Miss Poulter has put upon her title-page a striking passage in French from some essay of _Bernardin de St. Pierre_, which may be thus literally translated. “Tasso, while travelling with a friend, one day ascended a very high mountain. When he had reached the summit, he exclaimed: ‘Seest thou these rugged rocks, these wild forests, this brook bordered with flowers, which winds through the valley, this majestic river, which rolls onward and onward till it bathes the walls of a hundred cities? Well, these rocks, these mountains, these walls, these cities, gods, men—lo! these are my poem!’” On the page immediately preceding the principal poem in the volume, “Imagination,” there appears the following from _Stewart’s Outlines of Moral Philosophy_, “One of the principal effects of a liberal education is to accustom us to withdraw our attention from the objects of our present perceptions, and to dwell at pleasure on the past, the absent and the future. How much it must enlarge in this way the sphere of our enjoyment or suffering is obvious: for (not to mention the recollection of the past) all that part of our happiness or misery, which arises from our hopes or our fears, derives its existence entirely from the power of our imagination.” We are pleased with these quotations. They augur well for the original words that are to follow. They prepare the mind of the reader for something almost as good as they are. The talent, or rather tact of quoting well is no mean one; it is not possessed by many, scarcely possessed at all by those who say that a quotation should be as strictly appropriate as a title. It is enough that a quotation be one naturally appertaining to or suggestive _per se_ of the subject matter. Mottoes, it should be remembered, are not texts, but simply prefixes, intended rather as ornaments than things of use. They are to books, chapters, and cantos, what jewels are to the clasps of a fair lady’s girdle, not indispensable to the clasps, but decorating them. In the choice of the jewels and the style of their setting the taste of the wearer is manifested.