Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/219

Rh Alas! hope is not prophecy—we dream. But rarely does the glad fulfilment come; We leave our land, and we return no more!" than the passage became applicable to her who had quoted it in sympathy and regard.

Few ladies, perhaps, certainly few authoresses, have found more friends and acquaintances among their own sex than L. E. L. Some of them, possibly, she may have owed to that feeling which, associating her with her poetry and thus familiarizing itself, forbade the idea of strangership and the cold language of ceremony, even when addressing her for the first time. We assume, from the tone of several letters, that this was the case. Her introduction to Miss Mitford seems to have had its origin partly in this feeling: since, designating her "My dear Miss Landon," she says, "I do not address you as a stranger because I cannot think of you as one." But however acquaintanceship may have in any case commenced, it is certain that her intimacies, amongst her own sex, were neither few nor slight. In several instances, honourable in every sense as conveying proofs of her virtuous feeling and amiable temper, these intimacies ripened into the closest and most trusting friendships. Nor was it her fortune merely to make friends, but to retain them to the last. Now and then, indeed, she might share the common lot, and find even her own sex "a little lower than the angels;" estrangement might here and there ensue, from some infirmity of temper, or some literary mistake; but of this she experienced as little as most people, while it was her happiness to feel that the ties of grateful attachment which bound her to some of the best and purest among women, grew stronger as they grew older.