Poems (Chitwood)/Preface
PREFACE.
I have been requested by the nearest friends of the late Miss Chitwood to write a Preface for a volume of her poetry. It is to me an unaccustomed work, and I do not know that I can perform it more appropriately than by copying from my paper of last January the notice I then made of her death, and of her genius. That notice was as follows:
"We have seldom been so deeply pained, as by the intelligence of the death of Miss Mary Louisa Chitwood, of Mt. Carmel, Indiana. We grieve at her loss, for she was our very dear, personal friend, and one of the brightest among the young women of genius in this country. She was, for a long time, a writer of poetry for the Louisville Journal; and every reader has admired the rich and tender beauty of her productions.
"Miss Chitwood was young; but, in her brief career of life, she knew something of sorrow, and her heart was both softened and strengthened by the stern discipline. She was kind, and gentle, and true, and good—warm-hearted and high-souled—diffident and shrinking, but conscious of bright and beautiful thoughts, and of strong powers, given her by God for useful purposes. Her whole nature was deeply and intensely poetical; and thus to her the whole world was full of poetry. The deepest griefs of her young bosom were turned to music—soft, sweet, and mournful music, on her lips. There was a low, and sad, and mysterious melody in her heart, as if that young heart had wandered down from Heaven, and were moaning for its home, as the sea shell moans for its parent sea. There was no deadly nightshade, or other noxious thing among the myriad blossoms of her soul, that flung upon every breeze that stirred them an incense like that of Araby the Blest. She never uttered a thought that was not fitted to purify, and beautify, and make better every heart into which it sank-never a thought that might not be cherished and spoken by an angel in the midst of the shining hosts of Heaven. Every thought rested as purely and beautifully in her heart as a white dove in its nest, or a starbeam in the calm lake, or a dew-drop in the cup of the rose, or the soul of love and perfume in the bosom of the violet. The bitterest trials could not turn to bitterness her sweet and lovely nature. No adversity could make her cold, or morbid, or misanthropic; on the contrary, the whole tendency of her sorrowful experiences of life was to soften, and etherialize, and hallow her spirit, and to render it the home of universal benevolence, and charity, and love.
"Miss Chitwood had extraordinary genius; and, up to the time of her death, she cultivated it with diligence and success. She was rising rapidly to fame, when suddenly her fiery heart sank down, to be quenched in the cold damps of the grave. It was as if a tree, in the midst of all its wealth of April bloom, were uprent by the whirlwind; as if a young eagle, springing upward to the sky, were stricken down by the fowler's shaft; as if a young star, mounting brightly toward the zenith to take its place in heaven, were suddenly and mysteriously blotted in mid-career from existence. When the sad knowledge that she was dead came home to us, we felt, for a moment, as if beauty and glory had perished from the Universe—as if something beautiful in nature had stopped; as if an exquisite harmony in creation had ceased: we remembered not that her pure spirit still lives, exalted and strengthened, and rendered even more heavenly than in its lovely pilgrimage of earth. We loved her as dearly as we could love one whom we had never seen; and her pure, and gentle, and childlike, and enthusiastic, and holy love was to us, surrounded as we ever were by the fierce strifes of politics, like a tone of music among rude voices—a 'sweet benediction in the eternal curse.'
"We hope that Miss Chitwood's writings, in poetry and prose, will be collected by some surviving friend or relative, for publication, and it would give us pleasure to render our assistance in such a work. It would be to us a labor of duty and love. There is, in what Miss C. has written, not only a brilliant promise of what she would have done, but very much of graceful and beautiful fulfillment. She has uttered thoughts, which, we believe, will never die in the great heart of humanity. Perhaps her name may not survive her generation; it is possible, that her poetry, even before the lapse of many years, may be engulfed beneath the surging waves of time; but we religiously believe that there are influences from her life, and words, not destined to pass away. Those influences are as a soft and gentle zephyr, passing on to join the storms of beneficent might that sweep and purify the earth.
"We promised Miss Chitwood a tribute to her living worth and genius: but we have come too late; and now, standing, as it were, beside her coffin, we lay our humble offering on the cold bosom upon which her white hands are so meekly folded. We seem to hear a voice from all nature around us, asking what business we have here, while the bright spirits that have blessed our life are falling, one by one, around us. Oh, it seems a mysterious dispensation of Providence, that tho little amount of breath necessary to the life of a glorious young girl is withdrawn, while enough of wind to make a blustering day is vouchsafed to the lungs and the nostrils of the tens of thousands of the worthless and the vile:
Why are the bad above, the good beneath
The green grass of the grave? The mower fells
Briars and flowers alike—but we may breathe
(When he his desolating blade shall sheathe,
And rest him from his work) in a pure sky,
Above the smoke of burning worlds—and death,
Upon scorch'd pinions, with the dead shall lie,
When Time, with all his years and centuries, has gone by."