(A pleasing view) on genial Ridges grows,
Its clustered heads on lofty Spires ascend,
And frequent with delightful wavings bend,
There younger Barley shoots a tender Blade,
And spreads a level plain with verdant Shade.
The wreathing Pea extends its bloomy Pride,
And flow’ry Borders smile on either side.
She says, in terms, that whenever she looks at the country it produces an excitement in her which makes her write verse: unfortunately her intelligence was too weak, and only a few lines (not about Nature) were found pointed enough for a representative selection. But she had that touch of informality, and I think that even in the obscurest and worst women poets of the time will almost always be found—what in the men’s work is only sometimes to be found—expressions of personal joy and grief, the healthy instinct to write about the things that the writer most intensely feels.
As for the text, there are a few poems which I have cut. Two of Lady Chudleigh’s are cut and one of Katherine Philips’s, two by Mary Masters and the second of Mary Mollineux’s. The first poem from Lady Mary Montagu is compressed, and Fanny Greville’s Indifference and Mrs. Hemans’s Dirge are truncated as they are in Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse. I have modernized the spelling and typography of most of the older poems, but have here and there kept it because I didn’t like the look of some poems when I had modernized them.