“Loving she is, and tractable, though mild,
And Innocence hath privilege in her
To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes.”
The exquisite lines to six-year-old Hartley Coleridge might have been meant for her—
“whose fancies from afar were brought;
Who of her words did make a mock apparel,
And fitted to unutterable thought
The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol,”
with a difference to make her dearer. The children in Wordsworth “trail their clouds of glory” in a region into which we may only gaze from afar. Too rare is the atmosphere for our breathing; and we look at them a little wistfully, from another plane, feeling ourselves shut out from their “solitude” which to them is “blithe society.” Of that enchanted region of childhood, Marjorie alone has tried to make us free. The thrill the mother feels when her little one takes her into her confidence is ours to feel when we read Marjorie’s three diaries. That, I think, is what makes her so inexpressibly dear.