Diary Entry Lucy Larcom

This text is not meant to be published, but serve as an example for a hands-on training session.

This is a journal entry in Lucy Larcom's 1859-1861 diary.

This was a text originally encoded as an example for a TEI workshop held at Wheaton College

 Sept. 17.—

Whether such a record as this is a useful thing or entirely useless, I begin to question. I dont want to feel interested in anything which is only to benefit myself, and I dont want to write these trifles for other people's eyes. A journal of the subjective kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self-consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilation from the interior. Letter-writing is a better safety-valve than a journal, when we write to those we can trust, and this I meant to be a sort of prolonged letter, a mirror of my occupations and progress, for my friend E.— But she, I fear, will never read it; she is on her way to a place of better occupations; and I feel that the first stimulus is gone.

Shall I stop in the middle of my book? No; I believe not; for I think it will be indirectly a useful thing; and I shall write just when I feel like it, often enough to keep track of myself, and give account of myself to myself.

 Dancing Shadows. There's a spirit stirring the great elm tree With a motion graceful and glad and free. 'Tis the soul that breathes in the morning wind, The daughter of sunshine, with music trimmed,— A voice that has never a tone too sad; And the leaf and shadow alike are glad. In the mingling light, though you scarce can say Which is dancing shadow and dancing spray, Or whether by clustering leaves or shade Those wild arabesques on the trunk are made, Ever varying, lovelier ever,— you see In the haunted elm a rejoicing tree. O rich, happy spirits, ye still must wear For your manifold joys, as many a care. But Love, breathing softly your morn-light through, Makes sorrow as blessed as joy in you;— So the world is glad in the golden weather When the leaves and shadows dance together.

Since I returned to school, I have read, — well, not much; two little works on Natural History, — I have begun Ruskin's fifth volume, with great interest, — and Trench on the Parables, for my Sunday class. ""The Limits of Religious Thought" I am reading with a pupil, — and with it Maurice's reply, "What is Revelation?" My impressions of these two writers so far is that Maurice is a much more deeply religious man than Mansel; and that the latter's logic will not always sustain his footing. — I do not like logic in religion. Reason is not always logic; — reason seems to me to be the mind wide open, — no faculty numb or asleep; and to that state of the inner being, truth must come like sunshine; and the mysteries which cannot be explained, will be harmonized with our certain Knowledge, in such light.

 18th

The Katydids are in full concert, with the crickets, and in the daytime there is music from the grasshoppers; and moreover, plenty of practiced illustrations of Natural History all about, and some of us are making these living things a study more entertaining than agreeable, at times.

 John Ruskin Modern Painters Wiley & Halstead New York 1856-1860 Richard Chenevix Trench Notes on the parables of Our Lord D. Appleton New York 1859 Henry Longueville Mansel The limits of religious thought: examined in eight lectures delivered before the University of Oxford, in the year MDCCCLVIII, on the Bampton Foundation Gould and Lincoln Boston 1859 Frederick Denison Maurice What is revelation. A series of sermons on the epiphany; to which are added Letters to a student of theology on the Bampton lectures of Mr. Mansel. Macmillan & co Cambridge and London 1859