The “Wild Roses” were fragrant, and delighted some of the critics, even, for in addition to those that grew along Cape Ann, there were many cultivated ones, that blossomed beside the still waters of thought, and in the quiet retreats of meditation:--
“A Rose is sweet, No matter where it grows: and roses grow Nursed by the pure heavens, and the strengthening earth, Wherever men will let them. Every waste And solitary place is glad for them, Since the old prophets sang, so, until now.”
“Phebe” has a prominent place in the book--the poem that drew from Mr. Howells, when he was editor of the “Atlantic,” a most graceful note of acceptance:--
MY DEAR MISS LARCOM,--You take rejections so sweetly, that I have scarcely the heart to accept anything of yours. But I do like “Phebe,” and I am going to keep her.
“Shared” excited admiration; and was pronounced by one competent critic to be the best religious lyric of the decade:--
“The air we breathe, the sky, the breeze, The light without us and within, Life, with its unlocked treasuries, God’s riches, are for all to win.”
The theological poem, “The Heart of God,” was the cause of controversy. A stranger wrote, asking her to change it, for he thought it expressed too clearly “the old doctrine of the Divinity of Christ.” She answered politely, but with a strong statement of her faith, that what he called “the old Doctrine” was the inspiration of the verses: “To me, Christ is the Infinite Person, at once human and divine. God exists as impersonal Spirit, but I know Him only as a person through Christ. The historical Christ is entirely true to me, as the only way in which God could humanly be known to us. It is no more impossible for me to believe that the ‘Eternal Christ of God,’ the personal manifestation of Deity, should veil Himself for a time with the human form, than that we, in our humble personality, as sharers of the Divine Nature, should wear it as we do.” The same truth she put strongly in “Our Christ,” when she wrote:--
Concerning this poem, the Rev. W. Garrett Horder, the English hymnologist, writes that it has been accorded a place in “Hymns Supplemental” for Congregational churches, and was sung for the first time in England, February 14, 1894, in Colby Chapel, Bradford.