iod is told in her letters to this brother.

The first of these letters which the editors let us see was written at
the age of fifteen. "I have," she says, "been busily engaged reading
Paradise Lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; every
passion that he portrayed I felt; I loved, hated, and resented just as
he inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated 'above this
visible, diurnal sphere.' I could not but admire such astonishing
grandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity of style. Much as I
admire Milton, I must confess that Homer is a much greater favorite."

It is not strange that a studious brother in college would take
interest in a sister who at the age of fifteen could write him with so
much intelligence and enthusiasm of her reading. The next letter is
two years later when she has been reading Scott. She likes Meg
Merrilies, Diana Vernon, Annot Lyle, and Helen Mac Gregor. She hopes
she may yet read Virgil in his own tongue, and adds, "I usually spend
an hour after I retire for the night in reading Gibbon's Roman Empire.
The pomp of his style at first displeased me, but I think him an able
historian."

This is from a girl of seventeen living on the edge of the northern
wilderness, and she is also reading Shakspere. "What a vigorous grasp
of intellect," she says, "what a glow of imagination he must have
possessed, but when his fancy drops a little, how apt he is to make
low attempts at wit, and introduce a forced play upon words." She is
also reading the Spectator, and does not think Addison so good a
writer as Johnson, though a more polished one.

What she was doing with her ever busy hands during this period we are
not told, but her intellectual life ran on in these channels until
she reaches the age of eighteen, when she is engaged to teach a school
in Gardiner, Maine, an event which makes her very happy. "I cannot
talk about books," she writes, "nor anything else until I tell you the
good news, that I leave Norridgewock as soon as the travelling is
tolerable and take a school in Gardiner." It is the terrible month of
March, for country roads in the far north, "the saddest of the year."
She wishes her brother were as happy as she is, though, "All I expect
is that, if I am industrious and prudent, I shall be independent."

At the conclusion of her school, she took up her residence with her
brother in Watertown, Mass., where one year before, he had been
settled as minister of the