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

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, 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.