“Clearness and shallowness most often go together,” he observed.  “When you see the pebbles at the bottom of a stream, most likely its waters are not deep.”

“Yet, you can stir up mud with a long pole in the pool more readily than in the river.  Keats wanted a current, it seems to me, to give him vitality and carry off his own mental impurities.  His was a stagnant being.”

“What a queer comparison,” and he shook his head laughingly, “ingenious, but at fault; you are begging the question now.  Well, what do you say to Shelley?”

“I have nothing to say to him; he has every thing to say to me.  He is my master.”

“An eccentric taste for so young a girl; and Byron? and Moore? and Mrs. Hemans? and Leigh Hunt? and Barry Cornwall?”

“Oh, every one likes them, but one gets tired of hearing lions roar, and harps play, and angels sing; and then one goes to Shelley for refreshment.  He is never monotonous; he was a perennial fountain, singing at its source, and nearly all was fragmentary that he wrote, of course, wanting an outlet.  The mind finishes out so much for itself, and the thought comes to one always, that he was completed in heaven.  No other verse stirs me like his.  You know he wrote it because he had to write or die.  He was a poet, or nothing.”

“You ought to write criticisms for Blackwood, really, Miss Monfort, and give a woman’s reason for every opinion,” with ill-concealed derision.

“You are laughing at me now, of course, but I don’t regard good-natured raillery.  I am sure I should not enjoy poetry as I do were I a better critic.  I love flowers far more than many who understand botany as a science, and pull them to pieces scientifically and analytically.”

“And paintings; do you love them?”

“Oh, passionately!”

“I confess I am blase with art,” he said, quietly; “I have seen so much of it, I like nature far better;” adding, after a pause, “now, that is your chief charm.  Miss Monfort.”

“What, being natural?”

“How well you divine my meaning!” with a little irony in the voice and eye.  The tendency of his mind was evidently sarcastic.

“Ah! true.  Papa thinks me too natural; he often checks my impulses.  Your father, too, coincides with him, I believe, in this opinion; but don’t talk about me.  Tell me of your sojourn in Germany.  How delightful it must have been to have lived in Heidelberg, and felt the very atmosphere you breathed filled with wisdom!  Did you ever go to Frankfort?  Did you see the statue of Goethe there?  Can you read ‘Faust’ in the original?  Oh, I should like to so much, but I know nothing of German.  I never could learn the character, I am convinced.  French and Italian only.  There was such a beautiful picture of ‘Margaret’ in the Academy of Fine Arts last year, I wanted papa to purchase it, but Evelyn and he did not fancy it as much as I did.  They prefer copies from the old masters.  I don’t care a cent for Magdalenes and Madonnas and little fat cherubs.  I prefer illustrations of poetry or fiction; don’t you, Mr. Bainrothe?”