part of my education.  I was easily capable of attaining excellence, perhaps mastery, in the use of some implements.  Now I know, at least, what I do not know, and I get along by never voluntarily going beyond my depth, and, when called on to do it, stating my incompetency.  At moments when I feel tempted to regret that I could not follow out the plan I had marked for myself, and develop powers which are not usual here, I reflect, that if I had attained high finish and an easy range in these respects, I should not have been thrown back on my own resources, or known them as I do.  But Lord Brougham should not translate Greek orations, nor a maid-of-all-work attempt such a piece of delicate handling as to translate the Vita Nuova.’

Here is a letter, without date, to another correspondent: 

’To-day, on reading over some of the sonnets of Michel Angelo, I felt them more than usual.  I know not why I have not read them thus before, except that the beauty was pointed out to me at first by another, instead of my coming unexpectedly upon it of myself.  All the great writers, all the persons who have been dear to me, I have found and chosen; they have not been proposed to me.  My intimacy with them came upon me as natural eras, unexpected and thrice dear.  Thus I have appreciated, but not been able to feel, Michel Angelo as a poet.

’It is a singular fact in my mental history, that, while I understand the principles and construction of language much better than formerly, I cannot read so well les langues meridionales.  I suppose it is that I am less meridionale myself.  I understand the genius of the north better than I did.’

Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old poets,—­for to Ariosto she assigned a far lower place,—­Alfieri and Manzoni, among the new.  But what was of still more import to her education, she had read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost exclusively,—­Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above all, GOETHE.  It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her, though her rich and busy mind never reproduced undigested reading, that the last writer,—­food or poison,—­the most powerful of all mental reagents,—­the pivotal mind in modern literature,—­for all before him are ancients, and all who have read him are moderns,—­that this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled, nor was there room for any other.  She had that symptom which appears in all the students of Goethe,—­an ill-dissembled contempt of all criticism on him which they hear from others, as if it were totally irrelevant; and they are themselves always preparing to say the right word,—­a prestige which is allowed, of course, until they do speak:  when they have delivered their volley, they pass, like their foregoers, to the rear.