own poems as
they came fresh from the fount of song, and the impression no doubt
wrought upon her young imagination a spell she could not resist. On a
sensitive mind like hers such a piece as the "Petition to Time" could
not fail of producing its full effect, and no girl of her temperament
would be unmoved by the music of words like these:--

"Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently, as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream.
Humble voyagers are we,
Husband, wife, and children three.
(One is lost, an angel, fled
To the azure overhead.)

"Touch us gently, Time!
We've not proud nor soaring wings:
_Our_ ambition, _our_ content,
Lie in simple things.
Humble voyagers are we,
O'er Life's dim unsounded sea,
Seeking only some calm clime:
Touch us _gently_, gentle Time!"

Adelaide Procter's name will always be sweet in the annals of English
poetry. Her place was assured from the time when she made her modest
advent, in 1853, in the columns of Dickens's "Household Words," and
everything she wrote from that period onward until she died gave
evidence of striking and peculiar talent. I have heard Dickens describe
how she first began to proffer contributions to his columns over a
feigned name, that of Miss Mary Berwick; how he came to think that his
unknown correspondent must be a governess; how, as time went on, he
learned to value his new contributor for her self-reliance and
punctuality,--qualities upon which Dickens always placed a high value;
how at last, going to dine one day with his old friends the Procters, he
launched enthusiastically out in praise of Mary Berwick (the writer
herself, Adelaide Procter, sitting at the table); and how the delighted
mother, being in the secret, revealed, with tears of joy, the real name
of the young aspirant. Although Dickens has told the whole story most
feelingly in an introduction to Miss Procter's "Legends and Lyrics,"
issued after her death, to hear it from his own lips and sympathetic
heart, as I have done, was, as may be imagined, something better even
than reading his pathetic words on the printed page.

One of the most interesting ladies in London literary society in the
period of which I am writing was Mrs. Jameson, the dear and honored
friend of Procter and his family. During many years of her later life
she stood in the relation of consoler to her sex in England. Women in
ment