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;"

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,