Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/227

Rh from being those with which the public were most familiar, were perhaps those which she least publicly exhibited. She did better justice to her moral than to her intellectual gifts. To her genius, exercised either in poetry or prose, she was only just learning to do justice when she died; but in both the progress was perceptible and sure. We have but to compare the light and spangled drapery of her earlier muse, with the chastened colours and the simpler forms in which Poetry came arrayed in her later productions, to see what she was yearly becoming, and to predict what she would have been if she had lived. High and solemn thought had found the place where wild fancy or extravagant sentiment alone had revelled before; knowledge had succeeded to mere impulse or reckless speculation; the feelings had become more deeply seated, as the heart beat less feverishly; the sportive child had sprung into the woman.

Look to the glowing and impassioned pages of the "Improvvisatrice;" admire all that is naturally musical in the verse, beautiful in the romance of affection, rich and graceful in the imagery; and then measure her success by the calmer and deeper tenor, the bolder combinations of thought, the loftier pictures, and the nobler purposes of her best poems in the "New Monthly," and the "Drawing-room Scrap-book." The idea became purer as her knowledge of the actual advanced; and her dreams deepened in loveliness from her intercourse with the world. The severities of criticism, and more especially, perhaps, the sting of ridicule, aided in the production of this change. As she sprang almost from the arms of the teacher into those of fame, she had won the wreath of poetry before she knew it was anything more lasting than a pretty