Her dogs and her geraniums were her great glories.  She used to write me long letters about Fanchon, a dog whose personal acquaintance I had made some time before, while on a visit to her cottage.  Every virtue under heaven she attributed to that canine individual; and I was obliged to allow in my return letters, that, since our planet began to spin, nothing comparable to Fanchon had ever run on four legs.  I had also known Flush, the ancestor of Fanchon, intimately, and had been accustomed to hear wonderful things of that dog; but Fanchon had graces and genius unique.  Miss Mitford would have joined with Hamerton in his gratitude for canine companionship, when he says, “I humbly thank Divine Providence for having invented dogs, and I regard that man with wondering pity who can lead a dogless life.”

Her fondness for rural life, one may well imagine, was almost unparalleled.  I have often been with her among the wooded lanes of her pretty country, listening for the nightingales, and on such occasions she would discourse so eloquently of the sights and sounds about us, that her talk seemed to me “far above singing.”  She had fallen in love with nature when a little child, and had studied the landscape till she knew familiarly every flower and leaf which grows on English soil.  She delighted in rural vagabonds of every sort, especially in gypsies; and as they flourished in her part of the country, she knew all their ways, and had charming stories to tell of their pranks and thievings.  She called them “the commoners of nature”; and once I remember she pointed out to me on the road a villanous-looking youth on whom she smiled as we passed, as if he had been Virtue itself in footpad disguise.  She knew all the literature of rural life, and her memory was stored with delightful eulogies of forests and meadows.  When she repeated or read aloud the poetry she loved, her accents were

    “Like flowers’ voices, if they could but speak.”

She understood how to enjoy rural occupations and rural existence, and she had no patience with her friend Charles Lamb, who preferred the town.  Walter Savage Landor addressed these lines to her a few months before she died, and they seem to me very perfect and lovely in their application:—­

    “The hay is carried; and the hours
    Snatch, as they pass, the linden flow’rs;
    And children leap to pluck a spray
    Bent earthward, and then run away. 
    Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves
    About whose frocks the fragrant leaves,
    Sticking and fluttering here and there,
    No false nor faltering witness bear.

      “I never view such scenes as these
    In grassy meadow girt with trees,
    But comes a thought of her who now
    Sits with serenely patient brow
    Amid deep sufferings:  none hath told
    More pleasant tales to young and old. 
    Fondest was she of Father Thames,
    But rambled to Hellenic streams;