Page:Four Victorian poets; a study of Clough (IA fourvictorianpoe00broorich).pdf/22

 Contemporary with these unoriginal poets in this short exhausted period where the sentimentalists— little rivulets of poetry that assumed to be rivers. They received a gracious welcome from a society which did not desire to be disturbed by ideas, which imagined that the materialism it loved to live in would continue for ever, and which was quite willing to indulge a dainty sympathy for the suffering of the world and the starvation of the English poor, provided no one was bold or ill-mannered enough to ask them to surrender a single pleasure or a single guinea. They liked to read about pain and trouble in the past; they hated to read about it in the present. When suffering was known to be over, and made no claim on them—to read of it gave a pleasant flavour to their luxury and to their degraded peace. Therefore they accepted with a barren gratitude Mrs. Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth LandorLandon [sic], and others who wrote graceful, pathetic, perfumed stories, and pretty lyrics about spring, of love and sorrow, and little deeds of valour, and such religion as their society could accept, religion which promised them in heaven a pleasant extension of their agreeable life on earth.

Mrs. Hemans had a real poetical turn. Her poetry is musical, her love of nature commonplace but truly felt, her copiousness powerless. She had little intellect, and the great matters of humanity did not touch her at all. She was widely read and loved; but all that fame and affection are now gone, so swift is the