Lovely but to one on earth.’
“What is poetry, and what is a poetical career? The first is to have an organisation of extreme sensibility, which the second exposes bareheaded to the rudest weather. The original impulse is irresistible—all professions are engrossing when once begun; and, acting with perpetual stimulus, nothing takes more complete possession of its follower than literature. But never can success repay its cost. The work appears—it lives in the light of popular applause; but truly might the writer exclaim,—
‘It is my youth—it is my bloom—it is my glad free heart
I cast away for thee—for thee—ill-fated as thou art.’
If this be true even of one sex, how much more true of the other! Ah! Fame to a woman is indeed but a royal mourning in purple for happiness.”—New Monthly Magazine for August 1835.
H. F. CHORLEY.
“Though respect for the memory of the dead, and delicacy towards the living, enjoin us to be brief in alluding to the events of her life, we may speak freely, and at length, of the history of her mind, and the circumstances of her literary career, in the course of which she deserved and acquired a European reputation as the first of our poetesses living, and still before the public. Few have written so much, or written so well, as Mrs Hemans; few have entwined the genuine fresh thoughts and impressions of their own minds so intimately, with their poetical fancies, as she did; few have undergone more arduous and reverential preparation for the service of song—for, from childhood, her thirst for knowledge was extreme, and her reading great and varied. Those who, while admitting the high-toned beauty of her poetry, accused it of monotony of style and subject, (they could not deny to it the praise of originality, seeing that it founded a school of imitators in England, and a yet larger in America,) little knew to what historical research she had applied herself—how far and wide she had sought for food with which to fill her eager mind. It is true that she used only a part of the mass of information which she had collected—(for she never wrote on calculation, but from the strong impulse of the moment; and it was her nature intimately to take home to herself, and appropriate only what was high-hearted, imaginative, and refined;)—but the writer of this notice has seen manuscript collections of extracts made in the course of these youthful studies, sufficient of themselves to justify his assertion, if her poems (like those of every genuine poet) did not contain a still better record of the progress of her mind. Her knowledge of classic literature may be distinctly traced in her ‘Sceptic,’ her ‘Modern Greece,’ and a hundred later lyrics based upon what Bulwer so happily calls ‘the Graceful Superstition.’ Her study and admiration of the works of ancient Greek and Roman art, strengthened into an abiding love of the beautiful, which breathes both in the sentiment and in the structure of every line she wrote, (for there are few of our poets more faultlessly musical in their versification;) and when, subsequently, she opened for herself the treasuries of Spanish and German legend and literature, how thoroughly she had imbued herself with their spirit may be seen in her ‘Siege of Valencia,’ in her glorious and chivalresque ‘Songs of the Cid,’ and in her ‘Lays of Many Lands,’ the idea of which was suggested by Herder’s ‘Stimmen der Völker in Liedern.’
“But though her mind was enriched by her wide acquaintance with the poetical and historical literature of other countries, it possessed a strong and decidedly marked character of its own, which coloured all her productions—a character which, though any thing but feeble or sentimental, was essentially feminine. An eloquent modern critic (Mrs Jameson) has rightly said, ‘that Mrs Hemans’ poems could not have been written by a man;’ their love is without selfishness, their passion without a stain of this world’s coarseness, their high heroism (and to illustrate this assertion we would mention ‘Clotilda,’ ‘the Lady of Provence,’ and the ‘Switzer’s Wife,’) unsullied by any grosser alloy of mean ambition. Her religion, too, is essentially womanly—fervent, clinging to belief, and ‘hoping on, hoping ever,’ in spite of the peculiar trials appointed to her sex, so exquisitely described in the ‘Evening Prayer in a Girls’ School’—
‘Silent tears to weep,
And patient smiles to wear through suffering’s hour,