Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/246

246 sombre and desolate images, her heart was world-weary and her life miserable—to argue from her intellectual to her moral tendencies, and to assume that those subjects of uncontrollable fate, early and withering disappointment, premature but welcome death, to which her imagination reverted, were but pictures drawn from her experience of life, and prefigurings of her hopeless and inevitable future. Let this rule be applied at least consistently: we should rather say, let her for once be judged not unjustly by this principle. If evidence of the healthy, the animated, the cheerful flow of her thoughts and feelings in her last days, may be drawn from her writings—in the subjects upon which she was employed, and in her sparkling and picturesque style of treating them—that evidence will be found in her criticisms and reflections on the female characters of the illustrious Novelist. The new novel upon which she was herself engaged, the first volume being finished in Africa, affords evidence to the same effect, and equally strong; it is the opening of a story of modern life and manners, comic and satirical in its spirit; but too dependent for its effect upon the consecutiveness of its scenes, and the shadowy contrasts of its family liknesseslikenesses [sic], to admit of its set of sketches being separated with success.

From the morning of her marriage to the morning of her death, she was too incessantly occupied by necessary duties and habits of literary exercise, in which she never relaxed, to sit down, even for an instant, under the shadow of desponding thoughts. Brief, however, was the interval between: it was the breathless moment betwixt "the flash and thunder." As she stood at the altar in her bridal garments, beloved friends surrounding