Glimpses of Poetry

OUR close relationship to Old England was sometimes a little misleading to us juveniles. The conditions of our life were entirely different, but we read her descriptive stories and sang her songs as if they were true for us, too. One of the first things I learned to repeat—I think it was in the spelling-book—began with the verse:—

"I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth has smiled,
And made me, in these latter days,
A happy English child."

And some lines of a very familiar hymn by Dr. Watts ran thus:—

"Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
How many poor I see.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"How many children in the street
Half naked I behold;
While I am clothed from head to feet,
And sheltered from the cold."

Now a ragged, half-clothed child, or one that could really be called poor, in the extreme sense of the word, was the rarest of all sights in a thrifty New England town fifty years ago. I used to look sharply for those children, but I never could see one. And a beggar! Oh, if a real beggar would come along, like the one described in

"Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,"

what a wonderful event that would be! I believe I had more curiosity about a beggar, and more ignorance, too, than about a king. The poem read:—

"A pampered menial drove me from the door."

What sort of creature could a “pampered menial” be? Nothing that had ever come under our observation corresponded to the words. Nor was it easy for us to attach any meaning to the word “servant.” There were women who came in occasionally to do the washing, or to help about extra work. But they were decently clothed, and had homes of their own, more or less comfortable, and their quaint talk and free-and-easy ways were often as much of a lift to the household as the actual assistance they rendered.

I settled down upon the conclusion that “rich” and “poor” were book-words only, describing something far off, and having nothing to do with our every-day experience. My mental definition of “rich people,” from home observation, was something like this: People who live in three-story houses, and keep their green blinds closed, and hardly ever come out and talk with the folks in the street. There were a few such houses in Beverly, and a great many in Salem, where my mother sometimes took me for a shopping walk. But I did not suppose that any of the people who lived near us were very rich, like those in books.

Everybody about us worked, and we expected to take hold of our part while young. I think we were rather eager to begin, for we believed that work would make men and women of us.

I, however, was not naturally an industrious child, but quite the reverse. When my father sent us down to weed his vegetable-garden at the foot of the lane, I, the youngest of his weeders, liked to go with the rest, but not for the sake of the work or the pay. I generally gave it up before I had weeded half a bed. It made me so warm! and my back did ache so! I stole off into the shade of the great apple-trees, and let the west wind fan my hot cheeks, and looked up into the boughs, and listened to the many, many birds that seemed chattering to each other in a language of their own. What was it they were saying? and why could not I understand it? Perhaps I should, sometime. I had read of people who did, in fairy tales.

When the others started homeward, I followed. I did not mind their calling me lazy, nor that my father gave me only one tarnished copper cent, while Lida received two or three bright ones. I had had what I wanted most. I would rather sit under the apple-trees and hear the birds sing than have a whole handful of bright copper pennies. It was well for my father and his garden that his other children were not like me.

The work which I was born to, but had not begun to do, was sometimes a serious weight upon my small, forecasting brain.

One of my hymns ended with the lines,—

"With books, and work, and healthful play,
May my first years be passed,
That I may give, for every day,
Some good account at last."

I knew all about the books and the play; but the work,—how should I ever learn to do it?

My father had always strongly emphasized his wish that all his children, girls as well as boys, should have some independent means of self-support by the labor of their hands; that every one should, as was the general custom, “learn a trade.” Tailor’s work—the finishing of men’s outside garments—was the trade learned most frequently by women in those days, and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind.

This thought came over me with a sudden dread one Sabbath morning when I was a toddling thing, led along by my sister, behind my father and mother. As they walked arm in arm before me, I lifted my eyes from my father’s heels to his head, and mused: “How tall he is! and how long his coat looks! and how many thousand, thousand stitches there must be in his coat and pantaloons! And I suppose I have got to grow up and have a husband, and put all those little stitches into his coats and pantaloons. Oh, I never, never can do it!” A shiver of utter discouragement went through me. With that task before me, it hardly seemed to me as if life were worth living. I went on to meeting, and I suppose I forgot my trouble in a hymn, but for the moment it was real. It was not the only time in my life that I have tired myself out with crossing bridges to which I never came.

Another trial confronted me in the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best to begin mine early.

So I collected a few squares of calico, and undertook to put them together in my usual independent way, without asking direction. I liked assorting those little figured bits of cotton cloth, for they were scraps of gowns I had seen worn, and they reminded me of the persons who wore them. One fragment, in particular, was like a picture to me. It was a delicate pink and brown sea-moss pattern, on a white ground, a piece of a dress belonging to my married sister, who was to me bride and angel in One. I always saw her face before me when I unfolded this scrap,—a face with an expression truly heavenly in its loveliness. Heaven claimed her before my childhood was ended. Her beautiful form was laid to rest in mid-ocean, too deep to be pillowed among the soft sea-mosses. But she lived long enough to make a heaven of my childhood whenever she came home.

One of the sweetest of our familiar hymns I always think of as belonging to her, and as a still unbroken bond between her spirit and mine. She had come back to us for a brief visit, soon after her marriage, with some deep, new experience of spiritual realities which I, a child of four or five years, felt in the very tones of her voice, and in the expression of her eyes.

My mother told her of my fondness for the hymn-book, and she turned to me with a smile and said, “Won’t you learn one hymn for me—one hymn that I love very much?”

Would I not? She could not guess how happy she made me by wishing me to do anything for her sake. The hymn was,—

"Whilst Thee I seek, protecting Power."

In a few minutes I repeated the whole to her and its own beauty, pervaded with the tenderness of her love for me, fixed it at once indelibly in my memory. Perhaps I shall repeat it to her again, deepened with a lifetime’s meaning, beyond the sea, and beyond the stars.

I could dream over my patchwork, but I could not bring it into conventional shape. My sisters, whose fingers had been educated, called my sewing “gobblings.” I grew disgusted with it myself, and gave away all my pieces except the pretty sea-moss pattern, which I was not willing to see patched up with common calico. It was evident that I should never conquer fate with my needle.

Among other domestic traditions of the old times was the saying that every girl must have a pillow-case full of stockings of her own knitting before she was married. Here was another mountain before me, for I took it for granted that marrying was inevitable—one of the things that everybody must do, like learning to read, or going to meeting.

I began to knit my own stockings when I ways six or seven years old, and kept on, until home-made stockings went out of fashion. The pillow-case full, however, was never attempted, any more than the patchwork quilt. I heard somebody say one day that there must always be one “old maid” in every family of girls, and I accepted the prophecy of some of my elders, that I was to be that one. I was rather glad to know that freedom of choice in the matter was possible.

One day, when we younger ones were hanging about my golden-haired and golden-hearted sister Emilie, teasing her with wondering questions about our future, she announced to us (she had reached the mature age of fifteen years) that she intended to be an old maid, and that we might all come and live with her. Some one listening reproved her, but she said, “Why, if they fit themselves to be good, helpful, cheerful old maids, they will certainly be better wives, if they ever are married,” and that maxim I laid by in my memory for future contingencies, for I believed in every word she ever uttered. She herself, however, did not carry out her girlish intention. “Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also; and he praiseth her.” But the little sisters she used to fondle as her “babies” have never allowed their own years nor her changed relations to cancel their claim upon her motherly sympathies.

I regard it as a great privilege to have been one of a large family, and nearly the youngest. We had strong family resemblances, and yet no two seemed at all alike. It was like rehearsing in a small world each our own part in the great one awaiting us. If we little ones occasionally had some severe snubbing mixed with the petting and praising and loving, that was wholesome for us, and not at all to be regretted.

Almost every one of my sisters had some distinctive aptitude with her fingers. One worked exquisite lace-embroidery; another had a knack at cutting and fitting her doll’s clothing so perfectly that the wooden lady was always a typical specimen of the genteel doll-world; and another was an expert at fine stitching, so delicately done that it was a pleasure to see or to wear anything her needle had touched. I had none of these gifts. I looked on and admired, and sometimes tried to imitate, but my efforts usually ended in defeat and mortification.

I did like to knit, however, and I could shape a stocking tolerably well. My fondness for this kind of work was chiefly because it did not require much thought. Except when there was “widening” or “narrowing” to be done, I did not need to keep my eyes upon it at all. So I took a book upon my lap and read, and read, while the needles clicked on, comforting me with the reminder that I was not absolutely unemployed, while yet I was having a good time reading.

I began to know that I liked poetry, and to think a good deal about it at my childish work. Outside of the hymn-book, the first rhymes I committed to memory were in the “Old Farmer’s Almanac,” files of which hung in the chimney corner, and were an inexhaustible source of entertainment to us younger ones.

My father kept his newspapers also carefully filed away in the garret, but we made sad havoc among the “Palladiums” and other journals that we ought to have kept as antiquarian treasures. We valued the anecdote column and the poet’s corner only; these we clipped unsparingly for our scrap-books.

A tattered copy of Johnson’s large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versification which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to “make up” verses.

I made my first rhymes when I was about seven years old. My brother John proposed “writing poetry” as a rainy-day amusement, one afternoon when we two were sent up into the garret to entertain ourselves without disturbing the family. He soon grew tired of his unavailing attempts, but I produced two stanzas, the first of which read thus:—

"One summer day, said little Jane,
We were walking down a shady lane,
When suddenly the wind blew high,
And the red lightning flashed in the sky.

The second stanza descended in a dreadfully abrupt anti-climax; but I was blissfully ignorant of rhetoricians’ rules, and supposed that the rhyme was the only important thing. It may amuse my child-readers if I give them this verse too:

"The peals of thunder, how they rolled!
And I felt myself a little cooled;
For I before had been quite warm;
But now around me was a storm."

My brother was surprised at my success, and I believe I thought my verses quite fine, too. But I was rather sorry that I had written them, for I had to say them over to the family, and then they sounded silly. The habit was formed, however, and I went on writing little books of ballads, which I illustrated with colors from my toy paintbox, and then squeezed down into the cracks of the garret floor, for fear that somebody would find them.

My fame crept out among the neighbors, nevertheless. I was even invited to write some verses in young lady’s album; and Aunt Hannah asked me to repeat my verses to her. I considered myself greatly honored by both requests.

My fondness for books began very early. At the age of four I had formed the plan of collecting a library. Not of limp, paper-covered picture-books, such as people give to babies; no! I wanted books with stiff covers, that could stand up side by side on a shelf, and maintain their own character as books. But I did not know how to make a beginning, for mine were all of the kind manufactured for infancy, and I thought they deserved no better fate than to be tossed about among my rag-babies and playthings.

One day, however, I found among some rubbish in a corner a volume, with one good stiff cover; the other was missing. It did not look so very old, nor as if it had been much read; neither did it look very inviting to me as I turned its leaves. On its title-page I read “The Life of John Calvin.” I did not know who he was, but a book was a book to me, and this would do as well as any to begin my library with. I looked upon it as a treasure, and to make sure of my claim, I took it down to my mother and timidly asked if I might have it for my own. She gave me in reply a rather amused “Yes,” and I ran back happy, and began my library by setting John Calvin upright on a beam under the garret eaves, my “make-believe” book-case shelf.

I was proud of my literary property, and filled out the shelf in fancy with a row of books, every one of which should have two stiff covers. But I found no more neglected volumes that I could adopt. John Calvin was left to a lonely fate, and am afraid that at last the mice devoured him. Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or not.

This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian. It was Byron’s “Vision of Judgment,” and Southey’s also was bound up with it.

Southey’s hexameters were too much of a mouthful for me, but Byron’s lines jingled, and apparently told a story about something. St. Peter came into it, and King George the Third; neither of which names meant anything to me; but the scenery seemed to be somewhere up among the clouds, and I, unsuspicious of the author’s irreverence, took it for a sort of semi-Biblical fairy tale.

There was on my mother’s bed a covering of pink chintz, pictured all over with the figure of a man sitting on a cloud, holding a bunch of keys. I put the two together in my mind, imagining the chintz counterpane to be an illustration of the poem, or the poem an explanation of the counterpane. For the stanza I liked best began with the words,—

"St. Peter sat at the celestial gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."

I invented a pronunciation for the long words, and went about the house reciting grandly,—

"St. Peter sat at the kelestikal gate,
And nodded o'er his keys."

That volume, swept back to me with the rubbish of Time, still reminds me, forlorn and half-clad, of my childish fondness for its mock-magnificence.

John Calvin and Lord Byron were rather a peculiar combination, as the foundation of an infant’s library; but I was not aware of any unfitness or incompatibility. To me they were two brother-books, like each other in their refusal to wear limp covers.

It is amusing to recall the rapid succession of contrasts in one child’s tastes. I felt no incongruity between Dr. Watts and Mother Goose. I supplemented “Pibroch of Donuil Dhu” and

"Lochiel, Lochiel, beware of the day,"

with “Yankee Doodle” and the “Diverting History of John Gilpin;” and with the glamour of some fairy tale I had just read still haunting me, I would run out of doors eating a big piece of bread and butter,—sweeter than any has tasted since,—and would jump up towards the crows cawing high above me, cawing back to them, and half wishing I too were a crow to make the sky ring with my glee.

After Dr. Watts’s hymns the first poetry I took great delight in greeted me upon the pages of the “American First Class Book,” handed down from older pupils in the little private school which my sisters and I attended when Aunt Hannah had done all she could for us. That book was a collection of excellent literary extracts, made by one who was himself an author and a poet. It deserved to be called “first-class” in another sense than that which was understood by its title. I cannot think that modern reading books have improved upon it much. It contained poems from Wordsworth, passages from Shakespeare’s plays, among them the pathetic dialogue between Hubert and little Prince Arthur, whose appeal to have his eyes spared, brought many a tear to my own. Bryant’s “Waterfowl” and “Thanatopsis” were there also; and Neal’s,—

"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak,"

that the boys loved so dearly to “declaim;” and another poem by this last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche’s movement:—

"Slowly it came in its mountain wrath,
And the forests vanished before its path;
And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,—
And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead."

In reading this, “Swiss Minstrel’s Lament over the Ruins of Goldau,” I first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains—a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,—for something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly love them,—was Coleridge’s “Mont Blanc before Sunrise,” in this same “First Class Book.” I believe that poetry really first took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many games and pastimes.

But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it was to me like the thought of God and of truth. To leave out poetry would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places—

"Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers
Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?"

And then the

"Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound"

gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart in its trance echoed the poet’s invocation,—

"Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth!
And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD!"

I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in human possibilities,—like a white ideal beckoning me on.

Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.

Hard work, however, has its own illumination—if done as duty which worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the poet’s, whenever he most deeply moves our souls.

Reason and observation, as well as my own experience, assure me also that it is great—poetry even the greatest—which the youngest crave, and upon which they may be fed, because it is the simplest. Nature does not write down her sunsets, her starry skies, her mountains, and her oceans in some smaller style, to suit the comprehension of little children; they do not need any such dilution. So I go back to the “American First Class Book,” and affirm it to have been one of the best of reading-books, because it gave us children a taste of the finest poetry and prose which had been written in our English tongue, by British and by American authors. Among the pieces which left a permanent impression upon my mind I recall Wirt’s description of the eloquent blind preacher to whom he listened in the forest wilderness of the Blue Ridge, a remarkable word-portrait, in which the very tones of the sightless speaker’s voice seemed to be reproduced. I believe that the first words I ever remembered of any sermon were those contained in the grand, brief sentence,—”Socrates died like a philosopher; but Jesus Christ—like a God!”

Very vivid, too, is the recollection of the exquisite little prose idyl of “Moss-Side,” from “Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.” From the few short words with which it began—”Gilbert Ainslee was a poor man, and he had been a poor man all the days of his life”—to the happy waking of his little daughter Margaret out of her fever-sleep with which it ended, it was one sweet picture of lowly life and honorable poverty irradiated with sacred home-affections, and cheerful in its rustic homeliness as the blossoms and wild birds of the moorland and the magic touch of Christopher North could make it. I thought as I read—

“How much pleasanter it must be to be poor than to be rich—at least in Scotland!”

For I was beginning to be made aware that poverty was a possible visitation to our own household; and that, in our Cape Ann corner of Massachusetts, we might find it neither comfortable nor picturesque. After my father’s death, our way of living, never luxurious, grew more and more frugal. Now and then I heard mysterious allusions to “the wolf at the door”: and it was whispered that, to escape him, we might all have to turn our backs upon the home where we were born, and find our safety in the busy world, working among strangers for our daily bread. Before I had reached my tenth year I began to have rather disturbed dreams of what it might soon mean for me to “earn my own living.”