“I cannot but approve your taste,” he said.—­“But do you not also read the lighter works of the day?”

“I do not certainly pass all these by.  I would lose much were I to do so.  But I read only a few, and those emanating from such minds as James, Scott, and especially our own Miss Sedgwick.  The latter is particularly my favorite.  Her pictures, besides being true to nature, are pictures of home.  The life she sketches, is the life that is passing all around us—­perhaps in the family, unknown to us, who hold the relation of next door neighbors.”

“Your discrimination is just.  After reading Miss Sedgwick, our sympathies for our fellow creatures take a more humane range.  We are moved by an impulse to do good—­to relieve the suffering—­to regulate our own action in regard to others by a higher and better rule.  You are a reader of the poets, too—­and like myself, I believe, are an admirer of Wordsworth’s calm and deep sympathy with the better and nobler principles of our nature.”

“The simple beauty of Wordsworth has ever charmed me.  How much of the good and true, like precious jewels set in gold, are scattered thickly over his pages!”

“And Byron and Shelly—­can you not enjoy them?” Clarence asked, with something of lively interest in her reply, expressed in his countenance.

“It were but an affectation to say that I can find nothing in them that is beautiful, nothing to please, nothing to admire.  I have read many things in the writings of these men that were exquisitely beautiful.  Many portions of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are not surpassed for grandeur, beauty, and force, in the English language:  and the Alastor of Shelly, is full of passages of exquisite tenderness and almost unequalled finish of versification.  But I have never laid either of them down with feelings that I wished might remain.  They excite the mind to a feverish and unhealthy action.  We find little in them to deepen our sympathies with our fellows—­little to make better the heart, or wiser the head.”

“You discriminate with clearness, Caroline,” he said; “I did not know that you looked so narrowly into the merits of the world’s favorites.  But to change the subject; do you intend going to Mrs. Walsingham’s next week?”

“Yes, I think I will be there.”

“Are you fond of such assemblages?” the young man asked.

“Not particularly so,” Caroline replied.  “But I think it right to mingle in society, although all of its forms are not pleasant to me.”

“And why do you mingle in it then, if its sphere is uncongenial?”

“I cannot say, Mr. Clarence, that it is altogether uncongenial.  Wherever we go, into society, we come in contact with much that is good.  Beneath the false glitter, often assumed and worn without the heart’s being in it, but from a weak spirit of conformity, lies much that is sound in principle, and healthy in moral life.  In mingling, then, in society, we aid to develope and strengthen these good principles in others.  We encourage, often, the weak and wavering, and bring back such as are beginning to wander from the simple dignity and truth of nature.”