'As life wanes, all its cares and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words—
All these seem dear, and only worth our thoughts.'
Thus the youthful Browning in his marvellous Pauline. The same note is struck after a humbler and perhaps more moving fashion in the following simple strain of William Allingham:
'Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond;
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
How little a thing
To remember for years—
To remember with tears!'
If this be so—and who, looking into his own heart, but must own that so it is?—it explains how it comes about that as soon as Miss Harland finished her preface, got away from her childhood and began her biography, she has so little to tell us about Miss More's books, and from that little the personal note of enjoyment is entirely wanting. Indeed, though a pious soul, she occasionally cannot restrain her surprise how such ponderous commonplaces ever found a publisher, to say nothing of a reader.
'Such books as Miss More's,' she says, 'would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.'
And again:
'That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.'
However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.
I confess I never liked her love story. Anything more cold-blooded I never read. I am not going to repeat it. Why should I? It is told at length in Miss More's authorized biography in four volumes by William Roberts, Esq. I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford Street, price 1s. Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without chuckling. I refer the curious to her pages.
Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that Hannah More 'fagged' her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell? Some people like being fagged.