MEMOIRS OF MRS. HEMANS.1
1 From the Memoirs of Mrs. Hemans, by Chorley—now in the press of Messieurs Saunders and Otley, to whom we are indebted for some of the sheets.
It will be yet more clearly seen, from further portions of Mrs. Hemans' correspondence, with what devotion and gratitude she regarded German literature; she spoke of its language as “rich and affectionate, in which I take much delight:”—how she gratefully referred to its study as having expanded her mind and opened to her new sources of intellectual delight and exercise. For a while, too, she may have been said to have written under the shadow of its mysticism; but this secondary influence had passed away some time before her death. It is not the lot of high minds, though they may pass through and linger in regions where thought loses itself in obscurity, to terminate their career there. The “Lays of many Lands,” most of which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then edited by Mr. Campbell, were, we are told by herself, suggested by Herder's “Stimmen der Volker in Liedern.” Her next volume was formed of a collection of these, preceded by “The Forest Sanctuary.”
Mrs. Hemans considered this poem as almost, if not altogether, the best of her works. She would sometimes say, that in proportion to the praise which had been bestowed upon others of her less carefully meditated and shorter compositions, she thought it had hardly met with its fair share of success: for it was the first continuous effort in which she dared to write from the fulness of her own heart—to listen to the promptings of her genius freely and fearlessly. The subject was suggested by a passage in one of the letters of Don Leucadio Doblado, and was wrought upon by her with that eagerness and fervor which almost command corresponding results. I have heard Mrs. Hemans say, that the greater part of this poem was written in no more picturesque a retreat than a laundry, to which, as being detached from the house, she resorted for undisturbed quiet and leisure. When she read it, while in progress, to her mother and sister, they were surprised to tears at the increased power displayed in it. She was not prone to speak with self-contentment of her own works; but, perhaps, the one favorite descriptive passage was that picture of a sea burial in the second canto.
... She lay a thing for earth's embrace,
To cover with spring-wreaths. For earth's?—the wave
That gives the bier no flowers, makes moan above her grave!
On the mid-seas a knell!—for man was there,—
Anguish and love, the mourner with his dead!
A long, low, tolling knell—a voice of prayer—
Dark glassy waters, like a desert spread,—
And the pale shining Southern Cross on high,
Its faint stars fading from a solemn sky,
Where mighty clouds before the dawn grew red:—
Were these things round me? Such o'er memory sweep
Wildly when aught brings back that burial of the deep.
Then the broad lonely sunrise, and the plash
Into the sounding waves!—around her head
They parted, with a glancing moment's flash,
Then shut—and all was still....
The whole poem, whether in its scenes of superstition—the Auto da Fe—the dungeon—the flight, or in its delineation of the mental conflicts of its hero—or in its forest pictures of the free west, which offer such a delicious repose to the mind, is full of happy thoughts and turns of expression. Four lines of peculiar delicacy and beauty recur to me as I write, too strongly to be passed by. They are from a character of one of the martyr sisters.
And if she mingled with the festive train,
It was but as some melancholy star
Beholds the dance of shepherds on the plain,
In its bright stillness present, though afar.
But the entire episode of “Queen-like Teresa—radiant Inez”—is wrought up with a nerve and an impulse, which men of renown have failed to reach. The death of the latter, if, perhaps, it be a little too romantic for the stern realities of the scene, is so beautifully told, that it cannot be read without strong feeling, nor carelessly remembered. And most beautiful, too, are the sudden out-bursts of thankfulness—of the quick, happy consciousness of liberty with which the narrator of this ghastly sacrifice, interrupts the tale, to reassure himself—
Sport on, my happy child! for thou art free!