Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/679

Rh to lie constantly, and the exertion of writing began to be painful to her. Her poetry of this date is chiefly religious. Early in 1834 her Hymns for Childhood, which had appeared some years before in America, were published in Dublin. At the same time appeared her collection of National Lyrics, and shortly afterwards Scenes and Hymns of Life. She was planning also a series of German studies, to consist of translations from German authors, with introductions and explanatory notes, one of which, on Goethe s Tasso, was completed and published in the New Monthly Magazine for January 1834. In intervals of acute suffering she wrote the lyric Despondency and Aspiration, and dictated a series of sonnets called Thoughts during Sickness, the last of which, &quot; Kecovery,&quot; was written when she fancied she was getting well. After three months spent at Redesdale, Archbishop Whately s country seat, which had been placed at the disposal of the dying poetess, she was again brought into Dublin, where she lingered till spring. The use of her limbs was entirely gone ; but her passion for reading remained to the last, and the table at her bedside was strewn with books, one of which always lay open. Her last poem, the Sabbath Sonnet, was dictated to her brother on Sunday April 26th, and she died on the evening of Saturday, May 16, 1835, at the age of forty-one. She was buried in a vault under St Anne s church, Dublin. Besides the bust of Mrs Hemans by Angus Fletcher, there were three portraits taken of her in 1827 by the American painter West, one of which has been engraved ; and another portrait, an engraving of which is in Chorley s Memorials, was painted in 1831 by a young Irish artist, Edward Robinson. Mrs Hemans s poetry is the production of a fine imagina tive and enthusiastic temperament, but not of a commanding intellect or very complex or subtle nature. It is the out come of a beautiful but singularly circumscribed life, a life spent in romantic seclusion, without much worldly experi ence, and warped and saddened by domestic unhappiness and real physical suffering. Perhaps from thsse circum stances, aided by a course of self-instruction at best desul tory and unguided, the emotional in a sensitive and intensely feminine nature was unduly cultivated ; and this undue preponderance of the emotional is a prevailing characteristic in Mrs Hemans s poetry, and one to which Scott alluded when he complained that it was &quot; too poetical,&quot; that it con tained &quot; too many flowers &quot; and &quot; too little fruit.&quot; Her genius beautiful and pleasing as it was was not of a very high order. Like her favourite music, it lay within a small compass, and gave little opportunity for intricate harmonies. Thus her tragedies, and her longer and more complicated poems, such as The Sceptic and Forest Sanctuary, though by no means devoid of striking passages, are the least not able of her works. It is not, however, as the writer of these more ambitious productions, which in her own time were but doubtful successes and are now rarely read, but as the authoress of many short occasional pieces, and especi ally as a lyrist, that Felicia Hemans has earned so high a place among our poets. In her lyrics she could concentrate her strength on the perfect expression of simple themes. Her skill in versification, her delicate ear for rhythm, and the few ruling sentiments of her nature here found ample scope. In her lyrics Mrs Hemans is uniformly graceful, tender, delicately refined, sometimes perhaps, even here, too fervent, too emotional, but always pure and spiritual in tone; and in these too she occasionally displays those rarer qualities which belong only to the finest lyric genius. Many of her poems, such as &quot; The Treasures of the Deep,&quot; &quot;The Better Land,&quot; &quot;The Homes of England,&quot; &quot; Casa- bianca,&quot; &quot; The Palm Tree,&quot; &quot; The Graves of a Household,&quot; &quot; The Wreck,&quot; &quot; The Dying Improvisator,&quot; and &quot; The Lost Pleiad,&quot; have become standard English lyrics, and on the strength of these, and others such as these, Felicia Hemaus is ranked among our chief British lyrical poets.

1em  HEMEL-HEMPSTEAD, a market- of England, county of Hertford, is pleasantly situated on the declivity of a hill near the river Gade, 23 N.W. of London, 1 from the Boxmoor station of the London and North- Western Railway, and on a branch line of the Midland Railway. The town consists almost wholly of one main street about a in length. Among the principal build ings are the parish church, cruciform in shape, and paitly Norman in style, surmounted by a lofty octagonal spire, and containing an old brass of the time of Edward III.; the town-hall, a long narrow building formerly supported on square wooden pillars, but whose open marketplace underneath has now been converted into a corn exchange ; the union workhouse, and the West Herts infirmary. The chief industry is straw plaiting, but there are also manu factories of paper, an iron foundry, breweries, and tanneries. The of the township in 1871 was 5996, and of the parish 8720.

1em  HEMEROBAPTISTS, an ancient Jewish sect, so named from their observing a practice of daily ablution as an essential part of religion. Epiphanius, who mentions their doctrine as the fourth heresy among the Jews, classes the Hemerobaptists doctrinally with the Pharisees, from whom they differed only in, like the Sadducees, denying the resurrection of the dead. The name has been sometimes given to the Mendaeans on account of their frequent ablutions ; and in the Clementine Homilies (ii. 23) St John the Baptist is spoken of as a Hemerobaptist. Mention of the sect is made by Hegesippus (see Euseb., Hist. EccL, iv. 22) and by Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Tryphon.  HEMINGFORD, or, , a Latin chronicler of the , was a canon regular of the Austin Priory of Gisborough, now Guisborough, in Yorkshire. Leland calls him Hemengoburgus, and in one of the manuscripts of his chronicle his name appears as Hemingburght. In a document of the priory the name is also given as De Hemingburgh ; and in Gisborough Chartulary mention is made of a neighbouring family of that name. Bale seems to have been the first to give him the name by which he is more commonly known. His chronicle embraces the period of English history from the Conquest; to the  of Edward III., with the exception of the latter  of Edward II. It ends with the title of a chapter in which it was proposed to describe the battle of Crecy ; but the chronicler seems to have died before the required information reached him. In compiling the first part, Hemingford apparently used the histories of Eadmor, Hoveden, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Newbury; but the reigns of the three Edwards are original, composed from personal observation and information. There are several manuscripts of the history extant,—the best perhaps being that presented to the College of Arms by the earl of Arundel. The work is correct and judicious, and written in a pleasing style. One of its special features is the preservation in its pages of copies of 