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 Icould 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.Iparted 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,Iwrote 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 "Sab-bath in the fields."Bryant's "Forest Hymn"did me an equally beautiful service.Iknew 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 Iknew 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 Iwas 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 Offer-ing:"--LIVE LIKE THE FLOWERS.
Cheerfully wave they o'er valley and mountain,Gladden the desert,and smile by the fountain;Pale discontent in no young blossom lowers:--Live like the flowers!
Meekly their buds in the heavy rain bending,Softly their hues with the mellow light blending,Gratefully welcoming sunlight and showers:--Live like the flowers!
Freely their sweets on the wild breezes flinging,While in their depths are new odors upspringing:--(Blessedness twofold of Love's holy dowers,)Live like the flowers!
Gladly they heed Who their brightness has given:
Blooming on earth,look they all up to heaven;Humbly look up from their loveliest bowers:-Live like the flowers!
Peacefully droop they when autumn is sighing;Breathing mild fragrance around them in dying,Sleep they in hope of Spring's freshening hours:--Die like the flowers!
The prose-poem that follows was put into a rhymed version by several unknown hands in periodicals of that day,so that at last I also wrote one,in self-defense,to claim my own waif.But it was a prose-poem that I intended it to be,and I think it is better so.
"BRING BACK MY FLOWERS."
On the bank of a rivulet sat a rosy child.Her lap was filled with flowers,and a garland of rose-buds was twined around her neck.Her face was as radiant as the sunshine that fell upon it,and her voice was as clear as that of the bird which warbled at her side.
The little stream went singing on,and with every gush of its music the child lifted a flower in her dimpled hand,and,with a merry laugh,threw it upon the water.In her glee she forgot that her treasures were growing less,and with the swift motion of childhood,she flung them upon the sparkling tide,until every bud and blossom had disappeared.
