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 rom