—­We too bad human mothers, even as Thou,
          Whom we have learned to worship as remote
          From mortal kindred, wast a cradled babe. 
          The milk of woman filled our branching veins,
          She lulled us with her tender nursery-song,
          And folded round us her untiring arms,
          While the first unremembered twilight year
          Shaped us to conscious being; still we feel
          Her pulses in our own,—­too faintly feel;
          Would that the heart of woman warmed our creeds!

          Not from the sad-eyed hermit’s lonely cell,
          Not from the conclave where the holy men
          Glare on each other, as with angry eyes
          They battle for God’s glory and their own,
          Till, sick of wordy strife, a show of hands
          Fixes the faith of ages yet unborn,
          Ah, not from these the listening soul can hear
          The Father’s voice that speaks itself divine! 
          Love must be still our Master; till we learn
          What he can teach us of a woman’s heart,
          We know not His, whose love embraces all.

There are certain nervous conditions peculiar to women in which the common effects of poetry and of music upon their sensibilities are strangely exaggerated.  It was not perhaps to be wondered at that Octavia fainted when Virgil in reading from his great poem came to the line beginning Tu Marcellus eris:  It is not hard to believe the story told of one of the two Davidson sisters, that the singing of some of Moore’s plaintive melodies would so impress her as almost to take away the faculties of sense and motion.  But there must have been some special cause for the singular nervous state into which this reading threw the young girl, our Scheherezade.  She was doubtless tired with overwork and troubled with the thought that she was not doing herself justice, and that she was doomed to be the helpless prey of some of those corbies who not only pick out corbies’ eyes, but find no other diet so nutritious and agreeable.

Whatever the cause may have been, her heart heaved tumultuously, her color came and went, and though she managed to avoid a scene by the exercise of all her self-control, I watched her very anxiously, for I was afraid she would have had a hysteric turn, or in one of her pallid moments that she would have fainted and fallen like one dead before us.

I was very glad, therefore, when evening came, to find that she was going out for a lesson on the stars.  I knew the open air was what she needed, and I thought the walk would do her good, whether she made any new astronomical acquisitions or not.