freely and fearlessly. The subject was suggested by a passage in one of the letters of Don Leucadio Doblado, and was wrought upon by her with eagerness and fervour. It describes the mental counflicts, as well as outward sufferings of a Spaniard, who, flying from the religious persecutions of his country in the 16th century, finds refuge with his child in a North American forest. The story is supposed to be related by himself amidst the wilderness which has afforded him an asylum. There is much delicacy in the whole tone and texture of this piece. With all the pomp of a diction too ornate, which had distinguished her former pieces, there was in them not only a deficiency of thought, but of feeling, (extraordinary in a woman). But here the theme required both, and both are supplied-from a fountain out of which confessedly she had never drawn before-her own heart and mind! In The Records of Woman, she proceeded on the same line of endeavour, and boasted indeed that in them "there is more of herself to be found," than in any preceding composition. From her biographer's account, it is clear that she now began to feel the "life of mind" in her-that she was now creatingnot reproducing. The fervour of genius was now consuming her, and the framework of her soul began to yield under the electric shocks. Mozart's Requiem in particular, affected her health greatly, and assuredly there are some pathetic stanzas in it, worthy of the name it bears. She identified herself with the musician, when she exclaims "Swift thoughts that came and went, Like torrents o'er me sent, Have shaken as a reed my thrilling frame. The beautiful comes floating through my soul; The spirit to detain Of the deep harmonies that past me roll! Therefore disturbing dreams Trouble the secret streams, And founts of music that o'erflow my breast; Than may on earth be mine, Haunts my own heart, and will not let it rest." Mrs. Hemans could enter into the feelings of Mozart, for she was herself skilful in music, preferring, we are told, the national and melancholy. "How successfully," says one of her biographers, "wed to the magic of sweet sound many of her verses have been by her sister, no lover of music need to be reminded. The Roman Girl's Song is full of solemn classic beauty; and in one of her letters it is said, that of the Captive Knight Sir Walter Scott never was weary. Indeed, it seems in his mind to have been the song of chivalry, representative of the English, as the "Flowers of the Forest" was of the Scottish; the "Cancionella Espanola" of the Spanish; and the "Rhine Song" of the German." Traces of her appreciation of Wordsworth and Scott are to be detected in the poems which we have thus rapidly glanced at; the time was now arriving when, by a more intimate acquaintance with those N. S.-VOL. II. 3 т two great poets, Mrs. Hemans was to acquire and apply new perceptions of their spirit and manner. The death of her mother inducing her to leave Wales for Wavertree near Liverpool; and opportunities for visiting Scotland and the lakes having occurred, she was enabled to make a personal acquaintance with Sir Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, Wordsworth, the author of "Cyril Thornton" and others. While in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, her principal sojourn was at Milburn Tower, the seat of the venerable Sir Robert Liston. These journeys are, in fact, the great incidents of Mrs. Hemans' life, and here it is that Mr. Chorley's memorials become indeed valuable. Mrs. Hemans had now exchanged Love for Fame, and since she regretted the loss of the former, it was but fitting that the feeling of the latter should be rendered more intense by associating her for a while, in daily commerce, with the famous. Her best company at Liverpool had been Miss Jewsbury, Mary Howitt, and Dr. Bowring, good enough in their way, especially the two first, but still learners rather than teachers. She had now to encounter the masters of song! We will endeavour to condense the details of their intercourse. Mrs. Hemans saw Scott before Wordsworth, and had with the "Border Bard" a long delightful walk through the Rhymer's Glen, having got wet above her ancles in the haunted burn, torn her gown in making her way through thickets of wild roses, stained her gloves with wood-strawberries, and scratched her face with a rowan branch. "But what of all this?" she demands. "Had I not been walking with Sir Walter Scott, and listening to tales of elves and bogles and brownies, and hearing him recite some of the Spanish ballads till they stirred the heart like the sound of a trumpet?' This was all very well; but there came out, in the course of this interview, a trait of weakness in Mrs. Hemans' conduct, characteristic of her both as an individual and an author. She would be nothing if not poetical. Unlike Wordsworth. Mrs. Hemans' themes are poetical as well as the treatment, and in the handling of them she is afraid of permitting intervals of comparative prose, though nothing can be clearer than the propriety of the connecting links being of humbler texture than the gems which they unite. But to proceed with the story. She would sit on the grass. "Would it not be more prudent for you, Mrs. Hemans," said Sir Walter, "to take the seat?" "I have no doubt that it would, Sir Walter; but, somehow or other, I always prefer the grass. "And so do I,' replied the dear old gentleman, coming to sit there beside me; and I really believe that I do it chiefly out of a wicked wilfulness, because all my good advisers say that it will give me the rheumatism.'” Poor Mrs. Hemans interpreted this rebuke into approbation: she could not believe for a moment that Sir Walter Scott could ever cease being poetical, and act with ordinary prudence. She was self-deluded— no man's poetry was ever more varied with vale as well as hill than that of Sir Walter Scott. The personal appearance of the man might have taught her better. "I was," she says, "rather agreeably surprised by his appearance, after all I had heard of its homeliness; the predominant expression of countenance is, I think, a sort of arch good-nature, conveying a mingled impression of penetration and benevolence." We have no space to describe her visit, in the same company, to 1. Yarrow, and we omit other particulars, leaving Abbotsford for Rydal Mount. Her journey to Scotland was in the summer of 1829; that to the lakes in 1830. It was in the "leafy month of June" of that year that she first saw face to face the poet of the Excursion. Her nervous fear at the idea of presenting herself alone to Mr. Wordsworth grew upon her so rapidly, that it was long before she took courage to leave the inn. "I had," she proceeds, "little cause for such trepidation. I was driven to a lovely cottage-like building, almost hidden by a profusion of roses and ivy; and a most benignant-looking old man greeted me in the porch. This was Mr. Wordsworth himself ; and when I tell you that, having rather a large party of visitors in the house, he led me to a room apart from them, and brought in his family by degrees, I am sure that little trait will give you an idea of considerate kindness which you will both like and appreciate. In half an hour I felt myself as much at ease with him as I had been with Sir Walter Scott in half a day." Subsequently she remarks, that about Wordsworth's manner and conversation there was more of impulse than she had expected, but, in other respects, she saw much that she should have looked for in the poet of meditative life: frequently his head droops, his eyes half close, and he seems buried in quiet depths of thought. "I have passed," she adds, "a delightful morning to-day, in walking with him about his own richly shaded grounds, and hearing him speak of the old English writers, particularly Spenser, whom he loves, as he himself expresses it, for his earnestness and devotedness." "I am charmed with Mr. Wordsworth himself; his manners are distinguished by that frank simplicity which I believe to be ever the characteristic of real genius; his conversation perfectly free and unaffected, yet remarkable for power of expression and vivid imagery: when the subject calls forth anything like enthusiasm, the poet breaks out frequently and delightfully; and his gentle and affectionate playfulness in his intercourse with all the members of his family, would of itself sufficiently refute Moore's theory in the Life of Byron, with regard to the unfitness of genius for domestic happiness. I have much of his society, as he walks by me while I ride to explore the mountain glens and waterfalls, and he occasionally repeats passages of his own poems in a deep and thinking tone, which harmonises well with the spirit of these scenes." Again : "He gives me a good deal of his society, reads to me, walks with me, leads my pony when I ride, and I begin to talk with him as with a sort of paternal friend. The whole of this morning he kindly passed in reading to me a great deal from Spenser, and afterwards his own Laodamia, my favourite Tintern Abbey, and many of those noble sonnets which you, like myself, enjoy so much. His reading is very peculiar, but to my ear, delightful; slow, solemn, earnest in expression more than any I ever heard. When he reads or recites in the open air, his deep rich tones seem to proceed from a spirit-voice, and belong to the religion of the place, they harmonise so fitly with the thrilling tones of woods and waterfalls. His expressions are often strikingly poetical. I would not give up the mists that spiritualise our mountains for all the blue skies of Italy. Yesterday evening he walked beside me as I rode on a long and lovely mountain-path high above, Grasmere Lake. I was much interested by his shewing me, carved deep in the rock, as we passed, the initials of his wife's name, inscribed there many years ago by himself; and the dear old man, like Old Mortality, renews them from time to time. claiming, Esto perpetua !' I could scarcely help ex Between the periods of the two journeys, Mrs. Hemans had published the Lays of the Affections, a volume, which, though it contains the chi valresque ballad of The Lady of Provence, was rendered heavy by the initial poem of A Spirit's Return, with the subject of which few readers in these days can be found to sympathise. The poet herself, however, had in its composition, as she says, "sounded the deep places of her soul.” Many influences had already modified her genius, and henceforth continued to work out in her now thoroughly enkindled mind. Both Wordsworth and Shelley she now thoroughly understood, and appreciated for what is eternal in both. Sickness and sorrow now, too, threw their own magic over her soul, and the virtues of patience and resignation grew from suffering, and made her a heroine in her own despite. A deeper, higher, more solemn and truthful thinking and feeling were thus evolved from the recesses, as it were, of her being; and some of them are, with no mean skill and with increasing power, displayed in her Scenes and Hymns of Life. Cruel necessity restrains us from quoting-cruel, since now her poetry had found its meet employment, the sacred service of religion. With religion all poetry commenced; in religion the poetry of Felicia Hemans found its result and climax. Her course was pyramidal. The foundations of her mind were laid-in earth, grossly and broadly, but the superstructure gradually refined as it rose, becoming more and more purified, until at last it attained an apex etherial if not spiritual. Her tendencies were upward; and her last ambition was to emulate Coleridge's Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni. Her Easter Day in a Mountain Churchyard, and her Despondency and Aspiration, are challenged by her admirers as approaching it in excellence. They are certainly very beautiful both of them in their way-but that is divine. It was in the volume containing her Scenes and Hymns of Life, that she first shewed any aptitude for the sonnet; and in the specimens there given she avoids, instead of subduing the difficulties of its construction, by preferring the illegitimate form. As recording her passing thoughts and reminiscences, these short poems are precious: one that she dictated on her death-bed, a few days before her departure, is touching and memorable. She had, indeed, previous to this time, acquired the habit of dictating her poems. It is recorded of her, that she would sometimes compose and perfect long passages, or even entire lyrics, and retain them in her memory many days before they were committed to paper. this trait Mrs. Hemans is not singular; scarcely any versemonger but has this habit; and it is, indeed, one with many facilities of which the circumstance of the rhyme assisting the memory is not the least. In It has been said of the classic statues, that the shadow of Death blends dimly with the expression of them all: in classic studies, also, there is a tendency to acquaint the mind with melancholy. The taste of Mrs. Hemans was naturally of a classic character from the first; and how deeply imbued she was with the corresponding feelings, her Greek laments and other similar pieces abundantly testify. With the moral expansion of her genius, and the religious developement into which it ultimately blossomed, her sense of the nothingness of the temporal life. and her conviction of the treasures to be revealed by death, increased and deepened to such a degree, indeed, as to issue in a continuous aspiration towards the eternal—a perpetual desire for that more excellent state of being which is the solace of the pious. Mr. Chorley calls this feeling, "a morbid impatience of life;" we do not. It is the longing of hope yet unquenched; a foretaste of the world to come, quickening still as the spirit approaches the crown for which it has waited. Where does her biographer find anything morbid in her Poet's Dying Hymn? Why the stanzas end, "I bless thee, O my God!" Neither does she relieve her heart of bitterness as hating the world she is about to quit. O, no! It is in this affectionate style that she speaks of it:— "And if this earth, with all its choral streams, And crowning woods, and soft or solemn skies, 'Tis not that fondly I would linger here, I bless thee, O my God!" She rejoiced now in dying, that "life's last roses to her thoughts could bring rich visions of imperishable spring." On her very deathbed she sought to reconcile both worlds; and while aiming at heaven, was planning to erect a "Christian temple" on earth. We allude to an undertaking under that name, which had been suggested to her by a recent perusal of Schiller's Die Gotten Griechenlands, and in which her purpose was to trace out the workings of passion, the struggles of human affection, through various climes and ages and conditions of life; and thereby to illustrate the insufficiency of any dispensation, save that of an all-embracing Christianity, to soothe the sorrows, or sustain the hopes, or fulfil the desires, of an immortal being whose lot is cast in a world of which the cares and bereavements are many. The Antique Greek Lament was intended to form part of this work. It was the only one of the designed series.* And now what remains, fair reader, but that we bring this tribute to an end by gazing back awhile over the lovely landscape which, in passing through, haply we prized too lightly? We have done so, and as we trace the retrospect involuntarily exclaim, "Beautiful!" Yes, beauty, we repeat, was the presiding spirit of the genius of Mrs. Hemans. Beauty, not sublimity. The beautiful poetry of Greece might be supposed to have directed her earliest inspirations, as it clearly influenced some of her later efforts. It was this sense of the beautiful which prevented her diction, ornate and artificial as it was, from exploding in bombast. Restrained within the limits of the beautiful, she was equally preserved from the obscure as from the sublime. She shewed at one period, indeed, a tendency to German mysticism; but from this she was happily delivered by her instinct for the beautiful. Subsequently directed to the study of Wordsworth, by the same instinct, while she drank of the fountain of his living spirit, she nevertheless avoided the mean forms by which he was but too proud, in the audacity of genius, to communicate to the world its wonder-working influences. She learned to look at Mrs. Hemans died on Saturday, the 16th of May, 1835. |