rm ensued;
From interest, as improvement rose,
Succeeded gratitude.

Obedience was no effort soon,
And labour was no pain;
If tired, a word, a glance alone
Would give me strength again.

From others of the studious band,
Ere long he singled me;
But only by more close demand,
And sterner urgency.

The task he from another took,
From me he did reject;
He would no slight omission brook,
And suffer no defect.

If my companions went astray,
He scarce their wanderings blam'd;
If I but falter'd in the way,
His anger fiercely flam'd.

Something stirred in an adjoining chamber; it would not do to be
surprised eaves-dropping; I tapped hastily, And as hastily entered.
Frances was just before me; she had been walking slowly in her room,
and her step was checked by my advent: Twilight only was with her, and
tranquil, ruddy Firelight; to these sisters, the Bright and the Dark,
she had been speaking, ere I entered, in poetry. Sir Walter Scott's
voice, to her a foreign, far-off sound, a mountain echo, had uttered
itself in the first stanzas; the second, I thought, from the style and
the substance, was the language of her own heart. Her face was grave,
its expression concentrated; she bent on me an unsmiling eye--an eye
just returning from abstraction, just awaking from dreams: well-arranged
was her simple attire, smooth her dark hair, orderly her tranquil room;
but what--with her thoughtful look, her serious self-reliance, her
bent to meditation and haply inspiration--what had she to do with love?
"Nothing," was the answer of her own sad, though gentle countenance; it
seemed to say, "I must cultivate fortitude and cling to poetry; one is
to be my support and the other my solace through life. Human affections
do not bloom, nor do human passions glow for me." Other women have such
thoughts. Frances, had she been as desolate as she deemed, would not
have been worse off than thousands of her sex. Look at the rigid and
formal race of old maids--the race whom all despise; they have fed
themselves, from youth upwards, on maxims of resignation and endurance.
Many of them get ossified with the dry diet; self-control is so
continually their thought, so perpetually their object, that at last
it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their nature; and
they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a little parchment
and