jealousy which is the fond injustice of an unsatisfied heart, and which a child who has freely given and taken love finds it hard to comprehend. “I think my dear father,” writes Sara Coleridge, “was anxious that I should learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling so exclusively to my mother and all around me at home.” Love him and revere his memory she did; to Wordsworth she was conscious of owing more than to any other teacher or inspirer in matters of the intellect and imagination. But in matters of the heart and conscience the daily life of Southey was the book in which she read; he was, she would emphatically declare, “upon the whole, the best man she had ever known.” But the nepotism of the most “nepotious” uncle is not a perfect substitute for fatherhood with its hopes and fears. May-morning of the year 1804 saw “an Edithling very, very ugly, with no more beauty than a young dodo,” nestling by Edith Southey’s side. A trembling thankfulness possessed the little one’s father; but when the Arctic weather changed suddenly to days of genial sunshine, and groves and gardens burst into living greenery, and rang with song, his heart was caught into the general joy. Southey was not without a presentiment that his young dodo would improve. Soon her premature activity of eye and spirits troubled him, and he tried, while cherishing her, to put a guard upon his heart. “I did not mean to trust my affections again on so frail a foundation—and yet the young one takes me from my desk and makes me talk nonsense as fluently as you perhaps can imagine.” When Sara Coleridge—not yet five years old, but already, as she half believed, promised in marriage to Mr. De Quincey—returned after a short absence to Greta Hall, she saw her baby cousin, sixteen months younger, and therefore not yet marriageable, grown into a little girl very fair, with thick golden hair, and round, rosy cheeks. Edith Southey inherited something of her father’s looks and of his swift intelligence; with her growing beauty of face and limbs a growing excellence of inward nature kept pace. At twenty she was the “elegant cygnet” of Amelia Opie’s album verses, “’Twas pleasant to meet And see thee, famed Swan of the Derwent’s fair tide, With that elegant cygnet that floats by thy side”— a compliment her father mischievously would not let her Elegancy forget. Those who would know her in the loveliness of youthful womanhood may turn to Wordsworth’s poem, _The Triad_, where she appears first of the three “sister nymphs” of Keswick and Rydal; or, Hartley Coleridge’s exquisite sonnet, _To a lofty beauty, from her poor kinsman_: