efore then have
liked to spend my whole time with my pen, could I have done so. But it
was imperative that I should have an assured income, however small; and
every one who has tried it knows how uncertain a support one's pen is,
unless it has become very famous indeed. My life as a teacher, however,
I regard as part of my best preparation for whatever I have since
written. I do not know but I should recommend five or ten years of
teaching as the most profitable apprenticeship for a young person who
wished to become an author. To be a good teacher implies
self-discipline, and a book written without something of that sort of
personal preparation cannot be a very valuable one.

Success in writing may mean many different things. I do not know that I
have ever reached it, except in the sense of liking better and better
to write, and of finding expression easier. It is something to have won
the privilege of going on. Sympathy and recognition are worth a great
deal; the power to touch human beings inwardly and nobly is worth far
more. The hope of attaining to such results, if only occasionally, must
be a writer's best inspiration.

So far as successful publication goes, perhaps the first I considered
so came when a poem of mine was accepted by the "Atlantic Monthly." Its
title was "The Rose Enthroned," and as the poet Lowell was at that time
editing the magazine I felt especially gratified. That and another
poem, "The Loyal Woman's No," written early in the War of the
Rebellion, were each attributed to a different person among our
prominent poets, the "Atlantic" at that time not giving authors'
signatures. Of course I knew the unlikeness; nevertheless, those who
made the mistake paid me an unintentional compliment. Compliments,
however, are very cheap, and by no means signify success. I have always
regarded it as a better ambition to be a true woman than to become a
successful writer. To be the second would never have seemed to me
desirable, without also being the first.

In concluding, let me say to you, dear girls, for whom these pages have
been written, that if I have learned anything by living, it is
this,--that the meaning of life is education; not through
book-knowledge alone, sometimes entirely without it. Education is
growth, the development of our best possibilities from within outward;
and it cannot be carried on as it should be except in a school, just
such a school as we all find ourselves in--this world of hum