Speaking of the volume long after, she says, "It was a timid performance upon a slender reed."
Three years later a second volume of verse was published by Ticknor and Fields under the title of "Words for the Hour." Of this, George William Curtis wrote, "It is a better book than its predecessor, but will probably not meet with the same success."
She had written plays ever since she was nine years old. In 1857, the same year which saw the publication of "Words for the Hour," she produced her first serious dramatic work, a five-act drama entitled "The World's Own." It was performed in New York at Wallack's Theatre, and in Boston with Matilda Heron and the elder Sothern in the leading parts. She notes that one critic pronounced the play "full of literary merits and of dramatic defects"; and she adds, "It did not, as they say, 'keep the stage.'"
Yet her brother Sam writes to her from New York: "Lenore still draws the best houses; there was hardly standing room on Friday night"; and again: "Mr. Russell went last night, a second time, bought the libretto, which I send you by this mail—declares that there is not a grander play in our language. He says that it is full of dramatic vigor, that the interest never flags—but that unhappily Miss H., with the soul and self-abandonment of a great actress, lacks those graces of elocution, which should set forth the beauties of your verses."
Some of the critics blamed the author severely for her choice of a subject—the betrayal and abandonment of an innocent girl by a villain; they thought it unfeminine, not to say indelicate, for a woman to write of such matters.
At that time nothing could be farther from her thoughts than to be classed with the advocates of Women's Rights as they then appeared; yet in "The World's Own" are passages which show that already her heart cherished the high ideal of her sex, for which her later voice was to be uplifted:—
I think we call them Women, who uphold
Faint hearts and strong, with angel countenance;
Who stand for all that's high in Faith's resolve,
Or great in Hope's first promise.
* * * * * *
Ev'n the frail creature with a moment's bloom,
That pays your pleasure with her sacrifice,
And, having first a marketable price,
Grows thenceforth valueless,—ev'n such an one,
Lifted a little from the mire, and purged
By hands severely kind, will give to view
The germ of all we honor, in the form
Of all that we abhor. You fling a jewel
Where wild feet tramp, and crushing wheels go by;
You cannot tread the splendor from its dust;
So, in the shattered relics, shimmers yet
Through tears and grime, the pride of womanhood.
* * * * * *
We must not forget the Comic Muse. Comparatively little of her humorous verse is preserved; she seldom thought it important enough to make two copies, and the first draft was often lost or given away. The following was written in the fifties, when Wulf Fries was a young and much-admired musician in Boston. Miss Mary Bigelow had invited her to her house "at nine o'clock" to hear him play, meaning nine in the morning. She took this for nine in the evening; the rest explains itself:—
Miss Mary Big'low, you who seem
So debonair and kind,
Pray, what the devil do you mean
(If I may speak my mind)
By asking me to come and hear
That Wulf of yours a-Friesing,
Then leaving me to cool my heels
In manner so unpleasing?
* * * * * *
With Mrs. Dr. Susan you
That eve, forsooth, were tea-ing:
Confess you knew that I should come,
And from my wrath were fleeing!
To Mrs. Dr. Susan's I
Had not invited been:
So when the maid said, "Best go there!"
I answered, "Not so green!"
Within the darksome carriage hid
I bottled up my beauty,
And, rather foolish, hurried home
To fireside and duty.
It's very pleasant, you may think,
On winter nights to roam;
But when you next invite abroad,
This wolf will freeze at home!
While she was pouring out her heart in poem and play, and the Doctor was riding the errands of the hour and binding up the wounds of Humanity, what, it may be asked,—it was asked by anxious friends,—was becoming of the little Howes? Why, the little Howes (there were now five, Maud having been born in November, 1854) were having perhaps the most wonderful childhood that ever children had. Spite of the occasional winters spent in town, our memories centre round Green Peace;—there Paradise blossomed for us. Climbing the cherry trees, picnicking on the terrace behind the house, playing in the bowling-alley, tumbling into the fishpond,—we see ourselves here and there, always merry, always vigorous and robust. We were also studying, sometimes at school, sometimes with our mother, who gave us the earliest lessons in French and music; more often, in those years, under various masters and governesses. The former were apt to be political exiles, the Doctor always having many such on hand, some learned, all impecunious, all seeking employment. We recall a Pole, a Dane, two Germans, one Frenchman. The last, poor man, was married to a Smyrniote woman with a bad temper; neither spoke the other's language, and when they quarrelled they came to the Doctor, demanding his services as interpreter.
Through successive additions, the house had grown to a goodly size; the new part, with large, high-studded rooms, towering above the ancient farmhouse, which nevertheless seemed always the heart of the place. Between the two was a conservatory, a posy of all sweet flowers: the large greenhouse was down in the garden, under the same roof as the bowling-alley.