Page:Samuel Carter Hall.pdf/5

look, like a cloud on a rose, and folding her pretty little hands over her pink frock, made what she called a 'Sir Roger de Coverley' curtsy, skipping backwards into the bedroom, and rushing in again, having deposited out of sight the cap she was so proud of constructing, took my hands in hers, and asked me 'if we should be friends.'

"'Friends!' I do not think that during the long intimacy that followed that child-like meeting, extending from the year '26 to her leaving England in '38, during which time I saw her frequently every day, and certainly every week,—I do not think she ever loved me as I loved her,—how could she?—but I was proud of the confidence and regard she did accord me, and would have given half my own happiness to shelter her from the envy and evil that embittered the spring and summer-time of her blighted life. It always seemed to me impossible not to love her, not to cherish her. Perhaps the greatest magic she exercised was, that, after the first rush of remembrance of all that wonderful young woman had written had subsided, she rendered you completely oblivious of what she had done by the irresistible charm of what she was. You forgot all about her books,—you only felt the intense delight of life with her; she was penetrating and sympathetic, and entered into your feelings so entirely that you wondered how 'the little witch' could read you so readily and so rightly,—and if, now and then, you were startled, perhaps dismayed, by her wit, it was but the prick of a diamond arrow. Words and thoughts that she flung hither and thither, without design or intent beyond the amusement of the moment, come to me still with a mingled thrill of pleasure and pain that I cannot describe, and that my most friendly readers, not having known her, could not understand.

"When I knew her first, she certainly looked much younger than she was. When we talked of ages, which we did the first day, I found it difficult to believe she was more than seventeen,—she was so slight, so fragile, so girlish

in her gestures and manners. In after-days I often wondered what made her so graceful. Her neck was short, her shoulders high. You saw these defects at the first glance, just as you did that her nose was retroussé, and that she was underhung, which ought to have spoiled the expression of her mouth,—but it did not: you saw all this at once, but you never thought about it after the first five minutes. Her complexion was clear, her hair dark and silken, and the lashes that sheltered her gray eyes long and slightly upturned. Her voice was inexpressibly sweet and modulated, but there was a melancholy cadence in it,—a fall so full of sorrow that I often looked to see if tears were coming: no, the smile and eyes were beaming in perfect harmony, but it was next to impossible to believe in her happiness, with the memory of that cadence still in the ear.

"Like all workers I have known intimately, she had a double existence, an inner and an outer life. Many times, when I have witnessed her suffering, either from those spasmodic attacks that sapped the foundation of her life, or from the necessity for work to provide for the comforts and luxuries of those who never spared her, I have seen her enter the long, narrow room that opened on the garden at Hans Place, and flash upon a morning visitor as if she had not a pain or a care in the world, dazzling the senses and captivating the affections of some new acquaintance, as she had done mine, and sending them away in the firm belief of her individual happiness, and the conviction that the melancholy which breathes through her poems was assumed, and that her real nature was buoyant and joyous as that of a lark singing between earth and heaven! If they could but have seen how the cloud settled down on that beaming face, if they had heard the deep-drawn sigh of relief that the little play was played out, and noted the languid step with which she mounted to her attic, and gathered her young limbs on the common seat, opposite the common