Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/37

Rh she remembers she is "quite alone." As a matter of fact she states, that her aunt, whom she likes more and more, is "delightful and good-natured, allowing her to do just as she pleases;" but as a matter of fiction she declares, that "all she loved most fondly, all are gone"—that she is quite solitary and ever sorrowful. The reality asserts "that nothing can be pleasanter than her visit to Castle-end," and the romance insists that "cold is every smile" which meets hers. How far poetry may require these convenient sacrifices of fact, is a question it would be idle to discuss; nor is it here maintained that the habit was at all peculiar to L. E. L. What is required to be conceded, is simply, that the habit was hers; that she less frequently aimed at expressing in her poetry her own actual feelings and opinions, than at assuming a character for the sake of a certain kind of effect, and throwing her thickly-thronging ideas together with the most passionate force, and in the most picturesque forms. Sorrow and suspicion, pining regrets for the past, anguish for the present, and morbid predictions for the future, were in L. E. L., not moral characteristics, but merely literary resources. The wounded spirit and the worm that never dies were often but terms of art, or means to an end. This admitted, there is little of contradiction to be accounted for, and few mysteries of character to clear up.

In the month of July, 1824, after several