The character of the convert's wife, Leonor,—devotedly clinging to his fortunes, without a reproach or a murmur, while her heart trembles before him, as though she were in the presence of a lost spirit,—is one of those, in which Mrs. Hemans' individual mode of thought and manner of expression are most happily impersonated. As a whole, she was hardly wrong in her own estimate of this poem: and on recently returning to it, I have been surprised to find, how well it bears the tests and trials with which it is only either fit or rational to examine works of the highest order of mind. But here, also, would criticism be impertinent.
The next work of Mrs. Hemans, and the one by which she is most universally known, was the “Records of Woman,” published in 1828. In this, to use her own words, “there is more of herself to be found” than in any preceding composition. But even the slightest analysis of these beautiful legends would be superfluous; suffice it to say, that they were not things of meditation, but imagined and uttered in the same breath; like every line that she wrote, as far as possible from being a studied exercise. It is true, that in some lyrics more than others, her individual feelings are eagerly put forth—in those, for instance, wherein aspirations after another world are expressed, or which breathe the weary pining language of home sickness, or in which she utters her abiding sense of the insufficiency of fame to satisfy a woman's heart, however its possession may gratify her vanity—or wherein she speaks with a passionate self-distrust of her own art, of the impossibility of performance to keep pace with desire. The fervor with which these were poured forth seriously endangered a frame already undermined by too ardent a spirit, whose consuming work had been aided by a personal self-neglect, childish to wilfulness. So perilously, indeed, was she excited by the composition of Mozart's Requiem, that she was prohibited by her physician from any further exercise of her art, for some weeks after it was written. Few more genuine out-bursts of feeling have been ever poured forth than the three following verses of that poem.
“Yet I have known it long:
Too restless and too strong
Within this clay hath been the o'ermastering flame;
Swift thought that came and went,
Like torrents o'er me sent
Have shaken as a reed, my thrilling frame.
Like perfumes on the wind,
Which none may stay or bind,
The beautiful comes floating through my soul;
I strive with yearning vain,
The spirit to detain
Of the deep harmonies that past me roll!
Therefore disturbing dreams
Trouble the secret streams,
And founts of music that o'erflow my breast;
Something far more divine
Than may on earth be mine,
Haunts my worn heart, and will not let it rest.”
Most of the poems above referred to, were written at Rhyllon; the last and most favorite of Mrs. Hemans' residence at Wales. Some of them will be found colored by a shadow which had recently passed over her lot—the death of her mother. To this, which she always felt as an irreparable loss, will be found not a few touching allusions in many following letters.
A small woodland dingle, near Rhyllon, was her favorite retreat: here she would spend long summer mornings to read, and project, and compose, while her children played about her. “Whenever one of us brought her a new flower,” writes one of them, “she was sure to introduce it into her next poem.” She has unconsciously described this haunt over and over again with affectionate distinctness; it is the scene referred to in the “Hour of Romance,” and in the sonnet which is printed among her “Poetical Remains.”
“Still are the cowslips from thy bosom springing,
O far off grassy dell?—And dost thou see,
When southern winds first wake the vernal singing,
The star-gleam of the wood anemone?
Doth the shy ring-dove haunt thee yet—the bee
Hang on thy flowers, as when I breathed farewell
To their wild blooms? and round the beechen tree
Still in green softness, doth the moss bank swell?”
Many of the imaginations which floated through her brain in this retirement, were lost in the more interrupted and responsible life, which followed Mrs. Hemans' departure from Wales; when the breaking up of her household, on the marriage of one of her family, and the removal of another into Ireland, threw her exclusively upon her own resources, and compelled her to make acquaintance with an “eating, drinking, buying, bargaining” world with which, from her disposition and habits, she was ill-fitted to cope. One of these unfinished works was the “Portrait Gallery,” of which one episode, “The lady of the Castle,” is introduced in the “Records.”