bids us see the tear flow, and the pulse beat. What ghost can the
churchyard yield to us like the writing of the dead?

The bulk of the papers had been once lightly sewn to each other; they had
come undone, perhaps in Burley's rude hands, but their order was easily
apparent. Leonard soon saw that they formed a kind of journal,--not,
indeed, a regular diary, nor always relating to the things of the day.
There were gaps in time--no attempt at successive narrative; sometimes,
instead of prose, a hasty burst of verse, gushing evidently from the
heart; sometimes all narrative was left untold, and yet, as it were,
epitomized by a single burning line--a single exclamation--of woe or joy!
Everywhere you saw records of a nature exquisitely susceptible; and,
where genius appeared, it was so artless, that you did not call it
genius, but emotion. At the onset the writer did not speak of herself
in the first person. The manuscript opened with descriptions and short
dialogues, carried on by persons to whose names only initial letters were
assigned, all written in a style of simple innocent freshness, and
breathing of purity and happiness, like a dawn of spring. Two young
persons, humbly born, a youth and a girl, the last still in childhood,
each chiefly self-taught, are wandering on Sabbath evenings among green
dewy fields, near the busy town, in which labour awhile is still. Few
words pass between them. You see at once, though the writer does not
mean to convey it, how far beyond the scope of her male companion flies
the heavenward imagination of the girl. It is he who questions, it is
she who answers; and soon there steals upon you, as you read, the
conviction that the youth loves the girl, and loves in vain. All in this
writing, though terse, is so truthful! Leonard, in the youth, already
recognizes the rude imperfect scholar, the village bard, Mark Fairfield.
Then there is a gap in description; but there are short weighty
sentences, which show deep ening thought, increasing years, in the