Page:Letters of Life.djvu/237

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EDUCATIONAL REMEMBRANCES.
225

"Come, Disappointment, come!
Thou art not stern to me"—


has entered where harmony is unending; and another, Mrs. Mary Weld, who has successfully trained sons and daughters for the race of life, used to thrill every hearer by her full, fine emphasis in the poem of Pope:


"Rise, crown'd with light, imperial Salem, rise!"


This pleasant entertainment was followed by reading their weekly remembrances, where the same clear elocution was required, for I well remembered how often, in seminaries of young ladies, I had listened painfully, but almost in vain, to the movements of their ruby lips, doubtless uttering beautiful sentiments. Every third Saturday they read a letter which they had written to me; and I also, one addressed to them, and which was claimed by the Saturday Monitress as her peculiar perquisite. A selection from the last-named class of epistles I have been within a few years induced to publish, entitled "Letters to my Pupils," connected with biographical sketches of some of that loved group who have been earliest summoned to begin the travel of eternity.

During the two intervening Saturdays, for I directed epistolary composition only once in three weeks, our closing exercise was reading to them the memoir of some distinguished person, which I had abridged for