Mrs. Hall supplies me with the following particulars concerning her early acquaintance and intercourse with Miss Landon.
"I forget how it came about, but my husband was introduced to a certain little Miss Spence, who, on the strength of having written something about the Highlands, was most decidedly BLUE, when blue was by no means so general a color as it is at present. She had a lodging of two rooms in Great Quebec Street, and 'patronized' young littérateurs, inviting them to her 'humble abode,' where tea was made in the bedroom, and where it was whispered the butter was kept cool in the wash-handbasin! There were 'lots' of such-like small scandals about poor Miss Spence's 'humble abode'; still people liked to go; and my husband was invited, with a sort of apology to poor me, who, never having published anything at that time, was considered ineligible; it was 'a rule,' and Miss Spence, in her 'humble abode,' lived by rule.
"Of course I had an account of the party when Mr. Hall came home. I coveted to know who was there, and what everybody wore and said. I was told that Lady Caroline Lamb was there, enveloped in the folds of an ermine cloak, which she called a 'cat-skin,' and that she talked a great deal about a periodical she wished to get up, to be called 'Tabby's Magazine'; and with her was an exceedingly haughty, brilliant, and beautiful girl, Rosina Wheeler,—since well known as Lady Bulwer Lytton,—and who sat rather impatiently at the feet of her eccentric 'Gamaliel.' Miss Emma Roberts was one of the favored ladies, and Miss Spence (who, like all 'Leo-hunters,' delighted in novelty) had just caught the author of 'The Mummy,' Jane Webb, who was as gentle and unpretending then as she was in after-years, when, laying aside romance for reality, she became a great helper of her husband, Mr. London, in his laborious and valuable works. When I heard Miss Benger was there, in her historic turban, I thought how fortunate that I had remained at home! I had always a terror of tall, commanding women, who blink down upon you, and have the unmistakable air about them of 'Behold me! have I not pronounced sentence upon Queen Elizabeth, and set my mark on the Queen of Scots?' Still, I quite appreciated the delight of meeting under the same roof so many celebrities, and was cross-questioning my husband, when he said, 'But there was one lady there whom I promised you should call on to-morrow.'
"Imagine my mingled delight and dismay!—delight at the bare idea of seeing her, who must be wellnigh suffocated with the perfume of her own 'Golden Violet,' the idol of my imagination,—dismay! for what should I say to her? what would she say to me?
"And now I must look back,—back to the 'long ago.'
"And yet I can hardly realize the sweep of years that have gone over so many who have since become near and dear to us. At that first visit, I saw Lætitia Landon in her grandmamma's modest lodging in Sloane Street,—a bright-eyed, sparkling, restless little girl, in a pink gingham frock,—grafting clever things on commonplace nothings, frolicking from subject to subject with the playfulness of a spoiled child,—her dark hair put back from her low, but sphere-like forehead, only a little above the most beautiful eyebrows that a painter could imagine, and falling in curls around her slender throat. We were nearly of the same age, but I had been almost a year married, and if I had not supported myself on my dignity as a married woman, should have been more than nervous, on my first introduction to a 'living poet,' though the poet was so different from what I had imagined. Her movements were as rapid as those of a squirrel. I wondered how anyone so quick could be so graceful. She had been making a cap for grandmamma, and would insist upon the old lady's putting it on, that I might see 'how pretty it was.' To this grandmamma (Mrs. Bishop) objected,—she 'couldn't' and she 'wouldn't' try it on,—'how could Lætitia be so silly?'—and then Lætitia put the great beflowered, beribboned thing on her own dainty little head, with a grave look, like a cloud on a rose, and folding her pretty little hands over her pink frock, made what she called a 'Sir Roger de Coverley' curtsy, skipping backwards into the bedroom, and rushing in again, having deposited out of sight the cap she was so proud of constructing, took my hands in hers, and asked me 'if we should be friends.'
"'Friends!' I do not think that during the long intimacy that followed that child-like meeting, extending from the year '26 to her leaving England in '38, during which time I saw her frequently every day, and certainly every week,—I do not think she ever loved me as I loved her,—how could she?—but I was proud of the confidence and regard she did accord me, and would have given half my own happiness to shelter her from the envy and evil that embittered the spring and summer-time of her blighted life. It always seemed to me impossible not to love her, not to cherish her. Perhaps the greatest magic she exercised was, that, after the first rush of remembrance of all that wonderful young woman had written had subsided, she rendered you completely oblivious of what she had done by the irresistible charm of what she was. You forgot all about her books,—you only felt the intense delight of life with her; she was penetrating and sympathetic, and entered into your feelings so entirely that you wondered how 'the little witch' could read you so readily and so rightly,—and if, now and then, you were startled, perhaps dismayed, by her wit, it was but the prick of a diamond arrow. Words and thoughts that she flung hither and thither, without design or intent beyond the amusement of the moment, come to me still with a mingled thrill of pleasure and pain that I cannot describe, and that my most friendly readers, not having known her, could not understand.
"When I knew her first, she certainly looked much younger than she was. When we talked of ages, which we did the first day, I found it difficult to believe she was more than seventeen,—she was so slight, so fragile, so girlish in her gestures and manners. In after-days I often wondered what made her so graceful. Her neck was short, her shoulders high. You saw these defects at the first glance, just as you did that her nose was retroussé, and that she was underhung, which ought to have spoiled the expression of her mouth,—but it did not; you saw all this at once, but you never thought about it after the first five minutes. Her complexion was clear, her hair dark and silken, and the lashes that sheltered her gray eyes long and slightly upturned. Her voice was inexpressibly sweet and modulated, but there was a melancholy cadence in it,—a fall so full of sorrow that I often looked to see if tears were coming: no, the smile and eyes were beaming in perfect harmony, but it was next to impossible to believe in her happiness, with the memory of that cadence still in the ear.
"Like all workers I have known intimately, she had a double existence, an inner and an outer life. Many times, when I have witnessed her suffering, either from those spasmodic attacks that sapped the foundation of her life, or from the necessity for work to provide for the comforts and luxuries of those who never spared her, I have seen her enter the long, narrow room that opened on the garden at Hans Place, and flash upon a morning visitor as if she had not a pain or a care in the world, dazzling the senses and captivating the affections of some new acquaintance, as she had done mine, and sending them away in the firm belief of her individual happiness, and the conviction that the melancholy which breathes through her poems was assumed, and that her real nature was buoyant and joyous as that of a lark singing between earth and heaven! If they could but have seen how the cloud settled down on that beaming face, if they had heard the deep-drawn sigh of relief that the little play was played out, and noted the languid step with which she mounted to her attic, and gathered her young limbs on the common seat, opposite the common table, whereon she worked, they would have arrived at a directly opposite and a too true conclusion, that the melancholy was real, the mirth assumed.
"My next visit to her was after she left her grandmamma's, and went to reside at 22, Hans Place. Miss Emma Roberts and her sister at that time boarded in Miss Lance's school, and Miss Landon found there a room at the top of the house, where she could have the quiet and seclusion her labor required, and which her kind-natured, but restless grandmother prevented. She never could understand how 'speaking one word to Letty, just one word, and not keeping her five minutes away from that desk, where she would certainly grow humped or crooked,' could interfere with her work! She was one of those stolid persons who are the bane of authors, who think nothing of the lost idea, and the unravelling of the web, when a train of thought is broken by the 'only one word,' 'only a moment,' which scatters thoughts to the wind,—thoughts that can no more be gathered home than the thistledown that is scattered by a passing breeze.