MODERN CONSTANCY. 77 



for her own comfort, Fanny had read novels, old fashioned 

 Minerva-press novels, until her brain was half turned with that 

 excitement which Byron has so well styled " the opium-dream 

 of too much youth and reading." Long before she arrived at 

 womanhood, Fanny decided that she would be a heroine ; but as 

 the heroines of her favorite volumes were pale, delicate, sylph- 

 like creatures with hair always curling without the aid of Pa- 

 pillotes, — wearing white dresses which retained their snowy hue 

 even amid the vapors of a dungeon, — playing on certain ubiqui- 

 tous harps, and writing verses to sunset, moonlight and other 

 equally unusual natural occurrences, — the poor girl felt all the dif- 

 ficulties of her determination. Fanny was most unromantically 

 healthy, and her plump little figure was anything but sentimen- 

 tally proportioned. Her cheeks had much more of the damask 

 than of the white rose tint, and any emotion, instead of paling 

 their hue, was sure to deepen it to a fever tinge. Then she had 

 no musical taste, and scarcely knew one tune from another ; but 

 even if she had, there was no harp in the whole village. As for 

 poetry, she could write with great facility the verses of other peo- 

 ple, and had several albums filled with sentimental poems from 

 newspapers and magazines. She was once sufficiently under 

 lunar influences to attempt a sonnet to the moon, and actually 

 commenced her apostrophe : " Thou lovely moon ! thou lovely 

 moon !" but here the inspiration failed, and the unwritten son- 

 net must be placed on the same list with that vast amount of 

 unuttered poetry, which, like the bubble on a boiling spring, 

 comes warm and effervescing from the depths of the heart, but 

 breaks into empty air when it reaches the surface. 



