And then began, at thirty-four, absorbing, painstaking literary work.  She studied the best models of composition.  She said to a friend, years after, “Have you ever tested the advantages of an analytical reading of some writer of finished style?  There is a little book called Out-Door Papers, by Wentworth Higginson, that is one of the most perfect specimens of literary composition in the English language.  It has been my model for years.  I go to it as a text-book, and have actually spent hours at a time, taking one sentence after another, and experimenting upon them, trying to see if I could take out a word or transpose a clause, and not destroy their perfection.”  And again, “I shall never write a sentence, so long as I live, without studying it over from the standpoint of whether you would think it could be bettered.”

Her first prose sketch, a walk up Mt.  Washington from the Glen House, appeared in the Independent, Sept. 13, 1866; and from this time she wrote for that able journal three hundred and seventy-one articles.  She worked rapidly, writing usually with a lead-pencil, on large sheets of yellow paper, but she pruned carefully.  Her first poem in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled Coronation, delicate and full of meaning, appeared in 1869, being taken to Mr. Fields, the editor, by a friend.

At this time she spent a year abroad, principally in Germany and Italy, writing home several sketches.  In Rome she became so ill that her life was despaired of.  When she was partially recovered and went away to regain her strength, her friends insisted that a professional nurse should go with her; but she took a hard-working young Italian girl of sixteen, to whom this vacation would be a blessing.

On her return, in 1870, a little book of Verses was published.  Like most beginners, she was obliged to pay for the stereotyped plates.  The book was well received.  Emerson liked especially her sonnet, Thought.  He ranked her poetry above that of all American women, and most American men.  Some persons praised the “exquisite musical structure” of the Gondolieds, and others read and re-read her beautiful Down to Sleep.  But the world’s favorite was Spinning:—­

  “Like a blind spinner in the sun,
      I tread my days;
  I know that all the threads will run
      Appointed ways;
  I know each day will bring its task,
  And, being blind, no more I ask.

* * * * *

  “But listen, listen, day by day,
      To hear their tread
  Who bear the finished web away,
      And cut the thread,
  And bring God’s message in the sun,
  ’Thou poor blind spinner, work is done.”

After this came two other small books, Bits of Travel and Bits of Talk about Home Matters.  She paid for the plates of the former.  Fame did not burst upon Helen Hunt; it came after years of work, after it had been fully earned.  The road to authorship is a hard one, and only those should attempt it who have courage and perseverance.