. The child of
eight or nine years regarded her rhymes as only one among her many
games and pastimes.

But with this ideal picture of mountain scenery there came to me a
revelation of poetry as the one unattainable something which I must
reach out after, because I could not live without it. The thought of it
was to me like the thought of God and of truth. To leave out poetry
would be to lose the real meaning of life. I felt this very blindly and
vaguely, no doubt; but the feeling was deep. It was as if Mont Blanc
stood visibly before me, while I murmured to myself in lonely places--

"Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers
Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?"

And then the

"Pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound"

gave glorious answer, with the streams and torrents, and my child-heart
in its trance echoed the poet's invocation,--

"Rise, like a cloud of incense from the earth!
And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun,
Earth, with her thousand voices, calls on GOD!"

I have never visited Switzerland, but I surely saw the Alps, with
Coleridge, in my childhood. And although I never stood face to face
with mountains until I was a mature woman, always, after this vision of
them, they were blended with my dream of whatever is pure and lofty in
human possibilities,--like a white ideal beckoning me on.

Since I am writing these recollections for the young, I may say here
that I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful
elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of
blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much
earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory
breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched
even dull drudgery with its sunshine.

Hard work, however, has its own illumination--if done as duty which
worldliness has not; and worldliness seems to be the greatest
temptation and danger Of young people in this generation. Poetry is one
of the angels whose presence will drive out this sordid demon, if
anything less than the Power of the Highest can. But poetry is of the
Highest. It is the Divine Voice, always, that we recognize through the
poet's, whenever he most deeply moves our souls.

Reason and observation, as well