ve wished I could look into it again,
often and often through the years. But perhaps I ought to be grateful
to that little girl for teaching me to be careful about returning
borrowed books myself. Only a lover of them can appreciate the loss of
one which has been a possession from childhood.

Young and Cowper were considered religious reading, and as such I had
always known something of them. The songs of Burns were in the air.
Through him I best learned to know poetry as song. I think that I heard
the "Cotter's Saturday Night" and "A man's a man for a' that" more
frequently quoted than any other poems familiar to my girlhood.

Some of my work-folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to
"Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster" and "Edinburgh" reviews,
and they lent them to me. These, and Macaulay's "Essays," were a great
help and delight. I had also the reading of the "Bibliotheca Sacra" and
the "New Englander;" and sometimes of the "North American Review."

By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and Coleridge in my readings
of English poetry, I was enjoying it all so much that I could not any
longer call it study.

A gift from a friend of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of England" gave
me my first knowledge of Tennyson. It was a great experience to read
"Locksley Hall" for the first time while it was yet a new poem, and
while one's own young life was stirred by the prophetic spirit of the
age that gave it birth.

I had a friend about my own age, and between us there was something
very much like what is called a "school-girl friendship," a kind of
intimacy supposed to be superficial, but often as deep and permanent as
it is pleasant.

Eliza and I managed to see each other every day; we exchanged
confidences, laughed and cried together, read, wrote, walked, visited,
and studied together. Her dress always had an airy touch which I
admired, although I was rather indifferent as to what I wore myself.
But she would endeavor to "fix me up" tastefully, while I would help
her to put her compositions for the "Offering" into proper style. She
had not begun to go to school at two years old, repeating the same
routine of study every year of her childhood, as I had. When a child,
I should have thought it almost as much of a disgrace to spell a word
wrong, or make a mistake in the multiplication table, as to break one
of the Ten Commandments. I was astonished to find that Eliza and other
friends had not been as partic