Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/32

32 With the young she at once became a favourite. She breathed in rapturous verse their own fervent and wild aspirations—she unfolded to them the visions of their morning; nor did she the less retain this hold upon them, because they shrunk with a sudden dullness from her blank and dreary pictures of destiny, and her sombre predictions wrung from them tears of needless pity.

A writer of the first literary rank, in one of the volumes of the "New Monthly," for the year 1831, has referred to the "sensation" created by our subject on her first appearance in the pages of the "Literary Gazette." "We were," he says, "at that time, more capable than we now are of poetic enthusiasm; and certainly that enthusiasm we not only felt ourselves, but we shared with every second person we then met. We were young, and at college, lavishing our golden years, not so much on the Greek verse and mystic character to which we ought, perhaps, to have been rigidly devoted, as

At that time poetry was not yet out of fashion, at least with us of the cloister; and there was always in the reading-room of the Union a rush every Saturday afternoon for the 'Literary Gazette;' and an impatient anxiety to hasten at once to that corner of the sheet which contained the three magical letters ‘L. E. L.' And all of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed at the author. We soon learned it was a female, and our admiration was doubled, and our conjectures tripled. Was she young? Was she pretty? And—for there were some embryo fortune-hunters among us—was she rich? We ourselves who, now staid critics and sober gentlemen, are about coldly to measure