"In youth sad fancies we affect,
In luxury of disrespect
To our own prodigal excess
Of too familiar happiness."
It is a very youthful weakness to exaggerate passing moods into deep
experiences, and if we put them down on paper, we get a fine
opportunity of laughing at ourselves, if we live to outgrow them, as
most of us do. I think I must have had a frequent fancy that I was not
long for this world. Perhaps I thought an early death rather
picturesque; many young people do. There is a certain kind of poetry
that fosters this idea; that delights in imaginary youthful victims,
and has, reciprocally, its youthful devotees. One of my blank verse
poems in the "Offering" is entitled "The Early Doomed." It begins,--
And must I die? The world is bright to me,
And everything that looks upon me, smiles.
Another poem is headed "Memento Mori;" and another, entitled a "Song in
June," which ought to be cheerful, goes off into the doleful request to
somebody, or anybody, to
Weave me a shroud in the month of June!
I was, perhaps, healthier than the average girl, and had no
predisposition to a premature decline; and in reviewing these
absurdities of my pen, I feel like saying to any young girl who
inclines to rhyme, "Don't sentimentalize! Write more of what you see
than of what you feel, and let your feelings realize themselves to
others in the shape of worthy actions. Then they will be natural, and
will furnish you with something worth writing."
It is fair to myself to explain, however, that many of these verses of
mine were written chiefly as exercises in rhythmic expression. I
remember this distinctly about one of my poems with a terrible
title,--"The Murderer's Request,"--in which I made an imaginary
criminal pose for me, telling where he would not and where he would
like to be buried. I modeled my verses,--
"Bury ye me on some storm-rifted mountain,
O'erhanging the depths of a yawning abyss,"--
upon Byron's,
"Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;"
and I was only trying to see how near I could approach to his exquisite
metre. I do not think I felt at all murderous in writing it; but a more
innocent subject would have been in better taste, and would have met
the exigencies of the dactyl quite as well.
It is also only fair to myself to say that my rhyming was usually of a
more wholesome kind. I loved Nature as I knew her,--in our stern,
blustering, stimulating New England,--and I chanted the praises of
Winter, of snow-storms, and of March winds (I always took pride in my
birth month, March), with hearty delight.
Flowers had begun to bring me messages from their own world when I was
a very small child, and they never withdrew their companionship from my
thoughts, for there came summers when I could only look out of the mill
window and dream about them.
I had one pet window plant of my own, a red rosebush, almost a
perpetual bloomer, that I kept beside me at my work for years. I parted
with it only when I went away to the West, and then with regret, for it
had been to me like a human little friend. But the wild flowers had my
heart. I lived and breathed with them, out under the free winds of
heaven; and when I could not see them, I wrote about them. Much that I
contributed to those mill-magazine pages, they suggested,--my mute
teachers, comforters, and inspirers. It seems to me that any one who
does not care for wild flowers misses half the sweetness of this mortal
life.
Horace Smith's "Hymn to the Flowers" was a continual delight to me,
after I made its acquaintance. It seemed as if all the wild blossoms of
the woods had wandered in and were twining themselves around the
whirring spindles, as I repeated it, verse after verse. Better still,
they drew me out, in fancy, to their own forest-haunts under
"cloistered boughs," where each swinging "floral bell" was ringing "a
call to prayer," and making "Sabbath in the fields."
Bryant's "Forest Hymn" did me an equally beautiful service. I knew
every word of it. It seemed to me that Bryant understood the very heart
and soul of the flowers as hardly anybody else did. He made me feel as
if they were really related to us human beings. In fancy my feet
pressed the turf where they grew, and I knew them as my little sisters,
while my thoughts touched them, one by one, saying with him,--
"That delicate forest-flower,
With scented breath, and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe."
I suppose that most of my readers will scarcely be older than I was
when I wrote my sermonish little poems under the inspiration of the
flowers at my factory work, and perhaps they will be interested in
reading a specimen or two from the "Lowell Offering:"--