Unveil'd, unmask'd ! not so, not so ! Ah ! thine are closer worn Than those which, in light mockery, One evening thou hast borne. The mask and veil w… - Letitia Elizabeth Landon

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 !

Black (for such the quarries yield
Where the sun hath never shone,
Which night only rests upon,
Was the marble floor, which gave
Mirror like some clear dark wave.

She is but the type of all,
Mortal or celestial,
Who allow the heart,
In its passion and its power,
On some dark and fated hour,
To assert its part.