“Mightier far
Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway
Of magic, potent over sun and star,
Is love, though oft to agony distrest,
And though his favourite seat be feeble woman’s breast.” Wordsworth.
“Das ist sas Loos des Schonen auf der erde.” Schiller.
[341] [“The little volume, ‘Records of Woman,’ which you kindly gave me permission to inscribe to you,” wrote Mrs H. to Mrs Joanna Baillie, “is now in the press, and I hope I shall soon be able to send you a copy; and that the dedication, which is in the simplest form, will be honoured by your approval. Mr Blackwood is its publisher.”
Mrs Hemans always spoke with pleasure of her literary intercourse with Mr Blackwood, in whose dealings she recognised all that uprightness and liberality which belonged to the sterling worth of his character. The “Records of Woman,” the first of her works published by him, was brought out in May 1828. This volume was, to use the words of its author the one in which “she had put her heart and individual feelings more than in any thing else she had written;” and it is also, and perhaps consequently, the one which has held its ground the most steadily in public favour.—Memoir, p. 136.]
ARABELLA STUART.
[“The Lady Arabella,” as she has been frequently entitled, was descended from Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry VII., and consequently allied by birth to Elizabeth as well as James I. This affinity to the throne proved the misfortune of her life, as the jealousies which it constantly excited in her royal relatives, who were anxious to prevent her marrying, shut her out from the enjoyment of that domestic happiness which her heart appears to have so fervently desired. By a secret but early discovered union with William Seymour, son of Lord Beauchamp, she alarmed the cabinet of James, and the wedded lovers were immediately placed in separate confinement. From this they found means to concert a romantic plan of escape; and having won over a female attendant, by whose assistance she was disguised in male attire, Arabella, though faint from recent sickness and suffering, stole out in the night, and at last reached an appointed spot, where a boat and servants were in waiting. She embarked; and at break of day a French vessel engaged to receive her was discovered and gained. As Seymour, however, had not yet arrived, she was desirous that the vessel should lie at anchor for him; but this wish was overruled by her companions, who, contrary to her entreaties, hoisted sail, “which,” says D’Israeli, “occasioned so fatal a termination to this romantic adventure. Seymour, indeed, had escaped from the Tower; he reached the wharf, and found his confidential man waiting with a boat, and arrived at Lee. The time passed; the waves were rising; Arabella was not there; but in the distance he descried a vessel. Hiring a fisherman to take him on board, he discovered, to his grief, on hailing it, that it was not the French ship charged with his Arabella; in despair and confusion he found another ship from Newcastle, which for a large sum altered its course, and landed him in Flanders.” Arabella, meantime, whilst imploring her attendants to linger, and earnestly looking out for the expected boat of her husband, was overtaken in Calais Roads by a vessel in the king’s service, and brought back to a captivity, under the suffering of which her mind and constitution gradually sank. “What passed in that dreadful imprisonment cannot perhaps be recovered for authentic history, but enough is known—that her mind grew impaired, that she finally lost her reason, and, if the duration of her imprisonment was short, that it was only terminated by her death. Some effusions, often begun and never ended, written and erased, incoherent and rational, yet remain among her papers.”—D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.