Her hearers are amazed from whence Proceeds that fund of wit and sense, Which, though her modesty would shroud, Breaks like the sun behind a cloud; While gracefulness its art conceals, And yet through every motion steals. Say, Stella, was Prometheus blind, And forming you, mistook your kind? No; 'twas for you alone he stole The fire that forms a manly soul; Then, to complete it every way, He moulded it with female clay: To _that_ you owe the nobler flame, To _this_ the beauty of your frame. He compliments her sincerity and firmness of principle in four nervous lines: Ten thousand oaths upon record Are not so sacred as her word! The world shall in its atoms end, Ere Stella can deceive a friend! Her tender attention to him in sickness and suffering, is thus described, with a tolerable insight into his own character. To her I owe That I these pains can undergo; She tends me like an humble slave, And, when indecently I rave, When out my brutish passions break, With gall in every word I speak, She, with soft speech, my anguish cheers, Or melts my passions down with tears: Although 'tis easy to descry She wants assistance more than I, She seems to feel my pains alone, And is a Stoic to her own. Where, among scholars, can you find So soft, and yet so firm a mind? These lines, dated March, 1724, are the more remarkable, because they refer to a period when Stella had much to forgive;--when she had just been injured, in the tenderest point, by the man who owed to her tenderness and forbearance all the happiness that his savage temper allowed him to taste on earth. As Stella passed much of her time in solitude, she read a great deal. She received Swift's friends, many of whom were clever and distinguished men, particularly Sheridan and Delany; and on his public days she dined as a guest at his table, where, says his biographer,[108] "the modesty of her manners, the sweetness of her disposition, and the brilliance of her wit, rendered her the general object of admiration to all who were so happy as to have a place in that enviable society." Johnson says that, "if Swift's ideas of women were such as he generally exhibits, a very little sense in a lady would enrapture, and a very little virtue astonish him;" and thinks, therefore, that Stella's supremacy might be "only local and comparative;" but it is not the less true, that she was beheld with tenderness and admiration by all who approached her; and whether she could spell or not,[109] she could certainly write very pretty verses, considering whom she had chosen for her model:--for instance, the following little effusion, in reply to a compliment addressed to her: