Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/245

Rh dramatic work (her only one) which she completed just previous to her departure from England, and the essays on the female characters of Scott, which were the interesting and appropriate subjects of her last literary speculations when in Africa.

The reader, as he peruses those glowing records of a woman's thoughts and feelings in relation to some of the most beautiful pictures of passion, sentiment, and character in her sex that genius has bequeathed to us, will not find his emotions less pleasurable from this reflection—How many anxious and troubled hours may these, her last compositions, have lightened? How much pain, whether of sickness, or of watching over sickness, may they have helped to dissipate? How much of solitude may they have peopled with familiar and delightful images? What associations of old friends and of the old home may they have awakened! of youthful hours deliciously spent over the pages she was illustrating—of early desires to see some bright creations of her own also, entwined with her land's language—of hopes already not unfulfilled, and of a future that was to give reality to her fondest dreams!

These are reflections that will occur at least to some readers, and hence, perhaps, a pleasant and grateful conclusion that the mind which could so exert itself—so turn in a new position to its old pursuits—so employ its best and happiest energies with such vivid and successful results, must have been nobly sustained and fortified even to the very last.

It has been the fashion, as we have seen, to judge of the tone of L. E. L.'s ordinary feelings by the tone of her more earnest writings—to decide that when her poetry presented but a succession of