“It has been said that religion can never be made a subject of interest in poetry. The position is a false one, refuted by the close alliance between poetic inspiration and sacred enthusiasm. Irreligion has certainly no place in poetry. There may have been Atheist philosophers; an Atheist poet is an impossibility. The poet may doubt and reason like Hamlet, but the moment he acquiesces in unbelief, there is an end to the magic of poetry. Imagination can no longer throw lively hues over the creation: the forests cease to be haunted; the sea, and the air, and the heavens, to teem with life. The highest interest, we think, attaches to Mrs Hemans’s writings, from the spirit of Christianity which pervades them.
“The poetry of our author is tranquillising in its character, calm and serene. We beg pardon of the lovers of excitement, but we are seriously led to take notice of this quality as of a high merit. A great deal has been said of the sublimity of directing the passions; we hold it a much more difficult and a much more elevated task, to restrain them. It may be sublime to ride on the whirlwind, and direct the storm; but it seems to us still more sublime to appease the storm, and still the whirlwind. Virgil, no mean authority, was of this opinion. The French are reported to be particularly fond of effect and display; but we remember to have read that, even in the splendid days of Napoleon, the simplicity of vocal music surpassed in effect the magnificence of a numerous band. It was when Napoleon was crowned Emperor in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Parisians, wishing to distinguish the occasion by some novel exhibition, and to produce a great effect, filled the orchestra with eighty harps, which were all struck together with unequalled skill. The fashionable world was in raptures. Presently the Pope entered, and some thirty of his singers, who came with him from Rome, received him with the powerful Tu es Petrus of the old-fashioned Scarlatti; and the simple majesty of the air, assisted by no instruments, annihilated in a moment the whole effect of the preceding fanfaronade. And in literature the public taste seems to us already weary of those productions which aim at astonishing and producing a great effect, and there is now an opportunity of pleasing by the serenity of contemplative excellence.
“It is the high praise of Mrs Hemans’s poetry that it is feminine. The sex may well be pleased with her productions, for they could hardly have a better representative in the career of letters. All her works seem to come from the heart, to be natural and true. The poet can give us nothing but the form under which the objects he describes present themselves to his own mind. That form must be noble, or it is not worthy of our consideration; it must be consistent, or it will fail to be true. Now, in the writings of Mrs Hemans, we are shown how life and its concerns appear to woman, and hear a mother intrusting to verse her experience and observation. So, in ‘The Hebrew Mother,’ ‘the spring-tide of nature’ swells high as she parts from her son, on devoting him to the service of the Temple:—
‘Alas, my boy! thy gentle grasp is on me,
The bright tears quiver in thy pleading eyes;
And now fond thoughts arise,
And silver cords again to earth have won me,
And like a vine thou claspest my full heart—
How shall I hence depart?
‘And oh! the home whence thy bright smile hath parted,