mere pleasure of stimulated sensations; she had studied the character and history of the Father of her country, and the "fête" stirred up her enthusiasm, and inspired that feeling of actual existence and presence peculiar to minds of her temperament.
To the imaginative there is an extension of life far back into the dim past, and forward into the untried future, denied to those of common mould.
The day after the fête her elder sister found her absorbed in writing. She had sketched an urn, and written two stanzas beneath it: she was persuaded to show them to her mother; she brought them, blushing and trembling; her mother was ill, in bed; but she expressed her delight with such unequivocal animation, that the child's face changed from doubt to rapture, and she seized the paper, ran away, and immediately added the concluding stanzas; when they were finished, her mother pressed her to her bosom, wept with delight, and promised her all the aid and encouragement she could give her; the sensitive child burst into tears. "And do you wish me to write, mamma? and will papa approve? and will it be right that I should do so?" This delicate conscientiousness gives an imperishable charm to the stanzas, which will be found among the poems in this volume, under the title of "A Hero's Dust."
Lucretia did not escape the common trial of precocious genius. A literary friend, to whom Mrs. Davidson showed the stanzas, suspected the child had, perhaps unconsciously, repeated something she had gathered from the mass of her reading, and she betrayed
