Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/40

40 that beautiful set of pictures was produced. Her thoughts always flowed faster than she could put them upon paper; and of many of her fragments and sketches, as of the above, it may be said, that it would take her just as long to copy, as to compose them.

Nobody will deny that this proved, in numberless instances, a fatal facility. Here and there a stanza may have been improvised with advantage; many lines together, nay, whole pieces may be shown, which, written off as fast as the fingers could move, no study could have very materially improved. But these were the exceptions. The injury that resulted from the rule of rapidity—breathless and reckless rapidity—is shown throughout the various poems that compose the over-wrought richness, the beautiful excess, the melodious confusion of the "Improvvisatrice." If the superfluities, amounting to at least one-third of the poem, had been cut away, all that is obscure would have been clear—all that is languid, strong—all that is incongruous, harmonized. But let this, at the same time, be borne in mind, that L. E. L. is not, even in her earlier poems, chargeable with having used two words where one would do; she only sinned in employing two ideas, or three, where one was enough. It is true, she often marred a fine thought by a careless and inexact expression; but more frequently she destroyed the effect of a fine thought by profusely heaping others upon it, until she buried her nightingale in roses. It would be an endless task to recount the instances of personal tribute and congratulation from those whose "breath is renown," which this production won for its delighted author. Enough, that the public was her patron; that several