ty assurance,--queen-like. Indeed, they fell
in her way, where the access might have seemed difficult, by
wonderful casualties; and the inveterate recluse, the coyest maid, the
waywardest poet, made no resistance, but yielded at discretion, as if
they had been waiting for her, all doors to this imperious dame.
She disarmed the suspicion of recluse scholars by the absence of
bookishness. The ease with which she entered into conversation made
them forget all they had heard of her; and she was infinitely less
interested in literature than in life. They saw she valued earnest
persons, and Dante, Petrarch, and Goethe, because they thought as she
did, and gratified her with high portraits, which she was everywhere
seeking. She drew her companions to surprising confessions. She was
the wedding-guest, to whom the long-pent story must be told; and
they were not less struck, on reflection, at the suddenness of the
friendship which had established, in one day, new and permanent
covenants. She extorted the secret of life, which cannot be told
without setting heart and mind in a glow; and thus had the best of
those she saw. Whatever romance, whatever virtue, whatever impressive
experience,--this came to her; and she lived in a superior circle; for
they suppressed all their common-place in her presence.

She was perfectly true to this confidence. She never confounded
relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without
crossing or entangling any. An entire intimacy, which seemed to make
both sharers of the whole horizon of each others' and of all truth,
did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the
history that an equal trust of another friend had put in her keeping.
In this reticence was no prudery and no effort. For, so rich her
mind, that she never was tempted to treachery, by the desire of
entertaining. The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent
memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,--from July,
1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe,--never saw her
without surprise at her new powers.

Of the conversations above alluded to, the substance was whatever was
suggested by her passionate wish for equal companions, to the end
of making life altogether noble. With the firmest tact she led
the discourse into the midst of their daily living and working,
recognizing the good-will and sincerity which each man has in his
aims, and treating so playfully and intellectuall