eality, she became a great helper of her husband, Mr. London, in
his laborious and valuable works. When I heard Miss Benger was there, in
her historic turban, I thought how fortunate that I had remained at
home! I had always a terror of tall, commanding women, who blink down
upon you, and have the unmistakable air about them of 'Behold me! have I
not pronounced sentence upon Queen Elizabeth, and set my mark on the
Queen of Scots?' Still, I quite appreciated the delight of meeting under
the same roof so many celebrities, and was cross-questioning my husband,
when he said, 'But there was one lady there whom I promised you should
call on to-morrow.'

"Imagine my mingled delight and dismay!--delight at the bare idea of
seeing _her_, who must be wellnigh suffocated with the perfume of her
own 'Golden Violet,' the idol of my imagination,--dismay! for what
should I say to her? what would she say to me?

"And now I must look back,--back to the 'long ago.'

"And yet I can hardly realize the sweep of years that have gone over so
many who have since become near and dear to us. At that first visit, I
saw Laetitia Landon in her grandmamma's modest lodging in Sloane
Street,--a bright-eyed, sparkling, restless little girl, in a pink
gingham frock,--grafting clever things on commonplace nothings,
frolicking from subject to subject with the playfulness of a spoiled
child,--her dark hair put back from her low, but sphere-like forehead,
only a little above the most beautiful eyebrows that a painter could
imagine, and falling in curls around her slender throat. We were nearly
of the same age, but I had been almost a year married, and if I had not
supported myself on my dignity as a married woman, should have been more
than nervous, on my first introduction to a 'living poet,' though the
poet was so different from what I had imagined. Her movements were as
rapid as those of a squirrel. I wondered how anyone so quick could be so
graceful. She had been making a cap for grandmamma, and would insist
upon the old lady's putting it on, that I might see 'how pretty it was.'
To this grandmamma (Mrs. Bishop) objected,--she 'couldn't' and she
'wouldn't' try it on,--'how could Laetitia be so silly?'--and then
Laetitia put the great beflowered, beribboned thing on her own dainty
little head, with a grave look, like a cloud on a rose, and folding her
pretty little hands over her pink frock, made what she called a 'Sir
Roger de Coverley' curtsy, skippi