WOMEN WRITERS:

THEIR WORKS AND WAYS.

SECOND SERIES.

I.

MRS. HEMANS.

1793-1835.

Birth at Liverpool-Childhood at Gwrych-Early love of reading and marvellous memory-Bronwylfa-Conway Castle-Early BlossomsMeets Captain Hemans-Marriage-Dislike to Daventry-Birth of her son, Arthur-Return to Bronwylfa-Prize Poem-Vespers of Palermo-Siege of Valencia-The Forest Sanctuary-Rhyllon-Records of Woman-Settles at Wavertree-Visit to Abbotsford-At "The Dove's Nest"-Wordsworth-Goes to Dublin-Declining health— Death.

RE the poems of Mrs. Hemans quite forgotten? Are

Athey never read? We often hear that this is the case,

but some obstinate facts seem to tell us the contrary.

The tide of years is rolling on, and yet two leading publishers issue cheap editions of her works. Her poem of Casabianca is the first taught to us in childhood; The Graves of a Household, the Stately Homes of England, The Better Land, and Oh! call my brother back to me, are found in every school reading-book, and at least three

of her pieces-Richard Cœur de Lion, the Lady of Provence, and The Ballad of Roncesvalles-are frequently on the list of favourite selections for recitation. There is, too, a Mrs. Hemans' Birthday Book, published as late as 1884. With these facts staring us in the face, how can it be said that the poetry of Mrs. Hemans is quite neglected?

She was no Sappho; she gave us no passionate lovesongs; she was the poet of the affections. Nature, too, spoke eloquently to her soul; the romance of war and chivalry, the glitter of steel and the waving of banners. kindled her imagination. Some of her shorter poems do and will live, notwithstanding the ebb and flow of modern opinion. Without profound insight, they have a directness and pathos which nothing can destroy. We need not look for "obstinate questionings," for involved reasoning and passionate yearnings in Mrs. Hemans. The unrest which troubles so many at the close of the nineteenth century had not begun. She is plaintive, but never passionate; she is subdued, but never rebellious or defiant. Carlyle once said that there is "a thin vein of true poetry in Mrs. Hemans." He is right; the vein is thin, but it is there. By virtue of this "thin vein of true poetry" Mrs. Hemans takes rank amongst the singers of the century. She is not a deep teacher, but she has a sweet voice of her own. Let us take a brief glance at her life.

Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Duke Street, Liverpool, on the 25th of September, 1793. By descent she was only half Irish. Her father, a wine merchant in good business, was a native of Ireland, but her mother (whose name had been Wagner) was of mingled Italian and German descent, and was the daughter of the Tuscan Consul at Liverpool. Felicia, the fifth of seven children, was remark

Mr. H. F. Chorley, in his Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, gives the date of her birth 1794, but Mrs. Hughes, her sister, says 1793, and she must be the best authority on the subject. This date is also given in The Dictionary of National Biography.

EARLY LOVE OF READING.

3

able from her birth for extreme beauty and precocious talents. Before she had reached the age of seven, her father, having suffered commercial losses, broke up his establishment at Liverpool and removed with his family to Wales, where for the next nine years they resided at Gwrych, near Abergele, in Denbighshire. Their house, now almost entirely pulled down, was a large, solitary old mansion, close to the sea, and shut in by a chain of rocky hills. In the calm seclusion of this romantic region, with a large library at hand, little Felicia spent a happy childhood, and in after-life her thoughts travelled back to it with regretful tenderness. Here she drank in that ardent love of Nature and that warm attachment for the green land of Wales, its true-hearted people, its music and its traditions, which never left her. Gwrych was supposed to be haunted, and Felicia, having heard a rumour of a fiery greyhound, which kept watch at the end of the avenue, sallied forth, by moonlight, quite alone, to encounter the goblin. She had such a charm about her, that the old gardener used to say, "Miss Felicy would 'tice you to do anything." Her eldest sister died young, and Felicia's education was undertaken by her mother. Felicia repaid her with a love more than usually strong. Her first lines, when she was only eight years old, are addressed to her mother, and in one of her last sonnets (to a family Bible) she acknowledges that the teaching of her early years had been a seed—

"Not lost, for which in darker years,

O Book of Heaven! I pour with grateful tears
Heart blessings on the holy dead and thee."

Felicia's quickness in acquiring knowledge was only equalled by her amazing memory. Her sister says that she could repeat pages of poetry from her favourite authors after having read them but once, and a scarcely less wonderful faculty was the rapidity of her reading. When she was quite a child a bystander would imagine that she was only

carelessly turning over the pages of a book; in reality she
was taking in the whole sense as completely as another
would do who pored over it with the closest attention.
"Why, Felicia, you can't have read that," one of her friends
used to say.
"Oh! yes, I have," was her answer, "and I
will repeat it to you." And so she would. One of her
earliest tastes was a passion for Shakespeare, which she
read as her chosen recreation at six years old. "In later
days," says her sister, Mrs. Hughes, "she would often refer
to the hours of romance she had passed in a secret haunt of
her own, a seat among the branches of an old apple-tree.
There, revelling in the pages of her cherished volume, she
would become completely absorbed in the imaginative world
it revealed to her." The following lines, written at eleven
years old, show something of her youthful enthusiasm :-

"Led by Shakespeare, bard inspired,
The bosom's energies are fired.
We learn to shed the gen'rous tear
O'er poor Ophelia's sacred bier ;
To love the merry moonlit scene,
With fairy elves in valleys green;
Or, borne on fancy's heavenly wings,
To listen while sweet Ariel sings."

:

Her beauty was of a very delicate and fragile kind her complexion brilliant, her hair long, curling, and golden. One lady remarked in her hearing, "That child is not made for happiness, I know; her colour comes and goes too fast." She never forgot this observation, and used afterwards to say it gave her great pain.

At the age of eleven she passed a winter in London with her father and mother, and the visit was repeated the following year. During one of her London visits she was taken to see a sculpture-gallery, and she involuntarily exclaimed, "Oh! hush! don't speak." At another time, her mother used to tell of the interest she excited in a party who were visiting the Marquis of Stafford's collection of