s by the borders of woods and on mounds
within, deep ditchbanks unrolled profuse tangles of new blades,
and sharp eyes might light on a late white violet overlooked by the
children; primroses ran along the banks. Jane had a maxim that flowers
should be spared to live their life, especially flowers of the wilds;
she had reared herself on our poets; hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of
the arrival of one of the minstrel order: and the girl, who could
deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if requested, would refuse
to pluck a wildflower. But now they cried out to her to be plucked in
hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to her no violation
of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that would have done
honour to the procession of the children's May-day--a day she excused
for the slaughter because her idol and prophet among the poets, wild
nature's interpreter, was that day on the side of the children. How like
a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant mass shine to her
patient! Only to look at it was medicine! She believed, in her lively
healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to health, and she
hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred obligation to the
leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets. If much brooding on them will
sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and
as her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than
lead her into foolishness. Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility,
imaginative, yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse
brain and nerve, and was often a problem to the chief person interested
in it. She thought so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly,
brooded so softly! Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile
apparent antagonism and read themselves, forget that they are not full
grown. Longer than others are they young: but meanwhile they are of an
age when we are driven abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way
to the south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the
farmer's wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying
under swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to
send from London for coming u