"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;"