In 1854, Miss Larcom published her first book,--“Similitudes from the Ocean and the Prairie.” It was a little volume of not more than one hundred pages, containing brief prose parables drawn from nature, with the purpose of illustrating some moral truth. The titles of the Similitudes suggest their meaning: “The Song before the Storm;” “The Veiled Star;” “The Wasted Flower;” and “The Lost Gem.” Though the conception was somewhat crude, yet her desire to find in all things a message of a higher life and a greater beauty, showed the serious beginnings of the poet’s insight, which in after years was to reveal to her so many hidden truths. She characterized the book as “a very immature affair, often entirely childish.” Her first distinct literary success was the writing of the Kansas Prize Song, in 1855. When Kansas was being settled, the New England Emigrant Aid Company offered a prize of fifty dollars for the best song, written with the object of inspiring in the emigrants the sentiments of freedom. The power of a popular melody was to be used in maintaining a free soil. She gained this prize; and her stirring words were sung all through the West. They were printed, with the appropriate music of Mr. E. Norman, on cotton handkerchiefs, which were given away by the thousand. “Yeomen strong, hither throng, Nature’s honest men; We will make the wilderness Bud and bloom again; Bring the sickle, speed the plough, Turn the ready soil; Freedom is the noblest pay For a true man’s toil. “Ho, brothers! come, brothers! Hasten all with me; We’ll sing upon the Kansas plains A song of liberty.” Her next little book, “Lottie’s Thought-book,” was published by the American Sunday School Union, Philadelphia, in 1858. Not unlike the Similitudes in its method of teaching by parables, it gave the thoughts of a clever child, as they would be suggested by such scenes as a beautiful spring morning in the country, “when glad thoughts praise God;” the first snow, typifying the purity of the earth; or the thought of the joy of living, in the chapter “Glad to be alive” that recalls an exclamation she uses in one of her letters, “Oh! how happy I am, that I did not die in childhood!” These little books are like the inner biography of her youth, a pure crystal stream of love, reflecting the sunlight in every ripple and eddy.