XV. ADELAIDE PROCTER. THERE are many who love this sweet and gentle poet. Patience, disinterested devotion, faith, earnestness, courage, these are the themes which inspired her songs, and frequently the virtues which they directly urge upon the reader. None of her poems lapse into rhymed sermons ; they are true poems, when most moral and didactic. Of their authoress we know little, but that little is just what it is most pleasing to know. We learn, on the authority of Charles Dickens, that her poems were but the expression of her daily life ; she was a too ardu- ous worker, a faithful friend, a devoted helper of the poor and suffering. When she was yet too young to write, Dickens tells us, in the preface which he wrote for an edition of her works, she had a little album made of small sheets of note-paper neatly sewed together, into which her mother copied for her her favorite verses. This little book she read and re- read, and constantly carried about with her. In her studies she displayed a precocious ability, learning easily and rapidly, and showing a remarkable memory. As she grew older she acquired French, German, and Italian, played well upon the piano, and evinced a marked talent for drawing ; but she tired of each of these branches when she had mastered its chief difficulties. Her father, Bryan Waller Procter (the poet known as Barry Cornwall), although he considered her a girl of unusual capacity, never suspected that she had inherited his poetical gift, nor did he know that she had ever composed a line of (213)
