Circumstances alter cases.  Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Bronte’s mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of Jane Eyre and Villette might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did.  Perhaps so.  As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain and The Search after Happiness of a Sunday, and found solace therein.  But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the Pilgrim’s Progress, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood’s Tales from the Church Catechism, and, ‘more curious sport than that,’ the Bible in Spain of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.

What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland’s enthusiasm for Hannah More’s writings is that it expires with the preface. There, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light: 

’And The Search after Happiness! You cannot have forgotten all of the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals flung down by the warm wind.’

This passage lets us into the secret.  I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in The Search after Happiness, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home.  Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head: 

’As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth’s home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words—­
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.’

Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous Pauline.  The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham: 

’Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years—­
To remember with tears!’

If this be so—­and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?—­it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More’s books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting.  Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.