‘Kindly and gently, but as of one
For whom ’tis well to be fled and gone—
As of a bird from a chain unbound,
As of the wanderer whose home is found,
So let it be!’”
Memorials of Mrs Hemans, p. 354-6.
[445] It has already been shown that this was not the case.
ECLECTIC REVIEW.
“Mrs Hemans, if not in all respects the most gifted of the female writers who form so bright a constellation in the sphere of our contemporary literature, surpassed them all in those attributes of genius which characterise the lyric poets. Without possessing the dramatic conception of Joanna Baillie or Mary Mitford—the masculine vigour and depth of thought displayed by the late Mrs Fletcher, (better known as Miss Jewsbury,) or the fertile imagination of others of our delightful female prose writers—she outshone them all in her peculiar orbit; and though she wrote too much, and often too carelessly, to sustain, in all her compositions, the high standard of poetic excellence to which she often attained, her best productions, in her own rich and peculiar vein, rival those of the mightiest masters of English song; while their exquisitely feminine character justify the remark, that ‘the poetry of Mrs Hemans could have been written only by a woman.’”—E. R., 1836.