At Procter’s house the best of England’s celebrated men and women assembled, and it was a kind of enchantment to converse with the ladies one met there.  It was indeed a privilege to be received by the hostess herself, for Mrs. Procter was not only sure to be the most brilliant person among her guests, but she practised habitually that exquisite courtesy toward all which renders even a stranger, unwonted to London drawing-rooms, free from awkwardness and that constraint which are almost inseparable from a first appearance.

Among the persons T have seen at that house of urbanity in London I distinctly recall old Mrs. Montague, the mother of Mrs. Procter.  She had met Robert Burns in Edinburgh when he first came up to that city to bring out his volume of poems.  “I have seen many a handsome man in my time,” said the old lady one day to us at dinner, “but never such a pair of eyes as young Robbie Burns kept flashing from under his beautiful brow.”  Mrs. Montague was much interested in Charles Sumner, and predicted for him all the eminence of his after-position.  With a certain other American visitor she had no patience, and spoke of him to me as a “note of interrogation, too curious to be comfortable.”

I distinctly recall Adelaide Procter as I first saw her on one of my early visits to her father’s house.  She was a shy, bright girl, and the poet drew my attention to her as she sat reading in a corner of the library.  Looking at the young maiden, intent on her book, I remembered that exquisite sonnet in her father’s volume, bearing date November, 1825, addressed to the infant just a month after her birth:—­

    Child of my heart!  My sweet, beloved First-born! 
    Thou dove who tidings bring’st of calmer hours! 
    Thou rainbow who dost shine when all the showers
    Are past or passing!  Rose which hath no thorn,
    No spot, no blemish,—­pure and unforlorn,
    Untouched, untainted!  O my Flower of flowers! 
    More welcome than to bees are summer bowers,
    To stranded seamen life-assuring morn! 
    Welcome, a thousand welcomes!  Care, who clings
    Round all, seems loosening now its serpent fold: 
    New hope springs upward; and the bright world seems
    Cast back into a youth of endless springs! 
    Sweet mother, is it so? or grow I old,
    Bewildered in divine Elysian dreams!

I whispered in the poet’s ear my admiration of the sonnet and the beautiful subject of it as we sat looking at her absorbed in the volume on her knees.  Procter, in response, murmured some words expressive of his joy at having such a gift from God to gladden his affectionate heart, and he told me afterward what a comfort Adelaide had always been to his household.  He described to me a visit Wordsworth made to his house one day, and how gentle the old man’s aspect was when he looked at the children.  “He took the hand of my dear Adelaide in his,” said Procter, “and spoke some words to her, the recollection