MRS. WARE’S POEMS.[[1]]

Averse, as we have declared ourselves, to any severe criticisms upon the productions of female poets, we are constrained, in the case before us, to speak with a plainness, savoring less of gallantry than truth. If only “some female errors” fell to the lot of Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware, we might, perhaps, “look in her face” and “forget them all;” but so many are the faults of which she is guilty, that she must have a face as beautiful as Raphael’s Fornarina, to cause us to forget or forgive a tithe of the number. The lady, however, is neither beautiful nor juvenile; she goes so far in her preface as to confess that she cannot plead “youthful diffidence” for her indiscretion in writing and publishing a volume of verses. That she is not beautiful, we state on positive intelligence. On this score, therefore, her sins of metrical commission cannot be pardoned any more than because of her juvenility—an excuse which she so magnanimously disclaims.

On the second leaf of Mrs. Ware’s book, which is not really as well as figuratively blank, we perceive, paraded in capital letters, the words “Copyright secured in America.” Now, if the copyright has in fact been secured in America; if it has been entered at the office of the District Clerk of New York or of any other State, as the law directs, it strikes us that the dollar, charged as a fee in such cases, has been absurdly and ridiculously thrown away. The proceeding was altogether supererogatory. Booksellers are not particularly partial to publishing collections of poetry at the best; but that any one of them should be so insane as to re-publish a farrago like this, to enter into rivalry and competition for such a cause, is an hypothesis which never could have been engendered, except in the brain of a rhymster, dizzy with self-conceit. From the fact, however, of a copyright having been secured in America, we are well assured that the author is an American; even this was unnecessary, because Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware has, in times past, written her name to so many patches of poetry, that it is not unfamiliar to pains-taking readers, at least on our side of the water. She first made herself known to the literary world here as the Editor of a monthly magazine, exquisitely christened “The Bower of Taste.” That any work, with so Rosa-Matildaish a title, could have existed for a year was marvellous; still more marvellous was it, that it survived the merciless visitings of the Muse of Mrs. Ware. With the failure of this undertaking, her literary biography, brief as the posy of a ring, would terminate, were it not for the fact that, during some four years past, she has resided in England, and manufactured, to order, occasional lyrics for the Liverpool Newspapers. By some fatuity, which she has provokingly left unexplained, in a preface written in the worst possible taste, she has been impelled to the perpetration of the volume before us. But, previous to exemplifications of its component properties, let us give the preface entire, by way of showing how very unlike ladies, and how very foolishly, feminine bards can behave on paper. If our readers of both sexes do not laugh at the following outbreak of egotism and vanity, they are less easily amused than we conjecture.

[1] Power of the Passions and other Poems. By Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware. London: William Pickering, 1842. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 148

COURTEOUS READER,

I should like to write a Preface, if I could.—Such an ample field is afforded, for appealing to the sympathy and generosity of the “Liberal Public.” Such emphatic words as “youthful diffidence,” “consciousness of errors,” “request of friends,” “leisure hours,” “relief in solitude,”—all these once attracted my delighted attention, and I resolved, if I ever should write a book, to present therewith a very sentimental Preface. But upon this subject my opinions are changed. Negatively speaking of my volume—“youthful diffidence” I cannot plead; “consciousness of errors,” I might, which I own I have had time to correct. I do not publish at the “request of friends,” for no friends, to my knowledge, were ever particularly anxious for such an event. Nor for the amusement of my “leisure hours,” for, since my remembrance, I never had any. Nor as a “relief in solitude,” for I am never alone. And permit me to add, not for gold, for my muse will never become a Crœsus. Lastly, not for Fame, for light is my regard for her vain breath.

A Preface is an article which I am by no means prepared to attempt, being apprehensive that my labors might terminate like those of a certain venerable individual, of spelling-book celebrity, who, in companionship with his son, and a long-eared fellow-traveller, by his anxiety to please everybody, found, to his mortification, that he could please nobody. Now, with the very moderate desire of pleasing somebody, I have determined to write no preface to my book, because I am not prepared to make a single fashionable apology for its publication. At the present era of book-making, all prefatory introductions seem to be disregarded as superfluous by the reading community, except to works of deep erudition, or on subjects which may require preliminary elucidations from the author. All others are merely glanced over like the “programme of an entertainment,” or a “bill of the play,” and obtain no further notice. Scarcely one reader out of ten has the least interest or curiosity to learn what motive induced the author to write the volume, which he has either bought or borrowed for his entertainment. He certainly has a right to expect it will contain some matter either to improve, inform, or amuse the mind. If disappointed, no apology, however gracefully made, will effect a change in his opinion; and the author may expect to receive the same compliment which a certain learned doctor (more famed for candor than politeness) once paid to his delinquent pupil, who made an elaborate apology for his errors, that he who was good at making “a handsome apology, was generally good for nothing else.”

Thine respectfully,

K. A. W.