Through him I best learned to know poetry as song. I
think that I heard the "Cotter's Saturday Night" and "A man's a
man for a' that" more frequently quoted than any other poems
familiar to my girlhood.
Some of my work-folk acquaintances were regular subscribers to
"Blackwood's Magazine" and the "Westminster" and "Edinburgh"
reviews, and they lent them to me. These, and Macaulay's
"Essays," were a great help and delight. I had also the reading
of the "Bibliotheca Sacra " and the "New Englander;" and
sometimes of the "North American Review."
By the time I had come down to Wordsworth and Coleridge in my
readings of English poetry, I was enjoying it all so much that I
could not any longer call it study.
A gift from a friend of Griswold's "Poets and Poetry of England"
gave me my first knowledge of Tennyson. It was a great experience
to read "Locksley Hall" for the first time while it was yet a new
poem, and while one's own young life was stirred by the prophetic
spirit of the age that gave it birth.
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