ings are fledged, and the birds must leave their nest. The
communication of thought to man is implanted as an instinct in those
breasts to which Heaven has intrusted the solemn agencies of genius.
In the work which Maltravers now composed he consulted Florence: his
confidence delighted her--it was a compliment she could appreciate.
Wild, fervid, impassioned, was that work--a brief and holiday
creation--the youngest and most beloved of the children of his brain.
And as day by day the bright design grew into shape, and thought and
imagination found themselves "local habitations," Florence felt as if
she were admitted into the palace of the genii, and made acquainted with
the mechanism of those spells and charms with which the preternatural
powers of mind design the witchery of the world. Ah, how different in
depth and majesty were those intercommunications of idea between Ernest
Maltravers and a woman scarcely inferior to himself in capacity and
acquirement, from that bridge of shadowy and dim sympathies which the
enthusiastic boy had once built up between his own poetry of knowledge
and Alice's poetry of love!

It was one late afternoon in September, when the sun was slowly going
down its western way, that Lady Florence, who had been all that
morning in her own room, paying off, as she said, the dull arrears of
correspondence, rather on Lord Saxingham's account than her own; for he
punctiliously exacted from her the most scrupulous attention to cousins
fifty times removed, provided they were rich, clever, well off, or in
any way of consequence:--it was one afternoon that, relieved from these
avocations, Lady Florence strolled through the grounds with Cleveland.
The gentlemen were still in the stubble-fields, the ladies were out in
barouches and pony phaetons, and Cleveland and Lady Florence were alone.

Apropos of Florence's epistolary employment, their conversation fell
upon that most charming species of literature, which joins with the
interest of a novel the truth of a history--the French memoir and
letter-writers. It was a part of literature in which Cleveland was
thoroughly at home.

"Those agreeable and polished gossips," said he, "how well they
contrived to introduce nature into art! Everything artificial seemed so
natural to them. They even feel by a kind of clockwork, which seems to
go better than the heart itself. Those pretty sentiments, those delicate
gallantries, of Madame de Sevigne to her daughter, how a