I observed that Lady Winchelsea was unfortunate in her models—Pindarics and Fables; nor does it appear from her Aristomenes that she would have been more successful than her contemporaries, if she had cultivated tragedy. She had sensibility sufficient for the tender parts of dramatic writing, but in the stormy and tumultuous she would probably have failed altogether. She seems to have made it a moral and religious duty to control her feelings lest they should mislead her. Of love, as a passion, she is afraid, no doubt from a conscious inability to soften it down into friendship. I have often applied two lines of her drama (p. 318) to her affections:
'Love's soft bands,
His gentle cords of hyacinths and roses,
Wove in the dewy Spring when storms are silent.'
By the by, in the next page are two impassioned lines spoken to a person fainting:
'Then let me hug and press thee into life,
And lend thee motion from my beating heart.'
From the style and versification of this, so much her longest work, I conjecture that Lady Winchelsea had but a slender acquaintance with the drama of the earlier part of the preceding century. Yet her style in rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture, which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness, and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think there is a good deal of resemblance in her style and versification to that of Tickell, to whom Dr. Johnson justly assigns a high place among the minor poets, and of whom Goldsmith rightly observes, that there is a strain of ballad-thinking through all his poetry, and it is very attractive. Pope, in that production of his boyhood, the 'Ode to Solitude,' and in his 'Essay on Criticism,' has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced.
If a second edition of your 'Specimens' should be called for, you might add from Helen Maria Williams the 'Sonnet to the Moon,' and that to 'Twilight;' and a few more from Charlotte Smith, particularly,
'I love thee, mournful, sober-suited Night.'
At the close of a sonnet of Miss Seward are two fine verses:
'Come, that I may not hear the winds of night.
Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.'
You have well characterised the poetic powers of this lady; but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter, and concerned with a dissenting academy. One of the most pleasing passages in her poetry is the close of the lines upon 'Life,' written, I believe, when she was not less than eighty years of age: