eemed taller than common, dressed in a dark
silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew
she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features
were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other
voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard
often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination--Jenny Lind.
There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure
of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere
courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of
what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for
the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father
thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about
Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me
long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's
library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting
volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified
by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles
term, I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched
among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast,
which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in
England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon.
Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but
heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have
little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic
attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more
intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded
her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I
believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman
had placed herself, tried with all her might to read the book and
believe the theory; she would take up the mass of manuscript night after
night, and wade through it with that truly saintlike self-abnegation
which characterized her, occasionally, too, reading out a passage
which struck her. The result was that she could not bring herself to
disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a higher admiration than
ever of Bacon; and that, too, was characteristic of her.

We made several incursions into the surrounding