magazine." It gave evidence that we thought, and that we thought upon solid and serious matters; but the criticism of one of our superintendents upon it, very kindly given, was undoubtedly just: "It has plenty of pith, but it lacks point."

The "Offering" had always more of the literary spirit and touch. It was, indeed, for the first two years, edited by a gentleman of acknowledged literary ability. But people seemed to be more interested in it after it pa.s.sed entirely into the bands of the girls themselves.

The "Operatives' Magazine" had a decidedly religious tone. We who wrote for it were loyal to our Puritanic antecedents, and considered it all-important that our lightest actions should be moved by some earnest impulse from behind. We might write playfully, but there must be conscience and reverence somewhere within it all. We had been taught, and we believed, that idle words were a sin, whether spoken or written.

This, no doubt, gave us a gravity of expression rather unnatural to youth.

In looking over the bound volume of this magazine, I am amused at the grown-up style of thought a.s.sumed by myself, probably its very youngest contributor. I wrote a dissertation on "Fame," quoting from Pollok, Cowper, and Milton, and ending with Diedrich Knickerbocker's definition of immortal fame,--"Half a page of dirty paper." For other t.i.tles I had "Thoughts on Beauty;" "Gentility;" "Sympathy," etc. And in one longish poem, ent.i.tled "My Childhood" (written when I was about fifteen), I find verses like these, which would seem to have come out of a mature experience:--

My childhood! O those pleasant days, when everything seemed free, And in the broad and verdant fields I frolicked merrily; When joy came to my bounding heart with every wild bird's song, And Nature's music in my ears was ringing all day long!

And yet I would not call them back, those blessed times of yore, For riper years are fraught with joys I dreamed not of before.

The labyrinth of Science opes with wonders every day; And friendship hath full many a flower to cheer life's dreary way.

And glancing through the pages of the "Lowell Offering" a year or two later, I see that I continued to dismalize myself at times, quite unnecessarily. The t.i.tle of one sting of morbid verses is "The Complaint of a n.o.body," in which I compare myself to a weed growing up in a garden; and the conclusion of it all is this stanza:--

"When the fierce storms are raging, I will not repine, Though I'm heedlessly crushed in the strife; For surely 't were better oblivion were mine Than a worthless, inglorious life.

Now I do not suppose that I really considered myself a weed, though I did sometimes fancy that a different kind of cultivation would tend to make me a more useful plant. I am glad to remember that these discontented fits were only occasional, for certainly they were unreasonable. I was not unhappy; this was an affectation of unhappiness; and half conscious that it was, I hid it behind a different signature from my usual one.

How truly Wordsworth describes this phase of undeveloped feeling:--

"In youth sad fancies we affect, In luxury of disrespect To our own prodigal excess Of too familiar happiness."

It is a very youthful weakness to exaggerate pa.s.sing moods into deep experiences, and if we put them down on paper, we get a fine opportunity of laughing at ourselves, if we live to outgrow them, as most of us do. I think I must have had a frequent fancy that I was not long for this world. Perhaps I thought an early death rather picturesque; many young people do. There is a certain kind of poetry that fosters this idea; that delights in imaginary youthful victims, and has, reciprocally, its youthful devotees. One of my blank verse poems in the "Offering" is ent.i.tled "The Early Doomed." It begins,--

And must I die? The world is bright to me, And everything that looks upon me, smiles.

Another poem is headed "Memento Mori;" and another, ent.i.tled a "Song in June," which ought to be cheerful, goes off into the doleful request to somebody, or anybody, to

Weave me a shroud in the month of June!

I was, perhaps, healthier than the average girl, and had no predisposition to a premature decline; and in reviewing these absurdities of my pen, I feel like saying to any young girl who inclines to rhyme, "Don't sentimentalize! Write more of what you see than of what you feel, and let your feelings realize themselves to others in the shape of worthy actions. Then they will be natural, and will furnish you with something worth writing."

It is fair to myself to explain, however, that many of these verses of mine were written chiefly as exercises in rhythmic expression. I remember this distinctly about one of my poems with a terrible t.i.tle,--"The Murderer's Request,"--in which I made an imaginary criminal pose for me, telling where he would not and where he would like to be buried. I modeled my verses,--

"Bury ye me on some storm-rifted mountain, O'erhanging the depths of a yawning abyss,"--

upon Byron's,

"Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;"

and I was only trying to see how near I could approach to his exquisite metre. I do not think I felt at all murderous in writing it; but a more innocent subject would have been in better taste, and would have met the exigencies of the dactyl quite as well.

It is also only fair to myself to say that my rhyming was usually of a more wholesome kind. I loved Nature as I knew her,--in our stern, bl.u.s.tering, stimulating New England,--and I chanted the praises of Winter, of snow-storms, and of March winds (I always took pride in my birth month, March), with hearty delight.

Flowers had begun to bring me messages from their own world when I was a very small child, and they never withdrew their companionship from my thoughts, for there came summers when I could only look out of the mill window and dream about them.

I had one pet window plant of my own, a red rosebush, almost a perpetual bloomer, that I kept beside me at my work for years. I parted with it only when I went away to the West, and then with regret, for it had been to me like a human little friend. But the wild flowers had my heart. I lived and breathed with them, out under the free winds of heaven; and when I could not see them, I wrote about them. Much that I contributed to those mill-magazine pages, they suggested,--my mute teachers, comforters, and inspirers. It seems to me that any one who does not care for wild flowers misses half the sweetness of this mortal life.

Horace Smith's "Hymn to the Flowers" was a continual delight to me, after I made its acquaintance. It seemed as if all the wild blossoms of the woods had wandered in and were twining themselves around the whirring spindles, as I repeated it, verse after verse. Better still, they drew me out, in fancy, to their own forest-haunts under "cloistered boughs," where each swinging "floral bell" was ringing "a call to prayer," and making "Sabbath in the fields."

Bryant's "Forest Hymn" did me an equally beautiful service. I knew every word of it. It seemed to me that Bryant understood the very heart and soul of the flowers as hardly anybody else did. He made me feel as if they were really related to us human beings. In fancy my feet pressed the turf where they grew, and I knew them as my little sisters, while my thoughts touched them, one by one, saying with him,--

"That delicate forest-flower, With scented breath, and look so like a smile, Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould, An emanation of the indwelling Life, A visible token of the upholding Love, That are the soul of this wide universe."

I suppose that most of my readers will scarcely be older than I was when I wrote my sermonish little poems under the inspiration of the flowers at my factory work, and perhaps they will be interested in reading a specimen or two from the "Lowell Offering:"--

LIVE LIKE THE FLOWERS.

Cheerfully wave they o'er valley and mountain, Gladden the desert, and smile by the fountain; Pale discontent in no young blossom lowers:-- Live like the flowers!

Meekly their buds in the heavy rain bending, Softly their hues with the mellow light blending, Gratefully welcoming sunlight and showers:-- Live like the flowers!

Freely their sweets on the wild breezes flinging, While in their depths are new odors upspringing:-- (Blessedness twofold of Love's holy dowers,) Live like the flowers!

Gladly they heed Who their brightness has given: Blooming on earth, look they all up to heaven; Humbly look up from their loveliest bowers:-- Live like the flowers!

Peacefully droop they when autumn is sighing; Breathing mild fragrance around them in dying, Sleep they in hope of Spring's freshening hours:-- Die like the flowers!

The prose-poem that follows was put into a rhymed version by several unknown hands in periodicals of that day, so that at last I also wrote one, in self-defense, to claim my own waif. But it was a prose-poem that I intended it to be, and I think it is better so.

"BRING BACK MY FLOWERS."

On the bank of a rivulet sat a rosy child. Her lap was filled with flowers, and a garland of rose-buds was twined around her neck. Her face was as radiant as the sunshine that fell upon it, and her voice was as clear as that of the bird which warbled at her side.