to my dying hour." But what _was_ the
name of it? "Ask me no more."

In the department of history I can claim no results more calculated
to reflect credit upon the little student who hated a poor recitation
much, but facts and figures more. To the best of my belief, I can be
said to have retained but two out of the long list of historic dates
with which my quivering memory was duly and properly crowded.

I _do_ know when America was discovered; because the year is inscribed
over a spring in the seaside town where I have spent twenty summers,
and I have driven past it on an average once a day, for that period
of time. And I can tell when Queen Elizabeth left this world, because
Macaulay wrote a stately sentence:

"In 1603 the Great Queen died."

It must have been the year when my father read De Quincey and
Wordsworth to me on winter evenings that I happened for myself on
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first little event opened for me, as
distinctly as if I had never heard of it before, the world of letters
as a Paradise from which no flaming sword could ever exile me; but the
second revealed to me my own nature.

The Andover sunsets blazed behind Wachusett, and between the one
window of my little room and the fine head of the mountain nothing
intervened. The Andover elms held above lifted eyes arch upon arch
of exquisite tracery, through which the far sky looked down like some
noble thing that one could spend all one's life in trying to reach,
and be happy just because it existed, whether one reached it or not.
The paths in my father's great gardens burned white in the summer
moonlights, and their shape was the shape of a mighty cross. The June
lilies, yellow and sweet, lighted their soft lamps beside the cross--I
was sixteen, and I read Aurora Leigh.

A grown person may smile--but, no; no gentle-minded man or woman
smiles at the dream of a girl. What has life to offer that is nobler
in enthusiasm, more delicate, more ardent, more true to the unseen
and the unsaid realities which govern our souls, or leave us sadder
forever because they do not? There may be greater poems in our
language than Aurora Leigh, but it was many years before it was
possible for me to suppose it; and none that ever saw the hospitality
of fame could have done for that girl what that poem did at that time.
I had never a good memory--but I think I could have repeated a large
portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of hap-hazard