Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/123

100 had a Shakespeare-loving father, and a mother who read poetry aloud with a sweet intonation. I knew all the Lake poets early, and my "polemical" reading was much lightened by Childe Harold and Coleridge and Keats. I miss now very much that love of poetry which was so common among the young girls of fifty years ago. Indeed, I miss also the poets. In fact, we all read very much, beginning with Jane Taylor's Poems for Infant Minds, and including Thalaba and The Ancient Mariner.

And yet so illy directed, so carelessly done, was all this reading that I once shocked Dr. Bellows by telling him I had never read Comus or Milton's prose. How soon he repaired that omission by reading Comus aloud to us in a masterly manner, and following it up by giving us readings from, and almost a lecture on, Wordsworth when he was paying us a visit at Keene! Society is like a Cremona violin; those who play upon it decide that the old ones are incomparable. "A crowd is not company, faces are but galleries of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love." "But there was then love and liking." Where society is founded on the provision that people know each other well and like each other, it certainly follows that there should be more "love," or liking at least, than where it is merely a matter of display. When society is bought it is apt to lose the distinction and the value of the company of such men as Dr. Bellows, if, indeed, there are many such.

Certainly the individual was then of more consequence than his surroundings. There was less luxury and much more conservatism thirty, and even twenty, years ago. Dr. Bellows played his noble part both before and after the war with singular distinction. He had the courage of his convictions. It was not an easy