as if he had deeply felt the charm to which he lends language. He had himself wandered beneath the shade of—
"The weeping birch, the lady of the woods,"
with some fair companion, on whose face he only gazed by stealth—whole mornings had past by the side of some early idol,
"The only place he coveted,
In all a world so wide."
They too, perhaps, had interchanged volumes; and here we cannot but say a word in favour of books as the best pioneers in these kind of campaigns. The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves—it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence—it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste—and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own! Were we to choose the
