"The first time," she says, "I ever met with any of his works, this vagueness brought me into a ludicrous dilemma. It was in the great library of Tavistock House that Mr Perry one morning put into my hand a splendidly printed and splendidly bound volume, (_Alastor_, as I think,) and desired me to read it, and give him my opinion. 'You will at least know,' he said, 'whether it be worth anybody else's reading.' "Accordingly I took up the magnificent presentation copy, and read conscientiously till visitors came in. I had no marker, and the richly-bound volume closed as if instinctively; so that when I resumed my task, on the departure of the company, not being able to find my place, I was obliged to begin the book at the first line. More visitors came and went, and still the same calamity befell me; again, and again, and again I had to search in vain amongst a succession of melodious lines, as like each other as the waves of the sea, for buoy or landmark, and had always to put back to shore and begin my voyage anew. I do not remember having been ever in my life more ashamed of my own stupidity, than when obliged to say to Mr Perry, in answer to his questions as to the result of my morning's studies, that doubtless it was a very fine poem--only, that I never could tell, when I took up the book, where I had left off half an hour before--an unintended criticism, which, as characteristic both of author and reader, very much amused my kind and clever host." Now, if, instead of the magnificent presentation copy, read in the great library of Tavistock House, where visitors were coming in and going out, Miss Mitford had taken a little homely manageable volume down Woodcock Lane, and there read _Alastor_, undisturbed, beneath the shadow of the trees, she must, we think, have had to record a very different impression of the poem. She would have needed no "marker." Perhaps there would have lived in her memory an hour of intellectual pleasure as great as any that the page of the poet had ever procured for her. Though not the highest effort of Shelley's genius, _Alastor_ is probably the most pleasing. There is no tortuosity of thought to pardon or to forget; it is one unbroken interwoven strain of music, of imagery, of sentiment. Those who have defined poetry as the luxury of thought, could nowhere find a better example to illustrate their meaning--it is all music, imagination, feeling. Oh, when the summer months come round, let us entreat Miss Mitford _to try it in Woodcock Lane_! How could she trust to anything she had read out of a magnificent presentation copy, in the great library at Tavistock House?