This passage lets us into the secret. I suspect in sober truth both Miss Harland and her sister have long since forgotten all the lines in _The Search after Happiness_, but what they have never forgotten, what they never can forget, are the jessamine bells and the Wistaria petals, yellow and purple, blown about in the warm winds that visited their now desolate and forsaken Southern home. Less beautiful things than jessamine and Wistaria, if only they clustered round the house where you were born, are remembered when the lines of far better authors than Miss Hannah More have gone clean out of your head:
'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words-- All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'
Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous _Pauline_. The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham:
'Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond; A blue sky of spring, White clouds on the wing; How little a thing To remember for years-- To remember with tears!'
If this be so--and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?--it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting. Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.
'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.'
'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.'
However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.