Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/229

Rh them written in 1837) as evidences of advance with the Romance and Reality of 1830.

It was still provoking, occasionally, to observe a lingering attachment to some of her worst faults—to see her, with the consciousness that she had scattered the seeds of many pleasures in the world, with a full sense of what ought by all to be enjoyed, and of the human capacity to enjoy, perversely contrasting the actual with the ideal, not seemingly with a view to kindle emulation in her readers, but to put them out of heart with themselves; to find her deprecating what is, for the mere sake of glorifying what is not and cannot be. It would have been delightful to own that she had entirely ceased to cultivate her want of faith in the world's virtue, since nobody had more practical charity for the world's vice. But the pleasure next to this remains for us, in the proof that she was in a fair way to do it; that her advance to a right understanding of her own powers was regular and certain; and that her use of those fine gifts was becoming as admirable as the gifts themselves.

To her affections, throughout this period of intellectual progress—to her womanly sympathies—to her kind and generous disposition, she did ample justice. "Whatever errors may have been hers," observes a living writer, in a letter full of sad regrets for her loss, "what excuses she had! and: what noble qualities! what independence of spirit—what generosity and loftiness of feeling! The head of a man, and the heart of a woman."

Much as she was misrepresented, we never knew L. E. L. to be even suspected of a meanness. Of anything little, or paltry, or shabbily selfish, she was utterly incapable. She seemed in her very soul to scorn whatever was sordid. On the other