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FELICIA HEMANS.

[FELICIA DOROTHEA BROWNE was born in Liverpool Sept. 25, 1793, and published her first poems in 1803. She married Captain Hemans, 1812, and died in Dublin May 16, 1835. Her principal works are:-Tales and Historic Scenes, 1816; The Forest Sanctuary, 1826; Lays of Many Lands, 1826; Records of Woman, 1828; Songs of the Affections, 1830; Scenes and Hymns of Life, 1834. She also published various dramas and translations.]

Fifty years ago few poets were more popular than Mrs. Hemans; her verses were familiar to all hearts, and won praise from such fastidious critics as Gifford and Jeffrey, no less than from Wordsworth, Scott and Byron. Yet now they are chiefly forgotten, and without injustice. Her tedious romantic tales, her dramas characterless and without invention, are more frequently below than above the mean of merit. Her lyric poetry is more memorable; yet this, even, is less to be valued for its own sake than as the revelation of a delicate and attractive personality. Sprung from a talent expressive not creative, her verses are stamped with feminine qualities. In their familiar pathos, their love of brilliant adventure, their moral earnestness and habit of obvious reflection, no Pythian enthusiasm fills the poet and compels us to forget her womanhood. The inspiring genius of Mrs. Hemans is neither personal nor artistic passion, but a mild Anglican variety of Christianity. She was a woman of wide culture, yet her acquaintance with the civilisations of the past served only to heighten in her eyes the superiority of Protestant England. For the cause of faith she lays her timidity aside, and in a long and feeble poem, The Sceptic, attempts to scale the fastnesses of unbelief. Happily her religion has a gentler side; a side revealing her to be, as Wordsworth said, 'a holy spirit.' And as a spirit she passed through the world. This life to her, with all its keenly-felt endearments of natural beauty and of

human love, is but the prelude to an infinite future. Not in nature, not in art, not in sympathy must the weary spirit hope for rest.

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Earth has no heart, fond dreamer, with a tone

To send thee back the spirit of thine own;

Seek it in heaven.'

The transitoriness of this world is the dominant note of her music; loudest in all the chords of warning, consolation, and regret.

This is the chief distinction of Mrs. Hemans' poetry. Her other qualities may be referred to the influence of contemporary writers. The knowledge of many literatures preserved her from the servile adoption of any master's manner, but her early romantic poems are certainly suggested by those of Scott and of Southey; and the beauty of Childe Harold probably guided her choice of subject when she wrote a poem On the Restoration of the Arts to Italy, and another on Modern Greece. The last is a long attempt at loftiness of style whose passion for the beautiful burns with the warmth of painted fire. Mrs. Hemans was little qualified for such ambitious efforts. The habit of improvisation, never disciplined, disposed her to a looseness of style, an incoherence of thought, that no after revision corrected. Even her sweetest lyrics are somewhere imperfect, but to her more aspiring poems these weaknesses are fatal.

After the year 1828, when she fell in with Wordsworth's poetry, a simpler spirit moved her, and her gifts developed on a line more suited to their scope. Her simplicity was never the result of an inspired clearness of vision, as with Wordsworth or with Blake, but was rather the expression of a nature whose vistas were not wide enough to be indistinct, and whose plan of the globe ignored the unseen side. Still, such as it is, it counts for a merit. Her domestic lyrics are often spirited and tender. Some of these, The Child's First Grief, Casabianca, and others, are household words among our children. In such work, simple, chivalrous, pathetic, her real strength lies, and only by such poems can she assert a claim on our remembrance.

A. MARY F. ROBINSON.

A BALLAD OF RONCESVALLES.

'Thou hast not been with the festal throng At the pouring of the wine,

Men bear not from the hall of song

So dark a mien as thine!

There's blood upon thy shield,

There's dust upon thy plume,

Thou hast brought from some disastrous field That brow of wrath and gloom.'

'And is there blood upon my shield?

Maiden, it well may be!

We have sent the streams from our battle field All darkened to the sea!

We have given the founts a stain Midst their woods of ancient pine; And the ground is wet-but not with rain, Deep dyed-but not with wine.

'The ground is wet-but not with rain;
We have been in war array,

And the noblest blood of Christian Spain
Hath bathed her soil to-day.

I have seen the strong man die,
And the stripling meet his fate,

Where the mountain winds go sounding by
In the Roncesvalles' Strait.

'In the gloomy Roncesvalles' Strait
There are helms and lances cleft;
And they that moved at morn elate
On a bed of heath are left!

There's many a fair young face
Which the war-steed hath gone o'er;
At many a board there is kept a place
For those that come no more!'

'Alas for love, for woman's breast,

If woe like this must be!

Hast thou seen a youth with an eagle crest
And a white plume waving free?

With his proud quick-flashing eye,

And his mien of kingly state,

Doth he come from where the swords flashed high
In the Roncesvalles' Strait?'

'In the gloomy Roncesvalles' Strait

I saw, and marked him well;
For nobly on his steed he sate
When the pride of manhood fell.

But it is not youth which turns
From the field of spears again;
For the boy's high heart too wildly burns
Till it rests among the slain.'

'Thou canst not say that he lies low,
The lovely and the brave?

Oh none could look on his joyous brow
And think upon the grave!

Dark, dark perchance the day
Hath been with valour's fate;
But he is on his homeward way
From the Roncesvalles' Strait.'

'There is dust upon his joyous brow,
And o'er his graceful head,

And the warhorse will not wake him now,
Though it browse his greensward bed.
I have seen the stripling die,
And the strong man meet his fate,
Where the mountain winds go sounding by,
In the Roncesvalles' Strait.'

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A DIRGE.

Calm on the bosom of thy God,

Fair spirit, rest thee now!

E'en while with ours thy footsteps trod His seal was on thy brow.

Dust, to its narrow house beneath!

Soul, to its place on high!

They that have seen thy look in death No more may fear to die.

CASABIANCA.

The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck,
Shone round him o'er the dead;
Yet beautiful and bright he stood

As born to rule the storm!

A creature of heroic blood,

A proud, though child-like form!

The flames roll'd on-he would not go
Without his Father's word;

That Father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.
He call'd aloud: 'Say, father, say
If yet my task is done!'

He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

'Speak, father!' once again he cried,
'If I may yet be gone!'

And but the booming shots replied,

And fast the flames roll'd on.

Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair;

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And look'd from that lone post of death In still, yet brave, despair;

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