nambulistic, floated through the curtains.

There was a brief interval for rapturous vocatives and then the
curtains were flung apart and Spring burst through, crying,

"I come! I come! Ye have called me long.
I come o'er the mountains with light and song!
Ye may trace my step o'er the wakening earth
By the winds that tell of the violet's birth."

The young lady, attired in white and hung with garlands, looked not
unlike the engraving of "Spring" in the illustrated editions of the
poems of the gentle Felicia. For a moment Anne, who had long outgrown
Mrs. Hemans, was disposed to laugh, but as the sweet ecstatic voice
trilled on a wave of sadness swept over her, a familiar scene of her
childhood rose and effaced the one beneath. She saw the favourite room
of her mother in the tower overhanging the sea, her brothers sprawled
on the hearthrug, herself in her own little chair, her mother in her
deep invalid sofa holding her youngest child in her arms, while she
softly recited the "Evening Prayer at a Girl's School," "The
Coronation of Inez del Castro," "Juana," or, to please the more robust
taste of the boys, "Bernardo del Carpio," and "Casabianca," the last
two in sweet inadequate tones. Lines, long forgotten swept back to
Anne out of the past:

The night wind shook the tapestry round an ancient palace
room,
And torches, as it rose and fell, waved through the
gorgeous gloom.

There was music on the midnight--
From a royal fane it rolled.

The warrior bowed his crested head, and tamed his heart of
fire,
And sued the haughty king to free his long imprisoned sire.

Mrs. Percy had been a gentle, sentimental, romantic creature with
golden ringlets and floating sylph-like form, not unlike Lady Mary's.
She received little attention from her scientific husband and devoted
her short life to her children and to poetry, writing graceful vacant
verses herself. Mrs. Hemans was her favourite poet, although her eyes
could kindle when she read "The Corsair," or "The Bride of Arbydos,"
particularly as she had once met Byron and remembered him as the
handsomest of mortals. But she would have thought it indecorous even
to mention his name before her young children. Mrs. Hemans was as much
a part of the evening hour in winter as the dusk and the blazing logs,
and the children loved her almost as well as the gentle being who
renewed her girlhood in those romantic