ns should be moved by some earnest
impulse from behind. We might write playfully, but there must be
conscience and reverence somewhere within it all. We had been taught,
and we believed, that idle words were a sin, whether spoken or written.
This, no doubt, gave us a gravity of expression rather unnatural to
youth.

In looking over the bound volume of this magazine, I am amused at the
grown-up style of thought assumed by myself, probably its very youngest
contributor. I wrote a dissertation on "Fame," quoting from Pollok,
Cowper, and Milton, and ending with Diedrich Knickerbocker's definition
of immortal fame,--"Half a page of dirty paper." For other titles I had
"Thoughts on Beauty;" "Gentility;" "Sympathy," etc. And in one longish
poem, entitled "My Childhood" (written when I was about fifteen), I
find verses like these, which would seem to have come out of a mature
experience:--

My childhood! O those pleasant days, when everything seemed free,
And in the broad and verdant fields I frolicked merrily;
When joy came to my bounding heart with every wild bird's song,
And Nature's music in my ears was ringing all day long!

And yet I would not call them back, those blessed times of yore,
For riper years are fraught with joys I dreamed not of before.
The labyrinth of Science opes with wonders every day;
And friendship hath full many a flower to cheer life's dreary way.

And glancing through the pages of the "Lowell Offering" a year or two
later, I see that I continued to dismalize myself at times, quite
unnecessarily. The title of one sting of morbid verses is "The
Complaint of a Nobody," in which I compare myself to a weed growing up
in a garden; and the conclusion of it all is this stanza:--

"When the fierce storms are raging, I will not repine,
Though I'm heedlessly crushed in the strife;
For surely 't were better oblivion were mine
Than a worthless, inglorious life.

Now I do not suppose that I really considered 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 affectation 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