of which helped, perhaps, with other things, to incline her to poetry.”  When a little child “the golden-tressed Adelaide,” as the poet calls her in one of his songs, must often have heard her father read aloud his own poems as they came fresh from the fount of song, and the impression no doubt wrought upon her young imagination a spell she could not resist.  On a sensitive mind like hers such a piece as the “Petition to Time” could not fail of producing its full effect, and no girl of her temperament would be unmoved by the music of words like these:—­

    “Touch us gently, Time! 
      Let us glide adown thy stream
    Gently, as we sometimes glide
      Through a quiet dream. 
    Humble voyagers are we,
    Husband, wife, and children three. 
    (One is lost, an angel, fled
    To the azure overhead.)

    “Touch us gently, Time! 
      We’ve not proud nor soaring wings: 
    Our ambition, our content,
      Lie in simple things. 
    Humble voyagers are we,
    O’er Life’s dim unsounded sea,
    Seeking only some calm clime: 
    Touch us gently, gentle Time!”

Adelaide Procter’s name will always be sweet in the annals of English poetry.  Her place was assured from the time when she made her modest advent, in 1853, in the columns of Dickens’s “Household Words,” and everything she wrote from that period onward until she died gave evidence of striking and peculiar talent.  I have heard Dickens describe how she first began to proffer contributions to his columns over a feigned name, that of Miss Mary Berwick; how he came to think that his unknown correspondent must be a governess; how, as time went on, he learned to value his new contributor for her self-reliance and punctuality,—­qualities upon which Dickens always placed a high value; how at last, going to dine one day with his old friends the Procters, he launched enthusiastically out in praise of Mary Berwick (the writer herself, Adelaide Procter, sitting at the table); and how the delighted mother, being in the secret, revealed, with tears of joy, the real name of the young aspirant.  Although Dickens has told the whole story most feelingly in an introduction to Miss Procter’s “Legends and Lyrics,” issued after her death, to hear it from his own lips and sympathetic heart, as I have done, was, as may be imagined, something better even than reading his pathetic words on the printed page.

One of the most interesting ladies in London literary society in the period of which I am writing was Mrs. Jameson, the dear and honored friend of Procter and his family.  During many years of her later life she stood in the relation of consoler to her sex in England.  Women in mental anguish needing consolation and counsel fled to her as to a convent for protection and guidance.  Her published writings established such a claim upon her sympathy in the hearts of her readers that much of her time for twenty years before