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other! I am very happy. I congratulate you, my dear Harriet, with all
my heart. This is an attachment which a woman may well feel pride
in creating. This is a connexion which offers nothing but good.
It will give you every thing that you want--consideration, independence,
a proper home--it will fix you in the centre of all your real friends,
close to Hartfield and to me, and confirm our intimacy for ever.
This, Harriet, is an alliance which can never raise a blush in either
of us."

"Dear Miss Woodhouse!"--and "Dear Miss Woodhouse," was all that Harriet,
with many tender embraces could articulate at first; but when they
did arrive at something more like conversation, it was sufficiently
clear to her friend that she saw, felt, anticipated, and remembered
just as she ought. Mr. Elton's superiority had very ample acknowledgment.

"Whatever you say is always right," cried Harriet, "and therefore
I suppose, and believe, and hope it must be so; but otherwise I could
not have imagined it. It is so much beyond any thing I deserve.
Mr. Elton, who might marry any body! There cannot be two opinions
about _him_. He is so very superior. Only think of those sweet
verses--`To Miss --------.' Dear me, how clever!--Could it really
be meant for me?"

"I cannot make a question, or listen to a question about that.
It is a certainty. Receive it on my judgment. It is a sort
of prologue to the play, a motto to the chapter; and will be soon
followed by matter-of-fact prose."

"It is a sort of thing which nobody could have expected. I am sure,
a month ago, I had no more idea myself!--The strangest things do
take place!"

"When Miss Smiths and Mr. Eltons get acquainted--they do indeed--and
really it is strange; it is out of the common course that what is
so evidently, so palpably desirable--what courts the pre-arrangement
of other people, should so immediately shape itself into the proper form.
You and Mr. Elton are by situation called together; you belong
to one another by every circumstance of your respective homes.
Your marrying will be equal to the match at Randalls. There does
seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love
exactly the right direction, and sends it into the very channel
where it ought to flow.

The course of true love never did run smooth--

A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage."

"That Mr. Elton should really be in love with me,--me, of all people,
who did not know him, to speak to him, at Michaelmas! And he,
the very handsomest man that ever was, and a man that every body
looks up to, quite like Mr. Knightley! His company so sought after,
that every body says he need not eat a single meal by himself if he
does not chuse it; that he has more invitations than there are days
in the week. And so excellent in the Church! Miss Nash has put down
all the texts he has ever preached from since he came to Highbury.
Dear me! When I look back to the first time I saw him! How little

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