Tam o' the Lin lay down to die, And his friends whispered softly and woefully : 66 We'll buy you some masses to scour1 away sin," "And drink at my lyke-wake," 2 quo' Tam o' the Lin. 1 Wash. "Fee him 5, faither, fee him," quo' she; A' the wark about the house Gaes wi' me when I see him. I gang sae lightly through it; "What wad I dae wi' him, Meggy? He's ne'er a sark 8 upon his back, And I hae nane to gie him." "I hae two sarks into my kist, And ane of them I'll gie him, And for a merk o' mair fee Oh! dinna stand wi' him," quo' she, 2 The watching a dead body. 5 Engage him as servant. of our money, 6 A merk was in value thirteen and fourpence, 7 Repent. "Weel do I lo'e him," quo' she; "Weel do I lo'e him; The brawest lads about the place He'll haud the plough, thrash i̇' the barn, Among other Scottish women who have written verse, the most prominent are Jean Adam (1710—1765), author of the song "There's nae Luck about the House," and Mrs. Anne Grant of Luggan (1755-1838) who wrote "The Highlanders" (1803), "Letters from the Mountains" (1806), "Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen" (1814), and other forgotten works. These were extraordinarily popular in their day, and brought a considerable and much needed income to Mrs. Grant. Her letters were incorporated in her Life, published in 1844. 1 Fools. 2 Talk. CHAPTER VI. MRS. HEMANS. THE four " HE term of "English Sappho " has been applied to several of our poetesses, chiefly to "L. E. L." Perhaps, however, none of our women writers has so much deserved the appellation as Mrs. Hemans. Somebody has said that we could cut the whole of Sheridan's wit out of one of Shakspeare's comedies, and never miss it. The remark, of course, has only a certain amount of truth in it; but with a greater amount of accuracy one might say that the whole of what "L. E. L.'s" genius accomplished might easily be cut out of Mrs. Hemans' works without causing the other writer much loss of reputation. "L. E. L.," indeed, of the two poetesses, resembles Sappho the more, in leaving us less to read. It is true that Mrs. Browning, in her Portuguese sonnets, touches the chord of love with a far subtler finger, and produces from it a vibration far more intense than Mrs. Hemans, at her best, produces. But yet there was little of the Sapphic tone of mind about Elizabeth Barrett Browning; her love was objective; it clung to something with a sense of requital; and such touch of suffering as may be found in the famous Portuguese sonnets is not that of the pining spirit so much as it is the over-delicate sensibility generated in an invalid's room. But there is something in the more subjective yearning characteristic of Mrs. Hemans's poetry that more recalls the interpretation of Sappho's mind which we have been accustomed to put upon the fragments of her love-writings that are left us. It has also to be said that in much of the verse Mrs. Hemans devoted to personal themes less connected with love the motherliness which was so strange a sign in the virgin Sappho makes itself felt. There is far more in Mrs. Hemans than in Mrs. Browning that corresponds with the feeling of Sappho's sweetest fragments,— At best, however, the parallel cannot carry us far. As it has been said that the poetry of Wordsworth lacks a trumpet note, so it must be said that the poetry of Mrs. Hemans lacks any note of supreme passion. It is full of womanly tenderness, of acute sensibility to all truly beautiful things; it is "all pure womanly," but it does lack that passion which is the chief greatness of the highest poetry. If the distinction may justly be made, her love-poetry may be said to be that of the domestic affections rather than that of the elective affinities by which the sublimest souls, with peril to themselves, grope for each other. Precocious as the published verses of her extreme youth were, there was not any amount of striking aspiration in them. The unhappy surrender of her heart, when she was in the singularly lovely bloom that made her a woman at fifteen, did not draw from her emotions any great cry that has left to us an appealing echo; and had the marriage in which this surrender of her affections consummated proved as contenting as it was in reality harassing, perhaps we should have had from her much less poetry of any kind. For amid the happy surroundings of her girlhood she did not exhibit tokens of that consecrated, awful loneliness that nearly always makes the high poetic mind dwell like a star, apart. To the end of life all the things that sweeten a household, the love of home, and mother, and husband, and child were the themes upon which her fancy dwelt most constantly, and it was on this account that she found so wide a response in the grateful hearts of the people. The great element of freshness in Mrs. Hemans's writings was her abandonment of the classical style, which had been wearily done to death by her predecessors. She, in common with most literary people of her time, had felt the very last ebbing wave of classicalism, and recognised that a new inspiration must be sought. The joyous, half-pagan influences that had never been allowed to die in England since that "glorious time, when learning, like a pilgrim from afar, roused with his trumpet peasant and king," had at last worked themselves out. Romance was in the air. Byron, Southey, and Scott, were its great heralds; and Mrs. Hemans was the first woman of distinction who joined them in the new movement. Now that this phase of literary taste has also passed to so large an extent, it is impossible for us not to become impatient sometimes at the constant processions, and flapping of banners, and liltings of troubadours, and war-songs of crusaders, and all the other medievalisms which were then so new and delightful to readers of imaginative writing. Any poetess who should take up such themes now would be smiled at; but Mrs. Hemans was one of the greatest of those writers who originated or at least revived them, and in the varied music of our literature her verse is a sweet and clear fanfare like that of silver bugles. There is no great writer whom succeeding ages do not discover to echo largely the voice of his or her times; and to say that Mrs. Hemans's themes now strike us as hackneyed is no more than to say that three or four contemporary writers, of whom she was one, made them hackneyed by treating them so well. There is this at least to be said of this author, that though she wrote so much, and in an age when Byron was the favourite poet of Englishwomen, not |