Page:Every Woman's Encyclopedia Volume 1.djvu/458

 THE ARTS 456 No. LADY LINDSAY It is at 41, Hans Place, a delightlul old- i fashioned Chelsea house, replete with artistic treasures and antiquities, that Lady Lindsay, one of the most talented women poets of to-day, has resided for a number of years. Here it was that Shelley once lodged, and here Lady Lindsay has written the greater part of the ten volumes of poems which .have been published under her name, and which have earned for her consider- able distinction in the world of letters. Lady Lindsay frankly confesses that she was born with a passion for poetry. She was scarcely five when she earned the remonstrances of her parents through writing verses after she had gone to bed ; but even the removal of the light failed to .suppress her juvenile versifying effoils, for she re- calls with considerable aniuocment how she solved the difficulty by pricking out rhymes with a pin on the white cartridge paper lining a chest of drawers. Her precocity, indeed, caused her parents no little anxious thought, for it was feared that her studious temper- ament might affect her health. These fears were belied, how'cver, and little Blanche F i t z r o y — Lady Lindsay is the
 * laughter of the late

Rt. Hon. Henry Fitzroy, M.P. — gained strength while acquir- ing knowledge. She was taught to read and write in French before English, and at fifteen taught herself Greek. An omnivorous reader, she also found time to study art as well as literature. And her success with brush and palette has been almost equal to that which she has won with her pen. She became a prominent member of the Royal Institute of Water Colour?, and several of the pictures which adorn the walls of her charming house were greatly admired by her friends Sir John Millais and Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Mention of these two famous artists recalls the fact that Lady Lindsay has always moved Blanche Lindsay From a minialure by Mrs. Kate Peru^ini, daughter of Charles Dickens in a circle of literary and artistic celebrl'les. Browning, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Lowell, and many other distinguished writers were numbered amongst her friends, and she has many interesting personal reAiinis- cences to relate concerning them. " I knew Browning and his sister Sarianna fairly well," she said a short time ago, " but only many years after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. One day I asked Browning about his late wife. ' Tell me,' I said, 'what she was like.' ' I cannot,' he replied ; * I cannot talk about her, but come and see.' After that, in the house near the Harrow Road, where he lived, he showed me a bust of his wife — a pensive, in- tellectual face, with drooping, long curls on either side ; beauti- ful dark curls they were, I believe, but colourless, of course, in the white marble. " I knew Adelaide Proctor's mother well," continued Lady Lindsay, " a sturdy and interesting personality, who in old age thought nothing of climbing on foot, when return- ing from a party, to the fifth floor of the mansions where she lived. Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell and other distinguished men were her constant visitors, and on her eightieth birthday Lowell wrote a poem in her honour, begin- ning, ' I know a young lady of 80.' " It was in 1890 that Lady Lindsay's first book of poems, en- titled " Lyrics," was published, and the charm and pathos oi the verses quickly earned for it a fame richly deserved. Then followed " A String of Beads," verses for children, in 1892 ; " The King's Last Vigil," in 1894 ; " The Flower Seller," in 1896; "The Apostle of the Ardennes" in 1899; "The Prayer of St. Scholastica," in 1900; "A Christmas Posy," in 1902 ; " From a Venetian Balcony." 1903 ; " Poems of Love and Death " and " Godfrey's Quest " in 1907, all of which have earned the praise of the critics.