I do not suppose that I definitely thought all this,though Ifind that the verses I wrote for our two mill magazines at about this time often expressed these and similar longings.They were vague,and they were too likely to dissipate themselves in mere dreams.But our aspirations come to us from a source far beyond ourselves.Happy are they who are "not disobedient unto the heavenly vision"!
A girl of sixteen sees the world before her through rose-tinted mists,a blending of celestial colors and earthly exhalations,and she cannot separate their elements,if she would;they all belong to the landscape of her youth.It is the mystery of the meeting horizons,--the visible beauty seeking to lose and find itself in the Invisible.
In returning to my daily toil among workmates from the hill-country,the scenery to which they belonged became also a part of my life.They brought the mountains with them,a new background and a new hope.We shared an uneven path and homely occupations;but above us hung glorious summits never wholly out of sight.
Every blossom and every dewdrop at our feet was touched with some tint of that far-off splendor,and every pebble by the wayside was a messenger from the peak that our feet would stand upon by and by.
The true climber knows the delight of trusting his path,of following it without seeing a step before him,or a glimpse of blue sky above him,sometimes only knowing that it is the right path because it is the only one,and because it leads upward.
This our daily duty was to us.Though we did not always know it,the faithful plodder was sure to win the heights.Unconsciously we learned the lesson that only by humble Doing can any of us win the lofty possibilities of Being.For indeed,what we all want to find is not so much our place as our path.The path leads to the place,and the place,when we have found it,is only a clearing by the roadside,an opening into another path.
And no comrades are so dear as those who have broken with us a pioneer road which it will be safe and good for others to follow;which will furnish a plain clue for all bewildered travelers hereafter.There is no more exhilarating human experience than this,and perhaps it is the highest angelic one.It may be that some such mutual work is to link us forever with one another in the Infinite Life.
The girls who toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women.They practically said,by numbering themselves among factory girls,that in our country no real odium could be attached to any honest toil that any self-respecting woman might undertake.
I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted to grow up among those active,interesting girls,whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives,but had principle and purpose distinctly their own.Their vigor of character was a natural development.The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred years before.Their grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life,had known the horrors of savage warfare when the beautiful valleys of the Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from Canada to the white settlements.Those young women did justice to their inheritance.They were earnest and capable;ready to undertake anything that was worth doing.My dreamy,indolent nature was shamed into activity among them.They gave me a larger,firmer ideal of womanhood.
Often during the many summers and autumns that of late years Ihave spent among the New Hampshire hills,sometimes far up the mountainsides,where I could listen to the first song of the little brooks setting out on their journey to join the very river that flowed at my feet when I was a working girl on its banks,--the Merrimack,--I have felt as if I could also hear the early music of my workmates'lives,those who were born among these glorious summits.Pure,strong,crystalline natures,carrying down with them the light of blue skies and the freshness of free winds to their place of toil,broadening and strengthening as they went on,who can tell how they have refreshed the world,how beautifully they have blended their being with the great ocean of results?A brook's life is like the life of a maiden.The rivers receive their strength from the rock-born hills,from the unfailing purity of the mountain-streams.
A girl's place in the world is a very strong one:it is a pity that she does not always see it so.It is strongest through her natural impulse to steady herself by leaning upon the Eternal Life,the only Reality;and her weakness comes also from her inclination to lean against something,--upon an unworthy support,rather than none at all.She often lets her life get broken into fragments among the flimsy trellises of fashion and convention-ality,when it might be a perfect thing in the upright beauty of its own consecrated freedom.
Yet girlhood seldom appreciates itself.We often hear a girl wishing that she were a boy.That seems so strange!God made no mistake in her creation.He sent her into the world full of power and will to be a helper;and only He knows how much his world needs help.She is here to make this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place,without and within,--a true home for every one of his children.It matters not if she is poor,if she has to toil for her daily bread,or even if she is surrounded by coarseness and uncongeniality:nothing can deprive her of her natural instinct to help,of her birthright as a helper.These very hindrances may,with faith and patience,develop in her a nobler womanhood.
