She even possessed a vivacity that accompanied all her actions, and threw her real character into the distance. Though endued with the keenest sensibility, she appeared all life and gaiety. Wherever she was, she was the soul of the little company—her lively wit and her smiling beauty procured her attention wherever she showed herself. This beautiful mixture of the gay and the grave assumed, on some occasions, such strange contrasts, that she seemed to be composed of inconsistencies. Often in her little evening rambles with her young companions, after having put them all in good humour with themselves and with one another, by her little flattering railleries and harmless frolics, she would in an instant bound away from the group with the elastic grace of a mountain nymph—abruptly enter the cottage of some sick or suffering neighbour, with a smile on her countenance, like the angel of comfort charged with blessings, kindly inquire after their various wants and distresses, soothe them with consolatory hopes of better days, offer all those little assistances which old and decaying age accepts so gratefully at the hands of youth, and after mingling a sigh or a tear with theirs, again join her gay companions as though nothing had occurred.
In the innocent society of this amiable maiden, Charles passed the sweetest hours of his existence. His former boyish pursuits were renounced. The windmill, on a rock at a little distance, though nearly matured, was never completed; the water-works in the wood were permitted to run to ruin, even the perpetual motion in the room over the old kitchen, which was in a state of great forwardness, was neglected for a time, and eventually relinquished.
It is supposed, our intelligent correspondent says, that if Charles had never been in love, it is probable that he had never been a poet. And in confirmation of this idea, we observe that his first productions are of the amatory kind—"odes to beauty," "lines to Maria," "acrostics," &c. Among these fragments, we found a little airy piece without a head but we suppose intended for Maria:
"If all the world was made of kisses,
And all those kisses were made for me,
And I was made for you, my love,
How happy we should be!
If all the graces were join'd in one,
And all the wit and beauty too,
They'd make a maid like you, my love,
They'd make a maid like you!"
Some of his lyric pieces exhibit a strange mixture of philosophy and passion, learning and love. In the eleventh page of the manuscript before us, we find as curious a specimen of this kind as we ever recollect. It is much interlined and seems never to have been finished.
ON LOVE.
"Newton's keen observant eye,
Found a power pervade creation;
Ignorant of when or why,
He fondly called it gravitation.
But 'tis love that binds the spheres—
Love's the real central-forces—
Wheels them round their varying years,
Impels them on, and shapes their courses.