Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/34

34 all that related to the contemplation of the actual world, than "L. E. L." and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. People would do in this, as in so many other cases, forgetting one of the licenses of poetry, identify the poet's history in the poet's subject and sentiments, and they accordingly insisted that, because the strain was tender and mournful, the heart of the minstrel was breaking. Certain it is, that L. E. L.'s naturally sweet and cheerful disposition was not, at this time, soured or obscured by any meditations upon life and the things most worth living for, which a lavish and rapturous indulgence of the poetic mood could lead her into; and however she may have merited admiration, she had no original claim to sympathy as a victim to constitutional morbidness. While every chord of her lute seemed to awaken a thousand plaintive and painful memories, she was storing up just as many lively recollections; and as the melancholy of her song moved numberless hearts towards her, her own was only moved by the same process still farther than ever out of melancholy's reach. Her imagination would conjure up a scene in which, as was said of the Urn Burial, the gayest thing you should see would be a gilt coffin-nail; and this scene she would fancifully confound for the time being with human life, past, present, or to come; but the pen once out of her hand, there was no more sturdy questioner, not to say repudiator, of her own doctrines, than her own practice. The spectres she had conjured up vanished as the wand dropped from her hand. Five minutes after the composition of some poem full of passionate sorrow, or bitter disappointment and reproach, she would be seen again in the very mood out of which she had been carried by the poetic frenzy that had