“Tender and beautiful sufferer! she gathered her duty only from my eyes, and assented to the slightest intimation of my will. I was her only friend on the earth, and her gentle nature, now doubly gentle in her sorrow, lavished all its tenderness on me. “Gradually she awoke from the listlessness induced by newness to suffering, and the wonderful elasticity of her character revealed a thousand glowing and impassioned traits, that had hitherto escaped my observation. Frank and courageous, she regarded things as they were in themselves, and not as they might appear to others. Challenging the opinions of none, with an intuitive feminine tact, her conclusions were always what one would desire. “Nature is, after all, the best teacher—would women but yield themselves to the promptings of a simple and womanly nature, they would be far more effective than they at present are. Our sex are worshippers of truth—you smile—but it is true nevertheless; and might you, dared you preserve your primitive truthfulness of heart, we should fall down and worship you. “But I digress, and am describing Anne rather as she appeared when, like Spenser’s Amoret, she ‘reclined in the lap of womanhood,’ than while she sat upon my knee, a tender and simple child. “I would scarcely assert that Anne was endowed with genius; and yet I know not—at any rate it was thoroughly a woman’s genius—earnest, truthful, affectionate, dependent, and yet nobly self-sustained—impassioned and yet never mistaking or perverting her emotions—embodying every quality of her sex, and yet elevating all—gay as a bird, simple as a child; her own bright nature investing all things with an ideal halo, and yet with a singular clearness of perception and soundness of judgment correcting all such illusions; a creature of contradictions, and yet grand in her consistency; a true woman; the life-study of a man, aye, and were he the wisest of his sex, he might never exhaust the sweet subject; just not an angel, but all a woman— ‘A creature not too bright nor good, For human nature’s daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.’ “The ship that had wrecked our own good barque was bound on a three years cruise, and all that time Anne was the only one of her sex on board. She never seemed to feel the peculiarity of her situation, all she said or did was feminine and becoming, and her little state room worthy of Goethe’s Margery, ‘it is not every maiden keeps her room so chary,’ might have been said of her.