wayed to and fro, sobbing
his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed,
repeating,--

"For I am sick, and capable of fears,--
Oppressed with wrong, and, therefore, full of fears;
A widow, husbandless, subject to fears;
A woman, naturally born to fears."

"If thou, that bidst me be content, wert grim,
Ugly, and slanderous to thy mother's womb,--
Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious--"

Or, drawing herself up "to the height of her great argument,"--

"I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,
For grief is proud, and makes his owner stout.
Here I and sorrow sit."

Scott used to say that he was amazed at her power over him, saying to
Mrs. Keith, "She's the most extraordinary creature I ever met with, and
her repeating of Shakespeare overpowers me as nothing else does."

Thanks to the little book whose title heads this paper, and thanks still
more to the unforgetting sister of this dear child, who has much of the
sensibility and fun of her who has been in her small grave these fifty
and more years, we have now before us the letters and journals of Pet
Marjorie: before us lies and gleams her rich brown hair, bright and
sunny as if yesterday's, with the words on the paper, "Cut out in her
last illness," and two pictures of her by her beloved Isabella, whom she
worshipped; there are the faded old scraps of paper, hoarded still, over
which her warm breath and her warm little heart had poured themselves;
there is the old watermark, "Lingard, 1808." The two portraits are very
like each other, but plainly done at different times; it is a chubby,
healthy face, deep-set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on
within as to gather in all the glories from without; quick with the
wonder and the pride of life: they are eyes that would not be soon
satisfied with seeing; eyes that would devour their object, and yet
childlike and fearless; and that is a mouth that will not be soon
satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has
always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile, and speaking feature.

There she is, looking straight at us as she did at him,--fearless, and
full of love, passionate, wild, wilful, fancy's child. One cannot look
at it without thinking of Wordsworth's lines on poor Hartley
Coleridge:--

"O blessed vision, happy child!
Thou art so exquisitely wild,
I thought of thee with many fears,--
Of what might