It is plain that Miss Barrett would always write well if she wrote simply from her own heart, and without thinking of the compositions of any other author—at least let her think of them only in so far as she is sure that they embody great thoughts in pure and appropriate language, and in forms of construction which will endure the most rigid scrutiny of common sense and unperverted taste. If she will but wash her hands completely of Æschylus and Milton, and all other poets, either great, or whom she takes for such, and come before the public in the graces of her own feminine sensibilities, and in the strength of her own profound perceptions, her sway over human hearts will be more irresistible than ever, and she will have nothing to fear from a comparison with the most gifted and illustrious of her sex.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] London. Moxon. 1844.
[32] "With accents undefiled;" this is surely a very strange and unaccountable interpolation. How was it possible, or conceivable, that any accents could be defiled, which conveyed the holiest and most pathetic injunction that ever came from the lips of a dying mother?
UP STREAM; OR, STEAM-BOAT REMINISCENCES.
I had come to New Orleans to be married, and the knot once tied, there was little inducement for my wife, myself, or any of our party, to remain in that city. Indeed, had we been disposed to linger, an account that was given us of the most unwelcome of all visitors, the yellow fever, having knocked at the doors of several houses in the Marigny suburb, would have been sufficient to drive us away. For my part, I was anxious to find myself in my now comfortable home, and to show my new acquisition—namely, my wife—to my friends above Bâton Rouge, well assured that the opinion of all would be in favour of the choice I had made. By some eccentric working of that curious machinery called the mind, I was more thoughtful than a man is usually supposed to be upon his wedding-day; and I received the congratulations of the guests, went through the obligato breakfast, and the preparations for departure, in a very automatical manner. I took scarcely more note of the nine shots that were fired as we went on board the steamer, of the hurrahs shouted after us from the quay by a few dozen sailors, or the waving of the star-spangled banners that fluttered over the poop and forecastle—of all the honour and glory, in short, attending our departure. I was busy drawing a comparison between my first and this, my last, voyage to the Red River.
It was just nine years and two months since I had first come into possession of my "freehold of these United States," as the papers specified it. Five thousand dollars had procured me the honour of becoming a Louisianian planter; upon the occurrence of which event, I was greeted by my friends and acquaintances as the luckiest of men. There were two thousand acres, "with due allowance for fences and roads," according to the usual formula; and the wood alone, if I might believe what was told me, was well worth twenty thousand dollars. For the preceding six months, the whole of the western press had been praising the Red River territory to the very skies; it was an incomparable sugar and cotton ground, full sixteen feet deep of river slime—Egypt was a sandy desert compared to it—and as to the climate, the zephyrs that disported themselves there were only to be paralleled in Eldorado and Arcadia. I, like a ninny as I was, although fully aware of the puffing propensities of our newspaper editors, especially when their tongues, or rather pens, have been oiled by a few handfuls of dollars, fell into the trap, and purchased land in the fever-hole in question, where I was assured that a habitable house and two negro huts were already built and awaiting me. The improvements alone, the land-speculator was ready to take his oath, were worth every cent of two thousand dollars. In short, I concluded my blind bargain, and in the month of June, prepared to start to visit my estate. I was at New Orleans, which city was just then held fast in the gripe of its annual scourge and visitor, the yellow fever. I was in a manner left alone; all my friends had gone up or down stream, or across the Pont Chartrain. There was nothing to be seen in the whole place but meagre hollow-eyed negresses, shirtless and masterless, running about the streets, howling like jackals, or crawling in and out of the open doors of the houses. In the upper suburb things were at the worst; there, whole streets were deserted, the houses empty, the doors and windows knocked in; while the foul fever-laden breeze came sighing over from Vera Cruz, and nothing was to be heard but the melancholy rattle of the corpse-carts as they proceeded slowly through the streets with their load of coffins. It was high time to be off, when the yellow fever, the deadly vomito, had thus made its triumphant entry, and was ruling and ravaging like some mighty man of war in a stormed fortress.
I had four negroes with me, including old Sybille, who was at that time full sixty-five years of age; Cæsar, Tiberius, and Vitellius, were the three others. We are fond of giving our horses and negroes these high sounding appellations, as a sort of warning, I am inclined to think, to those amongst us who sit in high places; for even in our young republic there is no lack of would-be Cæsars.