CHAPTER XII.
L. E. L.
We love the bird we taught to sing.—L. E. L.
I cannot but remember such things were,
And were most dear to me.
The foregoing lines may suggest that I have arrived at the most difficult point in these memoirs. Of the gifted being whose career, intimately blended for nearly twenty years with my own in every intellectual and literary pursuit, it is my inevitable task to describe, I cannot write in a language addressed to common minds or submitted to mere worldly rules. I must appeal to the feeling and the imaginative; for such was L. E. L. She cannot be understood by an ordinary estimate nor measured by an ordinary standard; and those who have not poetry in their souls and warm and deep sympathies in their natures, will find little to interest them in this portion of my work.
Yet is the mystery of the tragedy powerfully affecting; and when I am calling on readers to look back above thirty years upon its earliest scenes, I implore them not to view my statements as those of age and reflection, but, as they belong to a distant period; to take all the conditions of that period into their consideration; and put themselves in the mood to feel that what is new to them, is to me a retrospect the
