I _do_ know when America was discovered; because the year is inscribed over a spring in the seaside town where I have spent twenty summers, and I have driven past it on an average once a day, for that period of time. And I can tell when Queen Elizabeth left this world, because Macaulay wrote a stately sentence: "In 1603 the Great Queen died." It must have been the year when my father read De Quincey and Wordsworth to me on winter evenings that I happened for myself on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first little event opened for me, as distinctly as if I had never heard of it before, the world of letters as a Paradise from which no flaming sword could ever exile me; but the second revealed to me my own nature. The Andover sunsets blazed behind Wachusett, and between the one window of my little room and the fine head of the mountain nothing intervened. The Andover elms held above lifted eyes arch upon arch of exquisite tracery, through which the far sky looked down like some noble thing that one could spend all one's life in trying to reach, and be happy just because it existed, whether one reached it or not. The paths in my father's great gardens burned white in the summer moonlights, and their shape was the shape of a mighty cross. The June lilies, yellow and sweet, lighted their soft lamps beside the cross--I was sixteen, and I read Aurora Leigh. A grown person may smile--but, no; no gentle-minded man or woman smiles at the dream of a girl. What has life to offer that is nobler in enthusiasm, more delicate, more ardent, more true to the unseen and the unsaid realities which govern our souls, or leave us sadder forever because they do not? There may be greater poems in our language than Aurora Leigh, but it was many years before it was possible for me to suppose it; and none that ever saw the hospitality of fame could have done for that girl what that poem did at that time. I had never a good memory--but I think I could have repeated a large portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of hap-hazard examinations on the poem from half-scoffing friends, sometimes of the masculine persuasion. Each to his own; and what Shakespeare or the Latin Fathers might have done for some other impressionable girl, Mrs. Browning--forever bless her strong and gentle name!--did for me. I owe to her, distinctly, the first visible aspiration (ambition is too low a word) to do some honest, hard work of my own, in the World Beautiful, and for it. It is April, and it is the year 1861. It is a dull morning at school. The sky is gray. The girls are not in spirits--no one knows just why. The morning mail is late, and the Boston papers are tardily distributed. The older girls get them, and are reading the head-lines lazily, as girls do; not, in truth, caring much about a newspaper, but aware that one must be well-informed.