fact. I
began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret
of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.

Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the
far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for
scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. A moment's
insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. I have frequently seen
children, long exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose features had a
strange look of advanced age. Too often one meets such in our charitable
institutions. Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few
summers were threescore years and ten.

And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool and
saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound
melancholy of those lines of Shelley,

"I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear."

came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.

I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this gift
of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as in
words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and
imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I
am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps I
owe it to my--Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first
calls him the venerable So-and-So!

--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like
a lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of
the whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood
makes it hard to train.

Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely, that
it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and therefore
more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other hand, is
much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements