"Imagine my mingled delight and dismay!--delight at the bare idea of seeing _her_, who must be wellnigh suffocated with the perfume of her own 'Golden Violet,' the idol of my imagination,--dismay! for what should I say to her? what would she say to me? "And now I must look back,--back to the 'long ago.' "And yet I can hardly realize the sweep of years that have gone over so many who have since become near and dear to us. At that first visit, I saw Lætitia Landon in her grandmamma's modest lodging in Sloane Street,--a bright-eyed, sparkling, restless little girl, in a pink gingham frock,--grafting clever things on commonplace nothings, frolicking from subject to subject with the playfulness of a spoiled child,--her dark hair put back from her low, but sphere-like forehead, only a little above the most beautiful eyebrows that a painter could imagine, and falling in curls around her slender throat. We were nearly of the same age, but I had been almost a year married, and if I had not supported myself on my dignity as a married woman, should have been more than nervous, on my first introduction to a 'living poet,' though the poet was so different from what I had imagined. Her movements were as rapid as those of a squirrel. I wondered how anyone so quick could be so graceful. She had been making a cap for grandmamma, and would insist upon the old lady's putting it on, that I might see 'how pretty it was.' To this grandmamma (Mrs. Bishop) objected,--she 'couldn't' and she 'wouldn't' try it on,--'how could Lætitia be so silly?'--and then Lætitia put the great beflowered, beribboned thing on her own dainty little head, with a grave look, like a cloud on a rose, and folding her pretty little hands over her pink frock, made what she called a 'Sir Roger de Coverley' curtsy, skipping backwards into the bedroom, and rushing in again, having deposited out of sight the cap she was so proud of constructing, took my hands in hers, and asked me 'if we should be friends.'