in her
composition, caused no one just knew how. Probably a certain young curate
at Saint Margaret's could have thrown light on this point; but he married,
took on a double chin, moved away to a fat living and never told.

No woman is ever wise or good until destiny has subdued her by grinding
her fondest hopes into the dust.

Lizzie Flower was wise and good.

She gave singing lessons to the Browning children. She taught Master
Robert Browning to draw.

She read to him some of her verses that were in the sewing-table drawer.
And her sister, Sarah Flower, two years older, afterwards Sarah Flower
Adams, read aloud to them a hymn she had just written, called, "Nearer, My
God, to Thee."

Then soon Master Robert showed the Flower girls some of the verses he had
written.

Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate, and told his mother so. A young
woman never cares anything for an unlicked cub, nine years younger than
herself, unless Fate has played pitch and toss with her heart's true love.
And then, the tendrils of the affections being ruthlessly lacerated and
uprooted, they cling to the first object that presents itself.

Lizzie Flower was a wallflower. That is to say, she had early in life rid
herself of the admiration of the many, by refusing to supply an unlimited
amount of small talk. In feature she was as plain as George Eliot. A boy
is plastic, and even a modest wallflower can woo him; but a man, for her,
inspires awe--with him she takes no liberties. And the wallflower woos the
youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using her influence the
better to instruct him.

It is fortunate for a boy escaping adolescence to be educated and loved
(the words are synonymous) by a good woman. Indeed, the youngster who has
not violently loved a woman old enough to be his mother has dropped
something out of his life that he will have to go back and pick up in
another incarnation.

I said Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate; and she declared that he was
the brightest and most receptive pupil she had ever had.

He was seventeen--she was twenty-six. They read Shelley, Keats and Byron
aloud, and together passed through the "Byronic Period." They became
violently atheistic, and at the same time decidedly religious: things that
seem paradoxical, but are not. They adopted a vegetable diet and for two
years they eschewed meat. They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the
groves were God's first temples; and sitting at t