A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

"There's a fierce gray bird with a bending beak," that the boys loved so dearly to "declaim;" and another poem by this last author, which we all liked to read, partly from a childish love of the tragic, and partly for its graphic description of an avalanche's movement:-- "Slowly it came in its mountain wrath, And the forests vanished before its path; And the rude cliffs bowed; and the waters fled,-- And the valley of life was the tomb of the dead." In reading this, "Swiss Minstrel's Lament over the Ruins of Goldau," I first felt my imagination thrilled with the terrible beauty of the mountains--a terror and a sublimity which attracted my thoughts far more than it awed them. But the poem in which they burst upon me as real presences, unseen, yet known in their remote splendor as kingly friends before whom I could bow, yet with whom I could aspire,--for something like this I think mountains must always be to those who truly love them,--was Coleridge's "Mont Blanc before Sunrise," in this same "First Class Book." I believe that poetry really first took possession of me in that poem, so that afterwards I could not easily mistake the genuineness of its ring, though my ear might not be sufficiently trained to catch its subtler harmonies. This great mountain poem struck some hidden key-note in my nature, and I knew thenceforth something of what it was to live in poetry, and to have it live in me. Of course I did not consider my own foolish little versifying poetry. The child of eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many games and pastimes.