"Did she seem quite well here?"
"Oh, yes; she seemed pretty well; and she had three of her children with her: and well behaved, nice children they were. Charles, they tell me, is turned Catholic, and Henry is gone abroad, and Claude is dead. Who could have believed it, when they were all so merry here! Poor thing! if she had but made known her situation—it was wearing her away. Mr. Graves, who was the tutor to the boys, and is now rector of Bowness, came here with the boys when she went to Dublin, and she was to come back, and be with me by the year; and then the boys could have been still with Mr. Graves, for he got the living just then. He always comes to tell me when he hears any thing about them—and her husband is dead too, I hear."
Such was the woman's information; and there may be more truth in it than we would like to believe. There can be no doubt that Mrs. Hemans taxed all her strength and power to maintain her family. It is not to be believed but that her brothers and sister, who were well off, did all she would allow them to do; but we know the honorable pride of a truly noble mind—not to be burdensome when it can itself do its own work. How sensitive and shrinking it is! That Mrs. Hemans, in her praiseworthy endeavor to furnish the means of her boys' education, did overtax herself, and was obliged to write more than either her inclination or her true fame prompted, we have the evidence of herself, in one of her very last letters to her friend, Mrs. Lawrence. "You know into how rugged a channel the poor little stream of my life has been forced, and through what rocks it has wrought its way; and it is now longing for repose in some still valley. It has ever been one of my regrets that the constant necessity of providing sums of money, to meet the exigences of the boys' education, has obliged me to waste my mind in what I consider mere desultory effusions:
Pouring myself away,
As a wild bird, amid the foliage, tunes
That which within him thrills, and beats, and burns,
Into a fleeting lay.
My wish ever was to concentrate all my mental energy in the production of some more noble and complete work; something of pure and holy excellence, which might permanently take its place as the work of a British poetess. I have always hitherto written as if in the breaking times of storms and billows. Perhaps it may not even yet be too late to accomplish what I wish, though I sometimes feel my health so deeply penetrated, that I can not imagine how I am ever to be raised up again. But a greater freedom from these cares, of which I have been obliged to bear up under the whole responsibility, may do much to restore me; and though my spirits are greatly subdued by long sickness, I feel the powers of my mind in full maturity."
This is a plain enough confession;—and it is the old melancholy story, of genius fighting for the world, and borne down by the world which should be its friend. Once more, and for the ten thousandth time under such circumstances, we must exclaim with Shakspeare—
"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!"