line.«
    »Which I have not. My memory, if a slow, is a retentive one. I acquire
deliberately both knowledge and liking: the acquisition grows into my brain, and
the sentiment into my breast; and it is not as the rapid springing produce
which, having no root in itself, flourishes verdurous enough for a time, but too
soon falls withered away. Attention, Henry! Miss Keeldar consents to favour you.
Voyez ce Cheval ardent et impétueux, so it commences.«
    Miss Keeldar did consent to make the effort; but she soon stopped.
    »Unless I heard the whole repeated, I cannot continue it,« she said.
    »Yet it was quickly learned, soon gained, soon gone,« moralized the tutor.
He recited the passage deliberately, accurately, with slow, impressive emphasis.
    Shirley, by degrees, inclined her ear as he went on. Her face, before turned
from him, returned towards him. When he ceased, she took the word up as if from
his lips: she took his very tone; she seized his very accent; she delivered the
periods as he had delivered them: she reproduced his manner, his pronunciation,
his expression.
    It was now her turn to petition.
    »Recall Le Songe d'Athalie« sheen treated, »and say it.«
    He said it for her; she took it from him; she found lively excitement in the
pleasure of making his language her own: she asked for further indulgence; all
the old school-pieces were revived, and with them Shirley's old school-days.
    He had gone through some of the best passages of Racine and Corneille, and
then had heard the echo of his own deep tones in the girl's voice, that
modulated itself faithfully on his: - »Le Chêne et le Roseau,« that most
beautiful of La Fontaine's fables, had been recited, well recited by the tutor,
and the pupil had animatedly availed herself of the lesson. Perhaps a
simultaneous feeling seized them now, that their enthusiasm had kindled to a
glow, which the slight fuel of French poetry no longer sufficed to feed; perhaps
they longed for a trunk of English oak to be thrown as a Yule log to the
devouring flame. Moore observed, -
    »And these are our best pieces! And we have nothing more dramatic, nervous,
natural!«
    And then he smiled and was silent. His whole nature seemed serenely alight:
he stood on the hearth, leaning his elbow on the mantel-piece, musing not
unblissfully.
    Twilight was