What girl now studies the words with which she shall address her
lover, or seeks to charm him with grace of diction? She dearly likes
a little slang, and revels in the luxury of entire familiarity with
a new and strange being. There is something in that, too, pleasant
to our thoughts, but I fear that this phase of life does not conduce
to a taste for poetry among our girls. Though my mother was a writer
of prose, and revelled in satire, the poetic feeling clung to her
to the last.
In the first ten years of her married life she became the mother of
six children, four of whom died of consumption at different ages.
My elder sister married, and had children, of whom one still lives;
but she was one of the four who followed each other at intervals
during my mother's lifetime. Then my brother Tom and I were left to
her,--with the destiny before us three of writing more books than
were probably ever before produced by a single family. [Footnote:
The family of Estienne, the great French printers of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, of whom there were at least nine or ten,
did more perhaps for the production of literature than any other
family. But they, though they edited, and not unfrequently translated
the works which they published, were not authors in the ordinary
sense.] My married sister added to the number by one little anonymous
high church story, called Chollerton.
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