As Mrs. Davidson's health gradually amended, with it returned her desire to give her daughter every means in her power to aid the development of her extraordinary genius. Her extreme sensibility and delicate health subjected her, at times, to depressions of spirit; but she had nothing of the morbid dejection, the exclusiveness, and hostility to the world, that are the results of self-exaggeration, selfishness, and self-idolatry, and not the natural offspring of genius and true feeling, which, in their healthy state, are pure and living fountains flowing out in abundant streams of love and kindness.
Indulgent as Mrs. Davidson was, she was too wise to permit Lucretia to forego entirely the customary employments of her sex. When engaged with these, it seems, she sometimes played truant with the Muse. Once she had promised to do a sewing task, and had eagerly run off for her work-basket; she loitered, and when she returned, she found her mother had done the work, and that there was a shade of just displeasure on her countenance. "O mamma!" she said, "I did forget; I am grieved, I did not mean to neglect you." "Where have you been, Lucretia?" "I have been writing," she replied, confused; "as I passed the window, I saw a solitary sweet pea; I thought they were all gone. This was alone; I ran-to smell it; but before I could reach it, a gust of wind broke the stem. I turned away disappointed, and was coming back to you; but as I passed the table, there stood the inkstand, and I forgot you." If our readers will turn to her printed poems, and read the "Last Flower
