'I see you are one of the best!' laughed Winterbourne. 'Are you an American man?' pursued this vivacious infant. And then on Winterbourne's affirmative reply,--'American men are the best,' he declared." On the other hand compare this intense, dark-eyed Maggie in her garret and with her flaming ways, with Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh." Aurora Leigh, too, has her garret, and doubtless her intensity too, blossoms in that congenial dark and lonesomeness. I read a few lines from Book 1st by way of reminder. "Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret-room Piled high with cases in my father's name ... Where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here or there At this or that box, pulling through the gap In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! At last, because the time was ripe, I chanced upon the poets." And here, every reader of _The Mill on the Floss_ will remember how, at a later period, Maggie chanced upon Thomas à Kempis at a tragic moment of her existence; and it is fine to see how in describing situations so alike, the purely elemental differences between the natures of Mrs. Browning and George Eliot project themselves upon each other. The scene in George Eliot concerning Maggie and Thomas à Kempis is too long to repeat here, but everyone will recall the sober, analytic, yet altogether vital and thrilling picture of the trembling Maggie, as she absorbs wisdom from the sweet old mediæval soul. But, on the other hand, Mrs. Browning sings it out, after this riotous melody: "As the earth Plunges in fury when the internal fires Have reached and pricked her heart, And throwing flat The marts and temples--the triumphal gates And towers of observation--clears herself To elemental freedom--thus, my soul, At poetry's divine first finger-touch, Let go conventions and sprang up surprised, Convicted of the great eternities Before two worlds. But the sun was high When first I felt my pulses set themselves For concord; when the rhythmic turbulence Of blood and brain swept outward upon words, As wind upon the alders, blanching them By turning up their under-natures till They trembled in dilation. O delight And triumph of the poet who would say A man's mere 'yes,' a woman's common 'no,' A little human hope of that or this, And says the word so that it burns you through With special revelation, shakes the heart Of all the men and women in the world As if one came back from the dead and spoke, With eyes too happy, a familiar thing Become divine i' the utterance!"