lilies, birds, clouds,
and brooks, with the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to
meteor. Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of
these girls'-compositions, their stringing together of the good old
traditional copy-book phrases; their occasional gushes of sentiment,
their profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that
read them as the experience of a bantam pullet's last-hatched young one
with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's
chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?
Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange
clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the
mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and
exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the
sensibility,--a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the
Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the Davidson sisters. In the
midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read over so
carefully were two or three that had something of individual flavor
about them, and here and there there was an image or an epithet which
showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather
marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.

The young lady-teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner,
as one reads proofs--noting defects of detail, but not commonly
arrested by the matters treated of. Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood's poem,
beginning--

"How sweet at evening's balmy hour,"

did not excite her. She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and
Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of
papers she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them
in a rather listless way,--for the poor thing was getting sleepy in
spite of herself,--when she came to one which seemed to rouse her
attention, and lifted her drooping lids. She looked at it a moment
before she would touch it. Then she took hold of it by one corner and
slid it off from the rest. One would have said she was afraid of it,
or had some undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her. Such odd
fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of
these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble
the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive
objects.

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