e is little, and
my belief is that my three-year-old daughter was suffering under an
impression that she had been taken a liberty with by some enterprising
schoolboy. Oh, Harriet! think if one of his own Irish rosebuds of
sixteen had received that poet's kiss, how long it would have been
before she would have washed that side of her face! I believe if he had
bestowed it upon me, I would have kept mine from water for its sake,
till--bed-time. Indeed, when first "Lalla Rookh" came out, I think I
might have made a little circle on that cheek, and dedicated it to Tom
Moore and dirt forever; that is--till I forgot all about it, and my
habit of plunging my face into water whenever I dress got the better of
my finer feelings. But, you see, he didn't kiss my stupid little child's
intelligent mother, and this is the way that fool Fortune misbestows her
favors. She is spiteful, too, that whirligig woman with the wheel. I am
not an autograph collector, of course; if I was, I shouldn't have got
the prize I received yesterday, when Rogers, after mending a pen for me,
and tenderly caressing the nib of it with a knife as sharp as his own
tongue, wrote, in his beautiful, delicate, fine hand, by way of trying
it--

"The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown."

Is that a quotation from himself or some one else? or was it an
impromptu?--a seer's vision, and friend's warning? Chi sa?

I cannot help being a little surprised at the earnestness with which you
implore me to read Archbishop Whately's treatise. My objection to
reading of books never extends to any book either given or lent, or
strongly recommended to me. I am so fond of reading that I care very
little what I read, so well satisfied am I with the movement and
activity which even the stupidest, shallowest book rouses in my mind.
With regard to the little work in question, you probably thought the
subject might not interest me, and therefore I should neglect it. The
subject, _i.e._, political economy, interests me so little that, though
I have read at various times and in sundry places publications of the
same nature with much attention, they, in common with other books on
other subjects for which I do not care, have left not the slightest
trace upon my memory; at least, until I come to read the matter all over
again, when my knowledge of it reappears, as it were, on the surface of
my mind, though it had seemed to me to run throug