Hers is that oft-quoted couplet:
“Is there never a chink in the world above
Where they listen for words from below?”
“The Carpenter,” relating the touching story of his wife’s death to “The Scholar,” says with happy directness:
“’Tis sometimes natural to be glad;
And no man can be always sad,
Unless he wills to have it so.”
“The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” is widely popularized by lyceum readers, who find its energy well fitted for semi-dramatic recitation; and certain divisions of the “Songs of Seven,” notably “Love” and “Giving in Marriage,” possess lyrical richness.
The thought of Jean Ingelow’s poems is always clean-of-heart; she eschews—generally—psychological tendencies, and, although far from lucid, her longer flights of speculation are merely curious, obscure, and fanciful rather than vicious or misleading. Indeed, according to her measure of grace, she is abjectly devout, worshipping with Eastern blindness a Deity of whose attributes she conceives only one—Love; and, in the humble resignation of a sightless child, she casts herself into the arms of her notion of what that Love is, and rests there, content to seek no knowledge outside herself. But even within these sacred limits her disposition to artificiality in expression unconsciously enters, to mar, with incongruous ornament, the limpid thought:
“For, O my God! thy creatures are so frail,