"I have now to introduce," says Miss Mitford, "another fair artist into the female gallery of which I am so proud; an artist whose works seem to me to bear the same relation to sculpture that those of Mrs Acton Tindal do to painting. The poetry of Miss Day is statuesque in its dignity, in its purity, in its repose. Purity is perhaps the distinguishing quality of this fine writer, pervading the conception, the thoughts, and the diction. But she must speak for herself. As 'The Infant Bridal' might form a sketch for an historical picture, so 'Charlotte Corday' is a model, standing ready to be chiselled in Parian stone."
"Stately and beautiful and chaste,
Forth went the dauntless maid,
Her blood to yield, her youth to waste,
That carnage might be stayed.
This solemn purpose filled her soul,
There was no room for fear;
She heard the cry of vengeance roll
Prophetic on her ear.
"She thought to stem the course of crime
By one appalling deed;
She knew to perish in her prime
Alone would be her meed.
No tremor shook her woman's breast,
No terror blanched her brow;
She spoke, she smiled, she took her rest,
And hidden held her vow.
"She mused upon her country's wrong,
Upon the tyrant's guilt;
Her settled purpose grew more strong
As blood was freshly spilt.
What though the fair, smooth hand were slight!
It grasped the sharpened steel;
A triumph flashed before her sight—
The death that it should deal.
"She sought her victim in his den—
The tiger in his lair;
And though she found him feeble then,
There was no thought to spare.
Fast through his dying, guilty heart,
That pity yet withstood,
She made her gleaming weapon dart,
And stained her soul with blood."
In another chapter of her work Miss Mitford gives us a slight biographical sketch of one who needs no introduction here or elsewhere—of the now celebrated Mrs Browning. The sketch is very interesting, but the extract given from her poems is not very happily selected. Miss Mitford does not seem to have ventured to trust herself among the more daring beauties—the bolder and more spiritual flights of her friend Mrs Browning. Her taste clings, as we have said, to what is distinct and definite. Of this we have rather an amusing instance in the criticism she passes on Shelley's Alastor. There is good sense and some truth in the criticism, and yet it is not all that ought to have been said of such a poem:—
"The first time," she says, "I ever met with any of his works, this vagueness brought me into a ludicrous dilemma. It was in the great library of Tavistock House that Mr Perry one morning put into my hand a splendidly printed and splendidly bound volume, (Alastor, as I think,) and desired me to read it, and give him my opinion. 'You will at least know,' he said, 'whether it be worth anybody else's reading.'
"Accordingly I took up the magnificent presentation copy, and read conscientiously till visitors came in. I had no marker, and the richly-bound volume closed as if instinctively; so that when I resumed my task, on the departure of the company, not being able to find my place, I was obliged to begin the book at the first line. More visitors came and went, and still the same calamity befell me; again, and again, and again I had to search in vain amongst a succession of melodious lines, as like each other as the waves of the sea, for buoy or landmark, and had always to put back to shore and begin my voyage anew. I do not remember having been ever in my life more ashamed of my own stupidity, than when obliged to say to Mr Perry, in answer to his questions as to the result of my morning's studies, that doubtless it was a very fine poem—only, that I never could tell, when I took up the book, where I had left off half an hour before—an unintended criticism, which, as characteristic both of author and reader, very much amused my kind and clever host."
Now, if, instead of the magnificent presentation copy, read in the great library of Tavistock House, where visitors were coming in and going out, Miss Mitford had taken a little homely manageable volume down Woodcock Lane, and there read Alastor, undisturbed, beneath the shadow of the trees, she must, we think, have had to record a very different impression of the poem. She would have needed no "marker." Perhaps there would have lived in her memory an hour of intellectual pleasure as great as any that the page of the poet had ever procured for her. Though not the highest effort of Shelley's genius, Alastor is probably the most pleasing. There is no tortuosity of thought to pardon or to forget; it is one unbroken interwoven strain of music, of imagery, of sentiment. Those who have defined poetry as the luxury of thought, could nowhere find a better example to illustrate their meaning—it is all music, imagination, feeling. Oh, when the summer months come round, let us entreat Miss Mitford to try it in Woodcock Lane! How could she trust to anything she had read out of a magnificent presentation copy, in the great library at Tavistock House?
The quotation from Keats is very skilfully selected; it must please the most fastidious taste, and is yet sufficiently peculiar to suggest that no one but Keats could have written it. From the writings of W. S. Landor she might have gathered much better, and without devoting to them any larger space than she has done. If she had turned to the miscellaneous poems which conclude his collected works, she might have extracted two or three of the most polished and perfect lyrics in our language, and which have the precise qualification, in this case so indispensable, of being very brief.