_, but what they have never forgotten, what
they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria
petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited
their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things
than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house
where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better
authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:

'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words--
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'

Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous _Pauline_. The same note
is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the
following simple strain of William Allingham:

'Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years--
To remember with tears!'

If this be so--and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that
so it is?--it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland
finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her
biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and
from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting.
Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her
surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to
say nothing of a reader.

'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall
from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion,
creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a
bubble in mid-Atlantic.'

And again:

'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long
generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest
contemporaries.'

However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude
to this excellent lady.

I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I
never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at
length in Miss More's authorized biography in four volumes by William
Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yest