Her rapture over the great players from England; her
absolute agony, after seeing "The Cup" played by them in London, lest
she could never, never tell the happiness it was to her, with
Tennyson's words on her own tongue, as it were, to follow Miss Terry's
perfect enunciation of the lines,--these enjoyments, true pleasures as
indeed they are, did not lose their power over her.
Gilbert and Sullivan, too, could not have found a more amused admirer.
"Pinafore" never grew stale for her, and her brothers yielded to her
fancy, or pleased it, by naming their little steamer Pinafore. She
went to the theatre again and again to see this, and all the
succeeding comedies by the same hands. She never seemed to weary of
their fun.
But the poets were her great fountain of refreshment; "Siloa's brook"
was her chief resort. Tennyson was her chosen master, and there were
few of his lines she did not know by heart. Her feeling for nature was
satisfied by the incomparable verses in which he portrays the divine
light shining behind the life of natural things. How often have we
heard her murmuring to herself,--
"The wind sounds like a silver wire,"
or,
"To watch the emerald-colored water falling,"
or,
"Black as ash-buds on the front of March."
Whatever it might be she was observing, there was some line of this
great interpreter of nature ready to make the moment melodious.
Shakespeare's sonnets were also her close companions; indeed, she
seized and retained a cloud of beautiful things in her trustworthy
memory.
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