Diary of Lucy Larcom, November 10, 1860

I have actually forgotten to write for months in this book. I fear me, "my heart is nae here." I have lived a good deal in the past week, and the world has been doing a great business, our country in particular. The Prince has turned the heads of our democratic people, and Republicans have chosen a President at last. That is glorious! Freedom takes long strides in these better days. The millennium is not so far off as we feared. While there is so much to be lived outside, who cares for the little self-life of a journal? But I never meant it to be a "subjective" one, and when it has been so, it has been so because I was living below my ideal. Yet this shall be just the book my thoughts shape from their various moods; when the thought is for myself, I will write it, and when it is for another, I will write it too.

"Whose window opened towards the rising sun.”

So the happy pilgrim rested, knowing that as soon as there was light anywhere, he should have the first ray. Strange, that every Christian sojourner should not seek a room with windows opening to the dawn! Some of them seem afraid of the sun; they choose a chamber having only a black, northerly outlook, and lie down saying, "What a dreary, miserable world!" And what wonder that they should grow thin and sickly-plants of the shade must ever be so; the soul, as well as the body, needs large draughts of sunshine for vigorous life.

SOURCE: Daniel Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary, p. 77-8

Diary of Lucy Larcom, November 27, 1860

Since I came to Beverly I have been looking over "Wilhelm Meister" for the first time. I am disappointed in it, and have little respect for Goethe as a man, great as was his genius. Great thoughts he had, and they shine like constellations through the book; artistic, no doubt he was, but everything that relates to principle or right feeling is terribly chaotic, it seems to me. And Wilhelm is an embodiment of high-strung selfishness, under a cloak of generosity and spontaneous good feeling. If I could despise any man, it would be such a one as he.

SOURCE: Daniel Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary, p. 78

Diary of Lucy Larcom, December 9, 1860

God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are. Having just made myself the possessor of "Guesses at Truth," I feel as if I had struck a new mine, or were a privileged traveler into regions hitherto unknown, where there is every variety of natural and cultivated growth, where there are ever recurring contrasts of scenery, and where even the rocks are not barren, but glittering with veins of precious ore. How much better these "thinking books" are than any "sensation books" of any kind, prose or poetry! They are the true intellectual companions. One does not read them, and put them by on the shelf, to be read again one of these days, perhaps, but they are wanted close at hand, and often.

“No spring nor summer beauty has such grace

As I have seen in an Autumnal face."

The poet Donne wrote so of the mother of “holy George Herbert." It is so true! and I have seen the same. It would be worth while to live long, to suffer much, to struggle and to endure, if one might have such spiritual beauty blossom out of furrows and wrinkles as has been made visible in aged human faces. Such countenances do not preach,—they are poetry, and music, and irresistible eloquence.

SOURCE: Daniel Dulany Addison, “Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary,” p. 78-9

Diary of Lucy Larcom, December 25, 1860

Christmas, 1860. Two or three books I have read lately. Mrs. Jameson's "Legends of the Madonna" is full of that fine appreciation of the deepest beauty, even in the imperfect creations of art, where the creation had in it the breath of spirit life, so peculiar to this gifted woman.

If I were going to travel in Europe, I should want, next to a large historical knowledge, an intimate acquaintance with the writings of Mrs. Jameson, to appreciate the treasures of medieval art.

Whittier's "Home Ballads," dear for friendship's sake, though not directly a gift from him, as were some of the former volumes. I wonder if that is what makes me like the songs in the "Panorama," some of them better than anything in this new volume, although I know that this is more perfect as poetry. I doubt if he will ever write anything that I shall like so well as the "Summer by the Lakeside," in that volume: it is so full of my first acquaintance with the mountains, and the ripening of my acquaintance with him, my poet-friend. How many blessings that friendship has brought me! among them, a glimpse into a true home, a realizing of such brotherly and sisterly love as is seldom seen outside of books, and best of all, the friendship of dear Lizzie, his sole home-flower, the meek lily blossom that cheers and beautifies his life. Heaven spare them long to each other, and their friendship to me!

But the "Ballads are full of beauty and of a strong and steady trust, which grows more firmly into his character and poetry, as the years pass over him. "My Psalm," with its reality, its earnest depth of feeling, makes other like poems, Longfellow's "Psalm of Life," for instance, seem weak and affected. I like, too, the keenness and kindness of the Whitefield poem, in which he has preserved the memory of a Sabbath evening walk I took with him.

Dr. Croswell's poems contain many possibilities of poetry, and some realities; but there always seems to me a close air, as if the church windows were shut, in reading anything written by a devout Episcopalian. Still, there was true Christianity in the man, and it is also in the book.

SOURCE: Daniel Dulany Addison, “Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary,” p. 79-81

Diary of Lucy Larcom, December 27, 1860

To-night the telegraph reports the evacuation of Fort Moultrie by the Federal troops by order of the Executive, and the burning of the fort. There's something of the "spirit of '76" in the army, surely; South Carolina having declared herself a foe to the Union, how could those soldiers quietly give up one of the old strongholds to the enemy, even at the President's command?

But what will the end be? Is this secessionfarce to end with a tragedy? The South will suffer, by insurrection and famine; there is every prospect of it; the way of transgressors is hard, and we must expect it to be so. God grant that, whatever must be the separate or mutual sufferings of North and South, these convulsions may prove to be the dying struggles of slavery, and the birththroes of liberty.

It is just about a year since "Brown of Ossawatomie" was hung in the South, for unwise interference with slavery. He was not wholly a martyr; there were blood-stains on his hands, though no murder was in his heart. He was a brave man and a Christian, and his blood, unrighteously shed, still cries to heaven from the ground. Who knows but this is the beginning of the answer? But that judicial murder was not the only wrong for which the slaveholding South is now bringing herself before the bar of judgment, before earth and heaven. The secret things of darkness are coming to light, and the question will be decided rightly, I firmly believe. And the South is to be pitied, as all hardened and blinded wrong-doers should be! I believe the North will show herself a noble foe, if foe the South determines to make her.

SOURCE: Daniel Dulany Addison, “Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary,” p. 81-2