* * * * *

Often and often, when the English lanes were white with blossoms, I have sat by her side while her faithful servant guided her low-wheeled pony-chaise among the pleasant roads about Reading and Swallowfield.  Once we went to a cricket-ground together, and as we sat under the trees, looking on as the game proceeded, she, who fell in love with Nature when a child, and had studied the landscape till she knew familiarly every flower and leaf that grows on English soil, assembled all that was best in poesy from her memory to illustrate the beautiful scene before us, and to prove how much better and more truly the great end of existence is answered in a rural life than in the vexatious cares of city occupation.  As we sat looking at the vast lawn, magnificent in its green apparel, she quoted Irving as one who had understood English country-life perhaps more deeply and fully than any other foreign author who had ever written.

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,—­

“It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, ‘This is fine!’”

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in her “Notes of a Literary Life.”  “Is there anything under the sun,” she exclaims, “that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?”

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and moved about only with severe pain.  “It is not age,” she said, “that has thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of one parent, and then of the other.  I have only to be intensely thankful that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such exertion was removed.”

“I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen,” she said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, “and can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy.”  The “Ballad of Cassandra Southwick” she esteemed as one of the finest things of our time; and of “Astrea” she said,—­“Nobody in England can write the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays.”

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the heroine of the “Rape of the Lock,” passed her married life.  On the way she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart.  Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were both disappointed.