or amusement. I think, with children at least, that it is partly the unselfish desire to give pleasure. They like gathering shells or doing anything for anybody. I hear dismal accounts of east winds in London; but the swallows believe in the spring, at any rate. They keep arriving in long V-like lines. How tame they are when they first come ! One alighted nearly at my feet this morning and stood looking at me with the most charming air of disdain imaginable. Then he perched on a lump of chalk, and gave his greeting to the land in a little low song — only two or three notes — but wonderfully clear and sweet. The gaunt old cliff seems to have a fluttering veil of melody thrown over it, it is so peopled with divers birds."
She records the impression left on her by the books with which her new or old friends supplied her:—
"I have read some capital papers of Lewes' in the 'Fort-nightly Review' on the 'Principles of success in Literature,' — rather heathenish, — I think he has a tendency that way; but solid, original, and thoughtful. Oddly enough, the paper on 'Style' concluded with, I believe, two (of course unintentional) examples of tautology. I suppose it is something like those grammatical errors which were always found in the prefaces of grammars, till they left off having prefaces. What a never-failing comfort any kind of art is."
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"I had a sabbath feast yesterday in the 'Unspoken Sermons.' It is not much to say that they are above any spoken ones that I ever heard. My experience of sermons has been unhappy; but some of the passages are simply the finest utterances of the soul that I ever came across — as ' a condition which, if delusive, would indicate a devil, may, of growth, indicate a saint,' — and so the whole of the 'Higher Faith.' "
*****
