Are requiems blent with triumph’s note.
Chicago, October 14.
JEAN INGELOW’S POEMS.[131]
Jean Ingelow is now over fifty years of age. For some time past she has devoted herself chiefly to graceful prose, in which her pure and playful imagination seems to have found sufficient vent. She can never be removed from the company of the poets, however, notwithstanding her apparent purpose of withdrawal, so far as we may surmise a possible design by her neglect of versification.
That she has demonstrated her possession of genuine poetic feeling cannot be denied. The volume before us is sufficient proof of this. Whenever she has permitted herself to be simple, lucid, and natural, her verses’ not only please—they charm. She is one of the minor poets sincerely beloved—not in so great a degree as Adelaide Procter, or Christina Rossetti, because she is not equally successful in expressing the universal sentiments of the heart, and because she wanders from the unambitious poetry of natural feeling into the tricky and artificial, whither the multitude will not voluntarily follow. She is not always in one mood, as Adelaide Procter is; and her joy, when sincere, and not fictitious and artful, is sometimes exceedingly attractive and—what is its truest test—becomes infectious, pervading the reader’s mind and carrying the emotions away into its own atmosphere.
We never smile at Adelaide Procter’s
joy. Her smiles are sadder than her tears. She smiles like a dying saint, whose pallid features proclaim that the effort is inspired by something higher and more mysterious than the pleasure of the world. It is as Shakspere says: “Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, as if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit, that could be moved to smile at anything.”
Jean Ingelow possesses enough perception of real humor to throw, here and there, winsome flashes of merriment over very sombre pictures, especially in genre scenes like that depicted in “The Supper at the Mill.” Indeed, it may be safe to say that if she unloosed the flimsy chains of artificiality in which she has bound her muse, that very affected maid would prove frolicsome and mischievous; but her mistress prefers a decorousness of behavior which, by this time, must have dulled her own sense of the ludicrous, while supplying additional keenness in that direction to her critics, and furnishing new and irresistible models for hilarious parody, as we shall see.