Lucy Larcom was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1826. Her father, a sea captain, died while she was a child, and her mother removed with her several children to Lowell, Massachusetts. For a while Lucy attended the public schools and at the age of ten years showed a talent for writing verses. In the cotton mill, she tells us, her first work was “doffing and replacing the bobbins in the machine. Next,” she says, “I entered the spinning-room, then the dressing-room, where I had a place beside pleasant windows looking toward the river. Later I was promoted to the cloth-room, where I had fewer hours of confinement, without the noisy machinery, and it was altogether neater.” The last two years, of her eight years’ work in the mill, she served as book-keeper, and, during her leisure hours, pursued her studies in mathematics, grammar and English and German literature. The female operatives in the Lowell mills published a little paper entitled “Offering,” and it was to this that Miss Larcom contributed her first literary production, which was in the shape of a poem entitled “The River;” and many of her verses and essays, both grave and gay, may be found in the old files of this paper. Her first volume, “Similitudes,” was compiled from essays which appeared originally in “Offering.” Since then her name has found an honored place among the women writers of America. Among her early and best poems are “Hannah Binding Shoes” and “The Rose Enthroned,” the latter being Miss Larcom’s first contribution to the “Atlantic Monthly.” She did not sign her name to the contribution and it was of such merit that one of the reviewers attributed it to the poet Emerson. Both Mr. Lowell, the editor of “The Atlantic Monthly,” and the poet, Whittier, to whose papers she also contributed, praised her ability. Miss Larcom studied at Monticello Female Seminary, Illinois, and afterwards taught in some of the leading female schools in her native State. In 1859 appeared her book entitled “Ships in the Mist and Other Stories,” and in 1866 was published “Breathings of a Better Life.” From 1866 to 1874 she was editor of “Our Young Folks,” and in 1875 “An Idyl of Work, a Story in Verse,” appeared. In 1880 “Wild Roses of Cape Ann and Other Poems” was published, and in 1881 “Among Lowell Mill Girls” appeared. In 1885 her poetical works were gathered and published in one volume. Of late, Miss Larcom’s writings have assumed deeply religious tones in which the faith of her whole life finds ample expression. This characteristic is strongly noticeable in “Beckonings” (1886), and especially so in her last two books “As It Is In Heaven” (1891) and “The Unseen Friend” (1892), both of which embody her maturest thought on matters concerning the spiritual life.