MY POEM.
Made up when I was (about) Four.
"I to the hills will lift mine eyes—
The purple hills of Paradise."
That's all! Now laugh! And if you do, I shan't ever love you again. Father smiles and says that very likely I did put them together, but that the last line is in a book of poems by a man named Trowbridge.
Well, what if it is? Can't I think it and Mr. Trowbridge too? I never saw his old book. Why, I could not read then, and he couldn't know what a little girl was thinking, sitting down by Esk-waterside and watching the purple hills—till I was told to come in and haste-me-fast, because the dew was falling.
But of course I don't tell this to everybody. They would call it sentiment. But I pity the little lonely girl who doesn't have "thinks" like that all to herself, which she would die sooner than tell to anybody except to her Dear Diary.
After the boys got bigger and could romp, I didn't have nearly so many thinks—not time enough, I suppose. Boys need a heap of watching. At first they have no soul—only a mouth to be silly with, teeth to eat with, and a Little Imp inside each to make them pesterful and like boys.
Well, little by little, I made a collection of things that were of my color—all in my head, of course.
"League upon rolling league of imperial purple!"
I think it was father who wrote that, and I believe his heart was pretty big and proud within him, seeing his own heathery country spread out before him when he did it. I wonder if something went cluck-cluck (like a hen) at the bottom of his throat? It does in mine sometimes.