Given the poetical temperament, and a lonely environment, with few distractions, youthful imagination is sure to express itself in mournful wails and despairing moans. Such wails and moans will be found to excess in this little book, and will serve to show better than any amount of common-sense reasoning, how fleeting are the sorrows of youth, and how slight the foundation on which the young build towers of despair.
In the days when these verses were written, each little song represented a few dollars (to my emaciated purse), and so the slightest experience of my own, or of any friend, with every passing mood, every trivial happening, was utilised by my imaginative and thrifty muse.
That the writer has always possessed robust health, and has lived to a good age, is proof positive that the verses are not all expressions of personal experiences, since no human being could have borne such continual agonies and retained life and reason.
All the verses in the book were written while I bore the name of Ella Wheeler, and are quite inconsistent with the ideas and philosophy of
Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
August 1910.
AN OLD HEART
How young I am! Ah! heaven, this curse of youth
Doth mock me from my mirror with great eyes,
And pulsing veins repeat the unwelcome truth,
That I must live, though hope within me dies.
So young, and yet I have had all of life.
Why, men have lived to see a hundred years,
Who have not known the rapture, joy, and strife
Of my brief youth, its passion and its tears.
Oh! what are years? A ripe three score and ten
Hold often less of life, in its best sense,
Than just a twelvemonth lived by other men,
Whose high-strung souls are ardent and intense.