“Whose poems do you like best?”
“Mrs. Hemans’s, of course. Don’t you think she is the best, sir?”
“She writes very beautiful verses, Harry. Which poem are you reading now?”
“Oh! one of my favourites—The Voice of Spring.”
“Who taught you to like Mrs. Hemans?”
“Euphra, of course.”
“Will you read the poem to me?”
Harry began, and read the poem through, with much taste and evident enjoyment; an enjoyment which seemed, however, to spring more from the music of the thought and its embodiment in sound, than from sympathy with the forms of nature called up thereby. This was shown by his mode of reading, in which the music was everything, and the sense little or nothing. When he came to the line,
“And the larch has hung all his tassels forth,”
he smiled so delightedly, that Hugh said: