Literary Boston As I Knew It | Page 8

scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the
generation that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I
saw her last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of
her comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's
"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly
spirit which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine
world of literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable
Beverly which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring,
God-fearing race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies
I know, "A New England Girlhood." She was the author of many
poems, whose number she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and
will be most lastingly, famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes',
which years before my days in Boston had made her so widely known.
She never again struck so deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged
such a note in the ear of time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of
eternity, one might very well hold up one's head in the fields of
asphodel, if one could say to the great others there, "I wrote Hannah
Binding Shoes." Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have read it
will remember; but Miss Larcom herself was above everything cheerful,
and she had a laugh of mellow richness which willingly made itself
heard. She was not only of true New England stock, and a Boston
author by right of race, but she came up to that city every winter from
her native town.
By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess,
whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I
saw Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those
poems and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings
and flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her
girlhood had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was

a most beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an
exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was:
fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our
literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in
mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but
our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is
interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it
is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to
blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from
the mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint
that it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift,
indeed, could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however
varied, and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings
impatient of the pallor of words.
She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and
'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now
Mrs. Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day.
It was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them
up from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember
that the evening when we met he was talking of their some time going
to Italy that she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian
cities he named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the
moment I felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I
could; and now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it
was a purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken
the fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New
England background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its
splendors of light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not
be farther evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away
from its environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and
beyond, the great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of
romantic motives and passions. But for what they were, I can