Miss Lyon's way of saying R.S.V.P.: Shall we not see you? Will you have the goodness on the reception of this, to drop me a line letting me know how strongly I may hope to see you.
Very sincerely yours
Mary Lyon
On Founder's Day, November 8, when Mount Holyoke College looks back with admiration at the strong character of Mary Lyon, the College is acting in the same spirit with which Miss Lyon herself referred to the 'stronger characters' of the post-Revolutionary days just previous to her own. She had been discussing the fact that education can increase knowledge of books faster than it can increase knowledge of character and powers of reflection, and she wound up with this statement: 'One reason why there were so many stronger characters fifty years ago is because knowledge and reflection were balanced.'
Fifty years ago meant the dim past, always, to Mary Lyon. She died at fifty-two, having, at fifty, given her students a discourse (of which the College would like to have a copy now) on old age. Mary Lyon's 'De Senectute at Fifty' would be something to read.
The morning of Founder's Day, beginning at sunrise, has always been full of color. The sunrise observations are an old South Hadley custom, traditionally a busy time for the Trustees. The method of freezing the ice-cream varies from year to year - it used to be said that they did it in frock coats - but only an eye-witness should attempt to tell about that.
The after-breakfast preparations are those of a college about to welcome guests. Members of the Faculty and Staff shake out their academic gowns. Seniors are ready with theirs. Guests and dignitaries arrive. Choir girls, white-winged, flap across campus for rehearsal. At half-past ten, in at the door of Mary Lyon Chapel goes the academic procession, its silks and velvets and gold appearing even more ceremonial than on Commencement Day because massed in the Chapel at close range.
The program marches grandly, with Festival Anthem, tributes to Mary Lyon, prayer and Scripture, an address by somebody chosen for distinction, and finally the singing of 'Saint Anne' or 'Duke Street' or 'A Mighty Fortress.' Then out goes the pageant again, with time for a stroll around campus before lunch. It is a day of combined festival and memorial. Traditionally a wreath has been placed on Mary Lyon's grave.
That wreath has been in keeping with old custom. Wreathes and garlands in Mary Lyon's administration decked the rooms of the old building on guest occasions, notably in November on Thanksgiving Day, when the Trustees and townspeople were invited to attend. Every 'scholar' in those days knew how to 'twine a wreath' of ground pine. For many years the custom was kept up, explaining perhaps the fact that ground pine is not too plentiful in the South Hadley woods today. Even as late as Founder's Day in 1891, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the founding, the 'parlours and dining room were decorated with chrysanthemums and ground pine.' Now, in keeping with modern restraint, the decorations are usually centered on a sheaf of prize chrysanthemums from the Plant House with branches of glossy leaves from the November oaks.
Founder's Day was established by President Elizabeth Storrs Mead, to be held on the anniversary of the day when Mount Holyoke first opened its doors; and at her request the original Founder's Day speeches were made by those who had actually known Miss Lyon. In reading over some of those addresses now, one is tantalized to find that each speaker, instead of filling his time with personal reminiscenes of the Founder, gave a reverent eulogy to her and then did honor to her memory by making practically a Commencement Address on some abstract theme.
For instance, the first Founder's Day talk was by Doctor Thomas Laurie, once minister in South Hadley and later in Providence, who had been for a short time Miss Lyon's pastor and had seen her leading her flock over to his church in South Hadley of a Sunday. He began with two or three recollections that whetted the appetite for more. He recalled, for instance, that Miss Lyon believed, regarding marriage, that 'woman is designed to be subordinate to a degree far exceeding the difference in native talents.' And Doctor Laurie went on to say:
The speaker would enlarge the sphere of thse words so as to take in the relation of preacher and hearer also. As he looks back he is amazed at the temerity that dared to be the religious teacher of one who approached so near to 'the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,' and the longer he thinks of it the more he is amazed. . . .
On this note, Doctor Laurie proceeds to preach an excellent sermon.
Even more exasperating was Doctor William S. Tyler of Amherst, who could have told invaluable items about his experiences as one of Mary Lyon's Trustees. He begins delightfully by saying how he enjoyed sitting nearly every day at dinner one year with Mary Lyon at Professor Hitchcock's house in Amherst. And instead of going on with the details, he launches into a fine collegiate address, leaving us to wonder in vain about the conversations at those dinners - what he said and what she said and what Professor Hitchcock then said, and what Miss Lyon said next. It is like the father of a family coming home and reporting that he has had dinner with a person we are all agog to know, and then soaring along obliviously on general themes.
That Mary Lyon was not silent at dinner we know from Doctor Francis E. (Father Endeavor) Clark, who was the son of one of Miss Lyon's Ipswich pupils. Doctor Clark has shared with us the contents of a notebook in which his mother took down bits of Miss Lyon's table talk. One of the most engaging remarks is about the difficulty of being tidy. Said Miss Lyon at table: 'Some ladies have everything in order. It seems as if everything belonging to them had feet, and went to its place as soon as done with. It is no effort to them to have their rooms and persons in order, while for others it is a very great task to keep anything in order.' There, if we are not mistaken, speaks a keen observer who has watched with envious eye the waxen neatness of those happy ladies whose belongings all 'have feet.' And at another time she said at table, 'It is a mark of a weak mind to be continually comparing the sexes, and disputing and making out the female sex as something great and superior.' This from Mary Lyon, who received the most votes of the first three women ever to be elected to America's Hall of Fame.
In approving of the essential spirit of Founder's Day, Sarah Cushing Boynton, one of Miss Lyon's Mount Holyoke pupils, sent in probably the most vivid personal impression of her that we shall ever have:
As a member of the senior class of '48, whose diplomas were the last to which Mary Lyon affixed her signature, I do most earnestly wish the present generation could have some idea of her personality. To any one who ever saw her - and the number now must be very few - the published portrait conveys no vestige of resemblance. I will give as well as I can a pen picture of her as she moved among us in those last years of her life.Rather under the medium heigh, with a strong, muscular frame, a florid complexion, with blazing, light-blue Saxon eyes, kindly, severe, or pathetic as occasion warranted, but with now and then a sparkle of merriment; hair of palest auburn, riotous in habit as to be never quite as smooth as fashion decreed, strangs of it waving and jigging about the temples in an entirely unwished-for manner. She always wore a demure little lace cap, strings flying as she hurried about, with a generous coil of her hair gleaming through its thin meshes behind.
Her fiftieth birthday occurred in February, 1847, and she discoursed much to us on the privileges and responsibilities of age! I can see her dear face now, all alight with feeling, as plainly as when I sat before her. She had a quick, bustling movement as as she went about, and the most marvelous executive ability imaginable, extending to the minutest details of our daily lives. No one who came under the influence of her magnetic personality can ever forget her.
Probably the most frequently quoted letter about her was sent in for the first Founder's Day by Eunice Caldwell Cowles. As Eunice Caldwell she had been Miss Lyon's associate in 1837-38, and was the 'Miss C.' who (with Mrs. Safford and Miss Lyon) was admitted to that famous conference of 'benevolent gentlemen' in Deacon Safford's parlor when plans for the Seminary were being laid. She wrote:
It was in the visions of Mr. Joseph Emerson and his illustrious pupils, Z. P. Grant and Mary Lyon, that a women's college had birth, and it was Mary Lyon, the youngest of the three, who gave it a lodgment, a residence, and a name. Its later accommodations and attractive adjuncts were cradled in her prolific fancy. She foresaw its increasing glory, honor, and usefulness before it touched the ground.
These letters were written in preparation for Founder's Day. But a quite different letter sped to Mrs. Mead from no less a personage than Lucy Stone, directly after the first new items about Founder's Day came out. Lucy Stone was then campaigning for equal suffrage, but in her girlhood she had been for three months a student at Mount Holyoke. Her note is on a small card like a message home, and the punctuation has been kept precisely as she had it. She probably meant some of her periods for commas, but the unexpected periods just as she wrote them bring her voice explosively to the inner ear:
Boston. Nov. 10 1891
Dear Mrs. Mead
Pardon me. but I can't help saying how sorry I was that on 'Founder's Day' the speakers invited were all men and your college has such fine capable. able graduates! It is too bad! I was ready to break my heart over it. dear dear! Well! The force of old customs will sometime break. and I am glad of you. and glad there is a Mount Holyoke College, even if Founder's Day, (the Founder being a woman) has its invited speakers all men. Now. forgive me. Do not answer it. but it had to be said for my peace of mind.
Yours
Most sincerely
Lucy Stone
Amusing enough, Lucy Stone has not been treated as a 'Lucy Stoner' in the catalogue of the Mount Holyoke Archives. Her note is filed in the card index under 'Stone, Lucy. See Blackwell, Mrs.' quite in the conventional way. To compensate Lucy Stone for this exquisite irony of mortal Fate, one can hardly do better in a chapter celebrating Founder's Day than to heed her admonition and bring out for discussion some material contributed by three women: first by Mary Lyon herself from her unpublished notebooks; second, a comment by Miss Woolley; and third, a story about Mary Lyon handed down from one of her students.
The notebooks of Mary Lyon contain many disconnected items too casual to have been printed in any of the books about her. Anybody who is interested in her, however, or in handwriting for itself will always be entertained to look at these notebooks in connection with her letters, if only to study her styles of penmanship and the occasions for which she used them. She was capable of writing dainty little letters of cobweb fineness. But for her own notes and for most of her correspondence she had a sweeping quill-stroke that went over the page like a flail. The result is not easy to read, and she knew it. In a letter to her niece Miss Lyon mentions her own illegible writing and hopes that the niece may be able to 'spell out' her 'blind hand.' In fact there are sentences among her notes that can never be quoted with assurance because they contain some illegible keywords.
For instance, Miss Lyon in one notebook is jotting down headings for a talk on general ways of the world, and states, 'We cannot begin a season and go out with the same sleeves.' At least that is probably what she says. But the word 'season' certainly looks a good deal like 'moon.' It might perhaps be moon, except that it does not sound like Miss Lyon to say, 'We cannot begin a moon and go out with the same sleeves.' Moreover, the word 'sleeves' may possibly not be 'sleeves.' It is anybody's guess, and therefore one can hardly venture to quote the sentence. Comforting anyhow to the worker on the manuscripts to come across a statement in Mary Lyon's own handwriting that shows she was aware that her 'hand' was 'blind.'
Her memorandum notes 'Hints to Myself' are particularly dashing. Sometimes her jottings are about courses to be given. Those early courses were generally referred to not by subjects such as Geometry, Natural Philosophy, and Chemistry, but by the names of the authors or editors of the textbooks then in use at most of the colleges. The names give the early curriculum a flavor like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: 'Playfair Commenced. Playfair Finished.' - 'Silliman Commenced. Silliman Finished.' - 'Smellie Begun. Smellie Finished' - and so on with Paley and Grimshaw and Butler and Goldsmith and Wayland and Olmstead and Pope. 'Milton Commenced' in Miss Lyon's handwriting is an energetic hieroglyph indeed.
In another note we find her listing 'Little Items to be remembered'
Enquired in spring about vinegar
Garden - sage
parsley
caraway
thyme
Returning copper boilers
Order of exercises
Think about carpenter's work &
Painting for vacation.
And often there are little 'way-marks' for speeches, memoranda to be filled out extemporaneously as she talked. For instance:
Importance of ladies being taught to be good imitators - accurate and skillful in business. Some modern enthusiasts who are so at war with the 'old school system' would have the principle of scholars thinking for themselves carried to such a length as to exclude everything else. Some think that of all things granite is most important, & this is enough, no matter how rough, ragged, or unpolished. I am very confident that the education of ladies should consist very much in their becoming good imitators.
Even in those 'modern' days some of her speeches must have been provocative. Some of them also, even in headlines, are picturesque. In 1829, she scribbled down some notes for a speech to her 'scholars' in Buckland.
Some young ladies so inclined to be out of humor or so ruffled by disappointments that the whole family find it necessary to use great caution lest they should be crossed. . . . Who of my scholars would like to know whether they possess such and such defects? Who would be glad to have me assist them? As I cannot devote as much time to every one as I could wish, who would be glad to have me prepare a few coats ready for any one to put on? Who will endeavor to put it on if it belongs to her?
Throughout her life Miss Lyon was ready at an instant's notice to 'prepare a few coats' not only for other people to put on but for herself. Many clues to her own efforts at self-improvement have already been quoted by Professor Hitchcock, Fidelia Fiske, Beth Bradford Gilchrist, and Sarah D. Locke Stowe, notably bits on 'Self-Control' in which she sketches a graph of her own defects. But in her notebooks, after one of these moments of introspection, she rapidly turns to planning her speeches again. Here is a crisp one headlined.
We are to live for eternity in the use of money.
This is possible. Many think it is not. Every dollar you spend cast your eye on eternity.
An important test of Christian character.
Reward in our own bosoms.
Educate yourselves by doing good rather than by proposing to do good.
In quite as vigorous penmanship she speeds on to tell what to do with 'Dried Apples':
Wash thoroughly but very quick, not in water much warm, which will wash away the juice of the apple. Soak in cold water, and stew it in the same.
In all these personal notes of hers, one finds the eternal instructiveness of the born educator. Even on a trip that she took to Niagara Falls after her journey to Philadelphia to buy laboratory equipment when she was teaching at Ipswich, she points up her account of the Falls with directions about the best way to see them. Perhaps it would be inaccurate to say that at Niagara she left no stone unturned, but certainly she left no stone unstepped-on in any part of the ledges where she was allowed to go. After an active morning-to-evening survey of Niagara which she describes in her most punctilious penmanship, she went back to her room by moonlight, only to accept an invitation to go out to the little bridge later in the evening to see the lunar bow.
For this effort I was well repaid [she writes]. From the fearful little bridge, I witnessed the complete bow in the greatest perfection. The clear full moon was just at its best height and in the right direction. Not a cloud was visible. Both extremities of the full bright bow seemed to dip deep in the waves below. The tumultuous waters - the dimness of moonlight - our terrific situation, as our narrow bridge, and the feeble banister to which I was clinging, seemed to rock with the mighty dashing waters - all tended to render the most sublime and awful - [word apparently left out]. With this I was perfectly satisfied for the night. I returned to my rest without a lingering feeling that I had left anything unseen. [Then she explains that one should by all means save the Canadian side until last.] All the little broken prospects and parts of views should be taken from the American shore and Goat Island, and sufficient time should be allowed for the mind to expand, & enlarge, & prepare to take in the greatness of the overwhelming view on the Canadian side.
Later we find in her Mount Holyoke memorandum books some revelations of the duties in her official day. Sometimes she kept these personal reminders in blankbooks with old-fashioned 'marbled' or 'clouded' covers. Sometimes she used a little home-made notebook formed of sheets of paper sewed together and folded to pocket size. The items were headed 'To be done,' and are not dated but apparently dashed down as they occurred to her without regard for order of precedence or mutual compatibility. Here are a few cullings taken at random to show their range.
To be done
Composition subjects
Bedspreads in Sth wing
Officers for Memorandum Society
Match boxes
Write to Mr. - about Miss Goodale
Write to obtain money for Miss B.
Looking glasses repaired
Miss Whitman's section
Cash account
Dried apples weighed
Send for buckwheat
Nails for maps
Coming into hall
Clotheslines
Pay for periodicals
Invite Trustees Thanksgiving
Pay Mason for sawing wood
The miscellany is so striking that it seemed tempting to compare it with a modern college president's personal memorandum for a day. President Woolley, without consulting Mary Lyon's list, selected the following bit for us from her personal memorandum-book - that big black leather-covered memorandum-book that she always has by her on the office desk. One should first explain that the item about ordering supplies has to do with the President's house, not with the diet of the college.
1. Arrange work for seamstress
2. Invite Mr. - to be Commencement speaker.
3. Notify driver of car at which time I wish to start.
4. Order meat and supplies for the day.
5. Engage rooms at New York Club and Boston Club.
6. Prepare talk on 'Thinking Internationally.'
7. Decide on talk for Philadelphia.
8. Write Miss - that she will be appointed on part time.
9. Write Miss - and Miss - about their appointments.
10. Recommend - for salary -.
11. Send gardenias to [member of the faculty who is ill].
12. Wire committees in New York and Washington.
13. Call up ticket office for reservations.
14. Arrange for motoring to keep engagements in Hartford.
11:00 A.M. Conference with the Dean of Residence.
11:30-12:30 Conference with the Academic Dean.
3:00 P.M. Appointment with the dentist.
Miss Lyon checked her items off with a plus-sign in the margin. Miss Woolley crosses out her finished items in red crayon with no uncertain swoop. The demands upon the time of an executive at the beginning and at the end of the century could be divertingly studied if we had access to a point-for-point comparison of these informal books.
Many of Mary Lyon's students were able to attend Founder's Day ceremonies when Miss Woolley first held office at Mount Holyoke, and they were happy to tell President Woolley about Miss Lyon. One of Mary Lyon's students who also knew Miss Woolley was the mother of Katharine Lee Bates. Another was the mother of President Blaisdell of Pomona College. Another was the grandmother of Eunice Fuller Barnard of the New York Times. Another was at Mount Holyoke with the mother of William Howard Taft. And so on. For the Founder's Day of 1904, Miss Woolley summed up the impressions she had gathered from first-hand reports about Mary Lyon.
I have talked with many of her students, all old ladies now, and always with the same result. It is beautiful to see their faces light up, and to hear the enthusiasm with which they speak of her; and as for her 'favorites,' so many of them have said to me, quite confidentially, 'And I, you know, was Miss Lyon's favorite,' that I am convinced that she must have been very impartial. Of her magnetic personality there can be no doubt.
'Magnetic' is a word used over and over again for Mary Lyon. Most of the stories about her show her in forthright and expressive action: going hither and thither to collect her own education; weaving 'coverlids' and teaching in private families for her board; gaining inspiration especially from Joseph Emerson of Byfield, Professor Hitchcock of Amherst, and Professor Eaton of Rensselaer, under whom she studied chemistry in Troy, New York. Anecdotes show her in demand as a teacher: Major Griswold of Buckland wanted to build a school for her there; Catherine Beecher invited her to be her associate in Hartford; Judge Laban Wheaton later asked her to help in founding the institution that was to bear his name; under her most stimulating friend, Zilpah Polly Grant, she was at the top of her game in Ipswich. To accomplish so much under difficulties she had needed vitality and that heightened zest for living that the character-analysts of her own time used to call 'vitativeness.' Most of the stories about her are full of it, and of her determination to give other young women a chance, in a permanent institution that should be endowed as the colleges for men were endowed, not dependent on the whim of clients, or limited to the lifetime of those in charge.
But there was a quieter sort of story told to me years ago by a lady who had known a student of Mary Lyon. Coming down through 'oral tradition' in this way, the narrative is not the material from which history is made; yet it suggests that Mary Lyon had a thought to spare for those temperaments, unlike her own, that were inexpressive and very shy. In connection with it we remember her own statement: 'One who talks easily often loves ardently and lastingly one more silent. If the general sympathies are alike the habits need not be.'
The story is this. Once there was a student at Mount Holyoke who was too silent and embarrassed to make friends. Miss Lyon was troubled, and asked the most popular and beautiful girl in the senior class to try to make the timid newcomer feel at home. The upperclass leader said that everyone had tried, but that the quiet student seemed really to be happier when left alone. Miss Lyon advised trying again. The year went on into springtime with no change. Miss Lyon called the popular senior into consultation again and told her to go out each morning to a certain white rose bush that had begun to bloom, and to pick one rose a day and take it to the silent girl.
Every day this was done until the roses were all gone. The next year the quiet one did not decide to return, and the episode was checked up as one of the rare times when Miss Lyon had failed.
But many years later, when the senior who had tried to help with the problem was an old lady, a gentleman at some social gathering looked up quickly at the sound of her name and asked her if she had ever been in South Hadley. When she told him that she had been a Mount Holyoke student he said, 'Are you the Girl with the White Roses?'
Then he told her that his mother had been for one year at South Hadley when she was a girl. His mother, he explained, was not a very talkative person, and the family had never been able to get her to tell anything about her student days except the story about the white roses. Every morning for two weeks in springtime, the most beautiful girl imaginable had brought her a white rose. That was all the family ever learned about her experiences at Mount Holyoke, but they gathered the impression from that one story that it must be a beautiful place.
The story makes one think of the present-day emphasis upon 'social adjustment.' Measured by every external standard, 'adjustment' for that diffident personality was not brought about by Mary Lyon. Yet later, when that same shy spirit was bringing up a family, one memory of her student days unfolded into almost legendary beauty, because of Mary Lyon's imaginative thought.
On the afternoon of a modern Founder's Day there is no more illuminating thing for a visitor to do than to go down for a moment to the Mary Lyon Room in Student Alumnae Hall. The place is usually very quiet in the late afternoon. The old clock on the wall ticks like a metronome beating time for an adagio song. There are the pictures of Mary Lyon's birthplace, and a door from the house at Buckland, and a coverlet she wove in the old-fashioned pattern of 'sunrise and dog-tracks' - the 'dog-tracks' done in the brown of the old-time 'but'nut dye.' Deacon Porter's clock is on the mantel. The 'Birds of South Hadley' are in their glass-domed cage. Miss Lyon's Bible is in the corner cupboard, and her thimble, and her bracelet, and a piece of cloth left over from one of her dresses, and the green velvet bag in which she collected money for the first endowment - the smallest contribution being six cents.
That six-cent item is famous. On a certain Sunday morning not long ago, members of the faculty and alumnae sat together reading aloud a newspaper item about the college. The writer of the item incautiously stated that the smallest contribution for the founding of Mount Holyoke was a gift of five cents. Instantly the whole roomful of listeners changed gravely, 'six cents,' in unison, with a harmonic blending of different voices and an accuracy of intonation that would have done credit to a verse-reading choir.
The green velvet bag is the most celebrated thing in the Mary Lyon Room. The most artistic thing pictorially considered is the Edouart silhouette of one of the early Trustees. But the most lovable thing of all is Mary Lyon's desk - not a desk that she used at South Hadley but one from her earlier days.
That desk, of unpainted natural wood crudely knocked together, with its straight wooden legs and its unpolished lid dented on the edges, takes every observer by surprise. It is such a plain uncompromising little desk, too battered for beauty, too narrow for comfort, too cramped for storage purposes - the desk of somebody who all but had no desk at all. Looking at it one remembers how much its owner achieved with slight material margin. Lingering beside it one is reminded of some of Mary Lyon's own concise maxims. Certainly no Founder's Day observance ought to go by without a thought for some of these:
Anything may become interesting which we think important.
Wealth and extravagance have no necessary connection.
Habit is more powerful than principle.
In all pursuits do not neglect the collateral means of improvement.
We must cooperate in all the known plans of God.
All ladies cannot be independent enough to be singular. Never be singular so as to be noticed; but select and combine so as to be in fashion.
My thoughts are turned not to the higher, not to the poorer, but to the middle classes. These contain the mainsprings and the wheels that move the world.
Ladies need systematic arrangements, but also to know how to alter to meet circumstances.
Ladies need to know how to take care of the fragments of time. Be careful to study to some purpose.
Could I be permitted to labor in the portico and spend my days in clearing ground for that which is to continue, and to exert an extensive and salutary influence on female education, and on religion from generation to generation, it would be the height of my ambition.
Come up to a proposed end in whatever you undertake.
Aim to speak smoothly, not with hitches and jerks.
Stop when you have done.
'Stop when you have done.' . . . That reminds us, Miss Mary Lyon. We will.