g upon her with a lively
feeling of admiration.

"I cannot but approve your taste," he said.--"But do you not also
read the lighter works of the day?"

"I do not certainly pass all these by. I would lose much were I to
do so. But I read only a few, and those emanating from such minds as
James, Scott, and especially our own Miss Sedgwick. The latter is
particularly my favorite. Her pictures, besides being true to
nature, are pictures of home. The life she sketches, is the life
that is passing all around us--perhaps in the family, unknown to us,
who hold the relation of next door neighbors."

"Your discrimination is just. After reading Miss Sedgwick, our
sympathies for our fellow creatures take a more humane range. We are
moved by an impulse to do good--to relieve the suffering--to
regulate our own action in regard to others by a higher and better
rule. You are a reader of the poets, too--and like myself, I
believe, are an admirer of Wordsworth's calm and deep sympathy with
the better and nobler principles of our nature."

"The simple beauty of Wordsworth has ever charmed me. How much of
the good and true, like precious jewels set in gold, are scattered
thickly over his pages!"

"And Byron and Shelly--can you not enjoy them?" Clarence asked, with
something of lively interest in her reply, expressed in his
countenance.

"It were but an affectation to say that I can find nothing in them
that is beautiful, nothing to please, nothing to admire. I have read
many things in the writings of these men that were exquisitely
beautiful. Many portions of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are not
surpassed for grandeur, beauty, and force, in the English language:
and the Alastor of Shelly, is full of passages of exquisite
tenderness and almost unequalled finish of versification. But I have
never laid either of them down with feelings that I wished might
remain. They excite the mind to a feverish and unhealthy action. We
find little in them to deepen our sympathies with our
fellows--little to make better the heart, or wiser the head."

"You discriminate with clearness, Caroline," he said; "I did not
know that you looked so narrowly into the merits of the world's
favorites. But to change the subject; do you intend going to Mrs.
Walsingham's next week?"

"Yes, I think I will be there."

"Are you fond of such assemblages?" the young man asked.

"Not particularly so," Caroline replied. "But I think it right to
mingle in society, alt