第42章 BY THE RIVER(4)

While it was in progress my sister Emilie became acquainted with a family of bright girls,near neighbors of ours,who proposed that we should join with them,and form a little society for writing and discussion,to meet fortnightly at their house.We met,--I think I was the youngest of the group,--prepared a Constitution and By-Laws,and named ourselves "The Improvement Circle."If I remember rightly,my sister was our first president.The older ones talked and wrote on many subjects quite above me.I was shrinkingly bashful,as half-grown girls usually are,but I wrote my little essays and read them,and listened to the rest,and enjoyed it all exceedingly.Out of this little "Improvement Circle"grew the larger one whence issued the "Lowell Offering,"a year or two later.

At this time I had learned to do a spinner's work,and I obtained permission to tend some frames that stood directly in front of the river-windows,with only them and the wall behind me,extending half the length of the mill,--and one young woman beside me,at the farther end of the row.She was a sober,mature person,who scarcely thought it worth her while to speak often to a child like me;and I was,when with strangers,rather a reserved girl;so I kept myself occupied with the river,my work,and my thoughts.And the river and my thoughts flowed on together,the happiest of companions.Like a loitering pilgrim,it sparkled up to me in recognition as it glided along and bore away my little frets and fatigues on its bosom.When the work "went well,"I sat in the window-seat,and let my fancies fly whither they would,--downward to the sea,or upward to the hills that hid the mountain-cradle of the Merrimack.

The printed regulations forbade us to bring books into the mill,so I made my window-seat into a small library of poetry,pasting its side all over with newspaper clippings.In those days we had only weekly papers,and they had always a "poet's corner,"where standard writers were well represented,with anonymous ones,also.I was not,of course,much of a critic.I chose my verses for their sentiment,and because I wanted to commit them to memory;sometimes it was a long poem,sometimes a hymn,sometimes only a stray verse.Mrs.Hemans sang with me,--"Far away,o'er the blue hills far away;"and I learned and loved her "Better Land,"and "If thou hast crushed a flower,"and "Kindred Hearts."I wonder if Miss Landon really did write that fine poem to Mont Blanc which was printed in her volume,but which sounds so entirely unlike everything else she wrote!This was one of my window-gems.It ended with the appeal,--"Alas for thy past mystery!

For thine untrodden snow!

Nurse of the tempest!hast thou none To guard thine outraged brow?"and it contained a stanza that I often now repeat to myself:--"We know too much:scroll after scroll Weighs down our weary shelves:

Our only point of ignorance Is centred in ourselves."There was one anonymous waif in my collection that I was very fond of.I have never seen it since,nor ever had the least clue to its authorship.It stirred me and haunted me;and it often comes back to me now,in snatches like these:--"The human mind!That lofty thing,The palace and the throne Where Reason sits,a sceptred king,And breathes his judgment-tone!""The human soul!That startling thing,Mysterious and sublime;An angel sleeping on the wing,Worn by the scoffs of time.

From heaven in tears to earth it stole-

That startling thing,the human soul."

I was just beginning,in my questionings as to the meaning of life,to get glimpses of its true definition from the poets,--that it is love,service,the sacrifice of self for others'good.

The lesson was slowly learned,but every hint of it went to my heart,and I kept in silent upon my window wall reminders like that of holy George Herbert:""Be useful where thou livest,that they may Both want and wish thy pleasing presence still.

-Find out men's wants and will,And meet them there.All worldly joys go less To the one joy of doing kindnesses;"and that well-known passage from Talfourd,--"The blessings which the weak and poor can scatter,Have their own season.

It is a little thing to speak a phase Of common comfort,which,by daily use,Has almost lost its sense;yet on the ear Of him who thought to die unmourned 't will fall Like choicest music."A very familiar extract from Carlos Wilcox,almost the only quotation made nowadays from his poems,was often on my sister Emilie's lips,whose heart seemed always to be saying to itself:--"Pour blessings round thee like a shower of gold!"I had that beside me,too,and I copy part of it here,for her sake,and because it will be good for my girl readers to keep in mind one of the noblest utterances of an almost forgotten American poet:--"Rouse to some work of high and holy love,And thou an angel's happiness shalt know;Shalt bless the earth while in the world above.

The good begun by thee shall onward flow.

The pure,sweet stream shall deeper,wider grow.

The seed that in these few and fleeting hours Thy hands,unsparing and unwearied sow,Shall deck thy grave with amaranthine flowers,And yield thee fruits divine in heaven's immortal bowers."One great advantage which came to these many stranger girls through being brought together,away from their own homes,was that it taught them to go out of themselves,and enter into the lives of others.Home-life,when one always stays at home,is necessarily narrowing.That is one reason why so many women are petty and unthoughtful of any except their own family's interests.We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family as the one to which we truly belong.To me,it was an incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls,all of us thrown upon our own resources,but thrown much more upon each others'sympathies.