Those sentimental, love-lorn pieces I affected at a time when my days were so full of sunshine that I had to seek artificial gloom. My greatest favourites among this melancholy poet’s verses were “The Mother,” and “The Lonely One”--long poems, but I believe I could say every word of them now, even without the aid of the churn-dasher. The first pictured a young mother revelling in the beauty of her baby boy. Then comes his illness and the harrowing scene as she realizes she is to be bereft. As I recited the lines, I used to feel her rapt devotion and her piteous grief. I identified myself with “The Lonely One” in the same way--a love-lorn, unattractive damsel “on whose spirit genius poured its rays,” who lived through the bitterness of seeing her hero marry another, and then, his wife having died, turn to her for comfort, entreating her love, just as Death was about to claim her: She died, Yet as a day of storms will ofttimes sink With a rich burst of sunlight at its close, Thus did the rays of happiness illume Her parting spirit. By this time my eyes would be suffused and my voice tremulous; but the butter had come, and Grandma would come down-cellar and pour a little cold water into the churn to help the butter “gather”; and despite Emma C. Embury and her ill-fated maidens, I would drink copiously of that most delicious beverage, butter-milk from Grandma’s little red churn. It was a heterogeneous lot of books that I read the last four years in school--there was perhaps more system during the last two--and though I had little discrimination myself, I was aggrieved if the interference of parents or teachers took the form of anything more positive than suggestion. How fascinating I found the historical novels of Louise Mühlbach! What cared I if they were not reliable as history? I turned unwillingly from them to Scott at the earnest solicitation of my teachers. The “Correspondence between Goethe and Bettina” made a deep impression upon me. I should like to see the identical copy I read; it opened up a new world. And a translation of Faust by Agnes Swanwick, moved me strangely. I copied favourite passages from it in a blank book, conning them again and again. Faust’s apostrophe to the radiant moonlight would put me in an exalted mood whenever I read it, especially the latter part: “Oh! that I might wander on the mountain tops in thy loved light--hover with spirits around the mountain caves, flit over the fields in thy glimmer, and, disencumbered from all the fumes of knowledge, bathe myself sound in thy dew!” I copied sentimental passages in German script. I would have blushed to have it known how much I liked this: His stately step, His noble form; The smile of his mouth, The power of his eyes, And of his speech the witching flow; The pressure of his hand, And, Ah, his kiss!