the poetical temperament. Residing just at its entrance, I passed long summer mornings making thrones and couches of moss, and listening to the robins and blackbirds.
The love of the beautiful then was quite undeveloped in social life; the dead reposed by roadside burial-grounds, the broken stone walls of which scarcely sheltered the sod which covered them. Now all is changed in those haunts of my childhood, and perchance costly monuments in Mount Auburn have risen on the sites of my moss-covered thrones.
Our residence was nearly opposite Governor Gerry’s, and we were frequent visitors there. One evening I saw a small book on the recessed window-seat of their parlour. It was Gesner’s Death of Abel; I opened it, spelt out its contents, and soon tears began to flow. Eager to finish it, and ashamed of emotions so novel, I screened my little self so as to allow the light to fall only on the book, and, while forgotten by the group, I also forgetting the music and mirth that surrounded me, I shed, at eight years, the first preluding tears over fictitious sorrow.
It was formerly the custom for countrypeople in Massachusetts to visit Boston in throngs on election day, and see the Governor sit in his chair on the Common. This pleasure was promised me, and a neighbouring farmer was good enough to offer to take me to my uncle Phillips’s. Therefore, soon after sunrise, I was dressed in my best frock, and red shoes, and with a large peony called a ’lection posey, in one hand, and a quarter of a dollar in the other, I sprang with a merry heart into the chaise, my imagination teeming with soldiers, and sights, and sugar-plums, and a vague thought of something like a huge giant sitting in a big chair, overtopping everybody.
I was an incessant talker when travelling, therefore the time seemed short when I was landed, as I supposed, at my uncle Phillips’s door, and the farmer drove away. But what was my distress at finding myself among strangers! Entirely ignorant of my uncle’s direction, I knew not what to say. In vain a cluster of kind ladies tried to soothe and amuse me with promises of playmates and toys; a sense of utter loneliness and intrusion kept me in tears. At
