We are ourselves getting rapidly to envy that “fellow” who is “wandering with her.” In our opinion she will soon be able to answer her own naïve question about love. Her companion leads her, with admirable discernment, as we think, into a glorious “old library.” What better place could he have selected to impress the heart of an imaginative and appreciating “little love.” If the cemetery and those “histories” did not explain to her the novel psychological emotion about which she consulted her mother, what occurs in the library certainly will. For see how the youth plays with the susceptibilities of a girl of “sixteen”—
“We sate together: his most noble head
Bent o’er the storied tome of other days,
And still he commented on all we read,
And taught me what to love and what to praise.
Then Spencer made the summer day seem brief,
Or Milton sounded with a loftier song,
Then Cowper charmed, with lays of gentle grief,
Or rough old Dryden roll’d the hour along.
Or, in his varied beauty dearer still,