impossible to express the summer girl in any single type? [Illustration] Indeed, the American girl’s methods of amusing herself are so various as to make it increasingly difficult to typify her at all, except as a goddess who, like Minerva (though _she_ did not go in much for amusing herself), shall illustrate a wide range of activities serenely and successfully undertaken. There is a triteness in the accomplishments of any period, yet the spirit of individualism in the American girl introduces here, as elsewhere, a diversifying element. I was reading the other day that Miss Mitford had that “faculty for reciting verses which is among the most graceful of accomplishments.” Where have all the verse reciters gone? Why did this elegant accomplishment perish? Are we all less poetical? Are our girls losing that sense of sentiment to which we used to look for so many of their quieter charms? Has this change anything to do with another change, surely not to be lightly accepted, which has of late years taken poetry from the top of the page, where we once thought it belonged of natural right, and placed it at the bottom? Is it finally to be crowded off the page altogether? Has the fact that women no longer consider verse an accomplishment anything to do with this subtle but revolutionary change? And what shall poetry say? Will poetry go on as it has from the beginning of time arming us with epithets of praise? If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be? I must ask the Professor some day what she thinks of the disappearance of poetry--she would tell me to say verse--as an accomplishment. For of course we cannot afford to ignore the significance of accomplishments, their influence either upon those who display or upon those who observe them. Accomplishments are more than an armor, a decoration,--they are a vent. A boy has his fling; a girl must have her accomplishments. It is long since hobbies were fitted with a side-saddle, and we have had no occasion to resent the general results. The concrete effect upon individual men is sometimes disquieting, but that is another matter. Miss America is, after all, especially accomplished in what she knows. The product of a system by which the limits of her information are the limits of her curiosity,--for, in general, she is not prohibited from reading the newspapers,--she has acquired a faculty which may, for aught I know, have superseded her quotation of verse,--the faculty for quoting facts. Yes, she still quotes, and the newer accomplishment, if less elegant, is not one which we may scorn or overlook. If in Tennyson’s phrase, she is part of all that she has seen, we might add “in print,” as a supplemental explanation of her attitude of mind.