The long-remember’d dead!
But not with thee might aught save glory dwell—
Fade, fade away, thou shore of asphodel!’
“And the same feelings of a woman and mother dictated ‘The Evening Prayer at a Girls’ School,’—a poem which merits to be considered in connexion with Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.’
‘O joyous creatures! that will sink to rest,
Lightly, when those pure orisons are done,” etc.
“Of other spirited, and lively, and pathetic short poems of Mrs Hemans, which form some of the brightest ornaments of the lyric poetry of the language, we take no particular notice—for in what part of the United States are they not known? So general has been the attention to those of her pieces adapted to the purposes of a newspaper, we hardly fear to assert that, throughout a great part of this country, there is not a family of the middling class in which some of them have not been read. The praise which was not sparingly bestowed upon her, when her shorter first productions became generally known among us, has been often repeated on a careful examination of her works; and could we hope that our remarks might one day fall under her eye, we should hope she would not be indifferent to the good wishes which are offered her from America, but feel herself cheered and encouraged in her efforts, by the prospect of an enlarged and almost unlimited field of useful influence, opened to her among the descendants of her country in an independent land. The ocean divides us from the fashions as well as the commotions of Europe. The voice of America, deciding on the literature of England, resembles the voice of posterity more nearly than any thing else, that is contemporaneous, can do. We believe that the general attention which has been given to Mrs Hemans’s works among us, may be regarded as a pledge that they will not be received with indifference by posterity.”—North American Review.
[At the conclusion of “The Records” we gave the opinions of one of our most celebrated Cisatlantic critics regarding the poetry of Mrs Hemans, and we think it but right to show now (as has just been done) the general estimate in which her genius is held in America, as evidenced by the North American Review, the best-known and most widely-circulated of the Transatlantic periodicals.
Judging from the state of feeling in America—from the ideas of practical philosophy entertained there—and from the pervading utilitarian bias of its prose literature, we must confess that, had we been asked to name any votary of the British muse more likely than another to be appreciated in that country, we should have had very little hesitation in fixing upon Crabbe. And why? Because his poetry is characterised by a stern adherence to the realities of life, as contradistinguished from romance, and because his characters and situations are taken from existing aspects of society, appreciable by all. In this theory it appears we are wrong; and Professor Norton has here done his best to account for it. We are most given to admire what is least attainable; and therefore it is that the spiritual glow which Mrs Hemans has blent with human sentiment—the imaginative beauty with which she has clothed “the shows of earth and heaven,”—and the leaven of romance which she has infused into the communications of daily life, have, as lucus a non lucendo, been elements of, and not the impediments to, her American popularity.]