icent in
its green apparel, she quoted Irving as one who had understood English
country-life perhaps more deeply and fully than any other foreign author
who had ever written.

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,--

"It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but
America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, '_This is fine!_'"

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never
weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in
her "Notes of a Literary Life." "Is there anything under the sun," she
exclaims, "that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?"

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and
moved about only with severe pain. "It is not age," she said, "that has
thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty
years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear
father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of
that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of
one parent, and then of the other. I have only to be intensely thankful
that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such
exertion was removed."

"I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen," she
said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, "and
can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to
retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The
"Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things
of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,--"Nobody in England can write
the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays."

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an
old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the
heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," passed her married life. On the way
she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart.
Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first
nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were
both disappointed. We listened long, but, although the air was full of
birdsongs that evening, the sweet-voiced warbler was not of the choir.
She talked much, as we rode along, of Kingsley and Ruskin, both of whom
she loved as friends as well as authors. "John Ruskin," she said, "is
good and kind, and charming be