Adelaide Anne Procter - Page 2

sake, and not for their own. So I have made up my mind to take my
chance fairly with the unknown volunteers."

Perhaps it requires an editor's experience of the profoundly
unreasonable grounds on which he is often urged to accept unsuitable
articles--such as having been to school with the writer's husband's
brother-in-law, or having lent an alpenstock in Switzerland to the
writer's wife's nephew, when that interesting stranger had broken
his own--fully to appreciate the delicacy and the self-respect of
this resolution.

Some verses by Miss Procter had been published in the Book of
Beauty, ten years before she became Miss Berwick. With the
exception of two poems in the Cornhill Magazine, two in Good Words,
and others in a little book called A Chaplet of Verses (issued in
1862 for the benefit of a Night Refuge), her published writings
first appeared in Household Words, or All the Year Round. The
present edition contains the whole of her Legends and Lyrics, and
originates in the great favour with which they have been received by
the public.

Miss Procter was born in Bedford Square, London, on the 30th of
October, 1825. Her love of poetry was conspicuous at so early an
age, that I have before me a tiny album made of small note-paper,
into which her favourite passages were copied for her by her
mother's hand before she herself could write. It looks as if she
had carried it about, as another little girl might have carried a
doll. She soon displayed a remarkable memory, and great quickness
of apprehension. When she was quite a young child, she learned with
facility several of the problems of Euclid. As she grew older, she
acquired the French, Italian, and German languages; became a clever
pianoforte player; and showed a true taste and sentiment in drawing.
But, as soon as she had completely vanquished the difficulties of
any one branch of study, it was her way to lose interest in it, and
pass to another. While her mental resources were being trained, it
was not at all suspected in her family that she had any gift of
authorship, or any ambition to become a writer. Her father had no
idea of her having ever attempted to turn a rhyme, until her first
little poem saw the light in print.

When she attained to womanhood, she had read an extraordinary number
of books, and throughout her life she was always largely adding to
the number. In 1853 she went to Turin and its neighbourhood, on a
visit to her aunt, a Roman Catholic lady. As Miss Procter had
herself professed the Roman Catholic Faith two years before, she
entered with the greater ardour on the study of the Piedmontese
dialect, and the observation of the habits and manners of the
peasantry. In the former, she soon became a