Representative women of New England/Frances L. Mace
FRANCIS LAUGHTON MACE, one of the best beloved poets of Maine, was born in Orono, on January 15, 1836. She died at Los Gatos, Cal., July 20, 1899. She was a daughter of Sumner Laughton, M.D., and his wife, Mary A. Parker Laughton. Dr. Laughton was a physician of excellent standing in his profession. He removed to Foxcroft when Frances was a year old, and removed thence with his family to liangor when she was about fourteen. She had already made excellent progress in the schools of Foxcroft, reading all the Æneid of Virgil and his Bucolics at twelve and thirteen, and writing much under the tutelage and with the encouragement of both friends and teachers.
The principal of the Foxcroft Academy at the time she was a student there was Mr. Thomas Ta.sh, afterward of Portland, and of much ability as a teacher, well-known in Maine educational circles. He gave her work not only close and friendly criticism, but warm appreciation. "It was he," she said long afterward, "who gave me courage to persevere."
In Bangor she continued her studies at the high school, completing the course at sixteen, and with private teachers. She was always an eager and diligent student, and her thoroughness and zeal are evidenced in her themes themselves and in her often lavish use of classic allusion and imagery. Her first verses were printed in the Waterville Mail when she was only twelve years old. It was not long before her poems began to attract attention, and, some of them coming under the eye of the editor of the New York Journal of Conunerce, she was invited to contribute to that paper. The series of poems published in that journal includes some of the loveliest and most significant of her minor verse.
In 1855 she was married to Mr. Benjamin ?I. Mace, a lawyer of Bangor, where they resided till the hope of firmer health for both induced their removal to San Jose, Cal.
The twoscore and more of years of Mrs. Mace's life in Bangor after her marriage were very fruitful years. Notwithstanding the cares of her home and of the eight little ones who came to gladden it (four of them living, to go with her to the Californian home), she was still an indefatigable student. Her vocation as poet was to her, as Mrs. Browning had said of her own calling long before, "a serious thing." Everything that could contribute to the enrichment and tlignity of her poetry was made to yield ^ts revenues: classic story and local legend alike were woven into it. She was constantly seek- ing its betterment and continually increasing the stores of knowledge and association which should enhance its charm.
Mrs. Mace's work is very strongly localized. Indeed, by far the best known and best loved of her poems have their roots deep in home soil. Her sweetest lyrics are those which crystallize some intimate experience or associution of her own. Choice as is the workmanship of her longer and more studied poems, it is the slighter and more spontaneous ones that win and hold the affection.
This is strikingly evident in her first volume, "Legends, Lyrics, and Sonnets," published in 1883. The tenderness, the serenity, the satisfied affection, the moral and spiritual elevation of the.se poems, impress one throughout the book. All the loves her life had known, with all the fruition of them, are garnered in this little gray-garbed volume; and her fame would have been secure in it had she never written more.
Although this collection includes some of the most spontaneous of her minor verse, and though it is by these lyrics rather than by her longer poems that she is most lovingly remembered, the book held, too, work that conunanded the attention of the wider and more critical world outside her immediate circle of friends or her accvistomed readers. "Israfil," one of the longest and most finished poems in the volume, was published in Harper s Magazine in 1877. It is one of the strongest and stateliest of her poems, and is instinct with a profound and in- sistent faith. Many of the poems in this and in the succeeding volume were suggested by the scenery and associations of the Mount Desert region, and will link her fame with its own.
In this volume are printed the well-known verses, "Only Waiting." This tender lyric was written when she was a girl of eighteen, and was first published in 1854 in the Waterville Mail, appearing with the signature "Inez." It has since been printed in many hooks of sacred song. That it travelled far and touched many hearts is shown by the fact that Mrs. Mace re- ceived letters of gratitude for its consolation from every State and Territory in the Union. Despite the irrefragable proofs that attest her own writing, her claim to its authorship was at one time disputed. It is pleasant to know that Dr. James Martineau, having included "Only Waiting" in his " Hynms of Praise and Prayer," gave her, in the second edition, credit for it, and wrote Mrs. Mace a most cordial letter of ajjpreciation.
A second volume of poems was published in 1887, with the title, " Under Pine ami Palm." These verses are of great sweetness and pathos. The lines of dedication, in which she say.s — with a touching allusion to a haltit of her girlhood, that of turning at once to her nearest and dear- est ones with each "poem as it was completed — she comes to
" Read once more My latest verse to those who loved me first,"
are exceedingly graceful and tender. And only a little less wistful are "The Woods of Maine," from which we make quotation here:—
" To all the wide, wild woods of Maine
The singing; birds have come again;
In thickets dense and skyward bough
Their nests of love are builded now;
And daybreak hears one blithesome strain
From ail the wide, wild woods of Maine.
"In all the deep, green woods of Maine
The myriad wild flowers wake again;
On mossy knoll, by whispering rill,
Their new life opens, shy and still;
Unseen, unknown, as spring days wane,
They sweeten all the woods of Maine.
" The fair and fragrant woods of Maine!
To dwellers far on shore and plain
The forest's breath of healing flows
In every wandering wind that blows;
And life throbs fresh in every vein
Where bloom the boundless woods of Maine."
The second half of the volume contains poems written during her residence in California, in many instances suggested by its scenery, its associations, and especially by its beauty and promise. Such poems as "The New Italv," "Los Angeles," "Mount Hamilton," and "Vespers at San Juan" show her quick intuition of the forces around her and her swift divination of the future they were shaping. Yet it is evident that her thoughts were always straying to more familiar things and to remembered scenes.
And it came to pass that out of this longing remembrance of home, out of the sorrows that one after another came to her in these later years, and out of the long quiescence of a lingering physical helplessness, of which one or two of her later poems give most pathetic reminder, there were born a noble patience, a serene and sufficing trust, a larger and devouter thought, hallowing all that she had wrought before.