A New England Girlhood [67]
myself a weed, though I did sometimes fancy that a different kind of cultivation would tend to make me a more useful plant. I am glad to remember that these discontented fits were only occasional, for certainly they were unreasonable. I was not unhappy; this was an affect- ation of unhappiness; and half conscious that it was, I hid it behind a different signature from my usual one
How truly Wordsworth describes this phase of undeveloped feeling:--
"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 be would like to be buried. I modeled my verses,--
"Bury ye me on some storm-rifted mountain, O'erhaliging 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
How truly Wordsworth describes this phase of undeveloped feeling:--
"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 be would like to be buried. I modeled my verses,--
"Bury ye me on some storm-rifted mountain, O'erhaliging 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