Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, F

[Lunch with Stowe, August 1862]

M [146] [Lunch with Stowe, August 1862] Lucy Larcom August 10. This week has been a more remarkable one than any in my life, I believe, in the way of seeing people I have heard of, and had some little curiosity about. Last Thursday was spent at Andover, and one of the golden days it was. The day itself was one of shine and shadow just rightly blended; and the place, the well-known Hill of the students, was in its glory. After sitting awhile in church, where the learned Professors, Park, Phelps, and Stowe, sat in state (I wonder if Professors dread anniversaries and conspicuous positions as we boarding-school teachers do!) we went up the hill to accept an invitation to lunch with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was beautiful as a page from one of her own story books. Mrs. Stowe herself I liked, and her house and garden were just such as an authoress like her ought to have. It all had what I imagine to be an English look, the old stone house, with its wild vines and trees brought into shape in picturesque walks, and its cool refreshment-room looking off over the Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) went to work in a textile mill in nearby Lowell at the age of eleven. She began her writing career by contributing to the Lowell Offering, a monthly literary magazine written and published by women working at the mills from 1840 to 1845. Toward the end of her life, Larcom wrote about her experiences in her autobiography, A New England Girlhood (1889). Larcom also trained as a teacher and taught at schools in Illinois and Massachusetts. She published poetry in a variety of periodicals and anthologies and was included in Rufus W. Griswold’s influential volume The Female Poets of America (1849). Larcom became friendly with Annie Fields in 1861, about the same time that Fields and Stowe began their friendship. Larcom was one of the many women writers Fields helped, and Stowe published Larcom’s work in the magazine Hearth and Home that she coedited from 1868 to 1869. In this entry for her diary in August 1862, Larcom describes her first meeting with Stowe at her home in Andover, Massachusetts. Lucy Larcom [147] Stowe house, “Stone Cabin,” Andover, Massachusetts, ca. 1890. Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut. river, the city, and the far hills, to the mountains; the arrangement of the table, too, showing so much of the poetess. I could not have called upon Mrs. Stowe formally; as it was, nothing could have been much pleasanter, of that kind. Then before I left I called upon some old friends; a call which finished the day very delightfully; for there, besides the cordiality of really wellbred people, I saw one of the sweetest specimens of girlhood that can be shown in New England, I fancy. Beauty does not often fascinate me, in its common acceptation; but where there is soul in a young, sweet face— modesty and intelligence that greet you like the fragrance of a rosebud before it is well opened—it is so rare a thing in these “Young America” days that it makes me a little extravagant in admiration, perhaps. Saturday I spent at Amesbury; it was not quite like other visits, for two other visitors were there; yet I enjoyed one of them especially; an educated mulatto girl, refined, lady-like in every respect, and a standing reply to those who talk of the “inferiority of the colored race.” It is seldom that I see any one who attracts me so much, whose acquaintance I so much desire, just from first sight. She would like to teach at Port Royal, but the government stowe in her own time [148] will not permit. Ah, well! my book ends with no prospect of the war’s end. Three hundred thousand recruits have just been raised, and as many more are to be drafted. Many talk as if there never was a darker time than now. We have no unity of purpose; the watchword is “Fight for the Government!” but that is an abstraction the many cannot comprehend. If they would say, “Fight for Liberty—your own liberty, and that of every American,” there would be an impetus given to the contest that, on our side, “drags its slow length along.” This is an extreme opinion, our law-abiding people say, but I believe we shall come to worse...