I have been giving myself a great deal of trouble to-day, and I doubt at last I shall be disappointed. Viganoni, with great readiness and great humility, granted my request that he would set the little song I wrote the other day; but to enable him to do this, I have just written it out, leaving a space between each line wide enough for him to write the cadence of the words, as if they were Italian, underneath; then at the bottom, in French prose, I have translated the song, that he may comprehend the sentiment; and I have also written it again with a literal translation of each word by a French one under it, regardless of French construction, that he may catch the proper emphasis; thus:—
New friends, new hopes, new joys, to find—
De nouveaux amis, de nouvelles espérances, de nouveaux plaisirs, à trouver.
And, after all, if he should not do it well! he says he will do son possible, but I have my fears; if he succeeds I shall be so pleased! * * What a labour it is to laugh for a continuance! I am quite sore to-day with immoderate laughter yesterday! I was irritable, and then anything sets me off. Not but what my uncle and aunt, at whose house I dined, and Mr. Biggs who dined there also, were very agreeable; but had I been quite well, and my husband not gone to Chatham I should not have been so noisy. Yet I declare I laugh now at some of the fun. I expect my husband home in half an hour. He went to please me, and after he was gone I repented of my persuading him to go, but I thought the air and exercise would do him good. Do not laugh, but though only two days absent, the house seems so strange without its master, that I have learned to excuse, nay to commend, women for marrying again! How dreadfully forlorn must be the situation of a widow! I think I shall write an essay recommending second marriages, and dedicate it to Mrs. Merrick. Well, God bless you! I think I have written nonsense enough. Love to your spouse and bairns; and believe me, ever yours,
A. Opie
“The other Volume” was the “Poems,” which appeared early in 1802, and for a critique upon which we must again refer the reader to the article in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1802. After some rather severe criticism of her deficiencies and faults, the writer observes, “It is in the smaller verse of eight syllables, which requires no pomp of sound, and in the simple tenderness, or simple grief, to which, the artlessness of such numbers is best suited, the power of Mrs. O.’s poetry consists. * * * The verses of feeling, on which she must rely for the establishment of her fame, are certainly among the best in our opuscular poetry. As a specimen we select the following song, which is scarcely surpassed by any in our language:—
Go, youth beloved, in distant glades,
New friends, new hopes, new joys to find!
Yet sometimes deign, ’midst fairer maids,
To think on her thou leav’st behind.