in London, and now renewed his acquaintance with them.  The young heiress herself combined with the many worldly advantages that encircled her, much personal beauty, and a disposition the most amiable and attaching.  Though already fully alive to her charms, it was at the period of which we are speaking that the young poet, who was then in his sixteenth year, while the object of his admiration was about two years older, seems to have drunk deepest of that fascination whose effects were to be so lasting;—­six short summer weeks which he now passed in her company being sufficient to lay the foundation of a feeling for all life.

He used, at first, though offered a bed at Annesley, to return every night to Newstead, to sleep; alleging as a reason that he was afraid of the family pictures of the Chaworths,—­that he fancied “they had taken a grudge to him on account of the duel, and would come down from their frames at night to haunt him."[36] At length, one evening, he said gravely to Miss Chaworth and her cousin, “In going home last night I saw a bogle;”—­which Scotch term being wholly unintelligible to the young ladies, he explained that he had seen a ghost, and would not therefore return to Newstead that evening.  From this time he always slept at Annesley during the remainder of his visit, which was interrupted only by a short excursion to Matlock and Castleton, in which he had the happiness of accompanying Miss Chaworth and her party, and of which the following interesting notice appears in one of his memorandum-books:—­

“When I was fifteen years of age, it happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time.  The companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had been long in love, and never told it, though she had discovered it without.  I recollect my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well.  We were a party, a Mr. W., two Miss W.s, Mr. and Mrs. Cl—­ke, Miss R. and my M.A.C.  Alas! why do I say MY?  Our union would have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers,—­it would have joined lands broad and rich, it would have joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill matched in years (she is two years my elder), and—­and—­and—­what has been the result?”

In the dances of the evening at Matlock, Miss Chaworth, of course, joined, while her lover sat looking on, solitary and mortified.  It is not impossible, indeed, that the dislike which he always expressed for this amusement may have originated in some bitter pang, felt in his youth, on seeing “the lady of his love” led out by others to the gay dance from which he was himself excluded.  On the present occasion, the young heiress of Annesley having had