Page:Frederic Rowton on Landon.pdf/3

Rh and her painting sketchy and rough: but there is genius in every line she has written.

Mrs. Maclean has herself given us a just portraiture of her peculiar powers. In the concluding lines of her fine poem entitled The Golden Violet, she says

“If that I know myself what keys Yield to my hand their sympathies, I should say 't is those whose tone Is Woman's Love and Sorrow's own."

No writer certainly has written more of Love and Sorrow than Mrs. Maclean. She touches scarcely any other strings. I called her the female Byron: in this respect she is particularly so. Passion and Sadness are the idols of her pen. She herself says

"Sad were my shades: methinks they had Almost a tone of prophecy— I ever had, from earliest youth, A feeling what my fate would be."

Her love-passages are certainly not inferior to Byron's. I would cite the following lines from The Improvisatrice in proof:

I lov'd him as a young Genius loves, When its own mild and radiant heaven Of starry thought burns with the light, The love, the life, by passion given. I loved him, too, as woman loves— Reckless of sorrow, sin, or scorn: Life had no evil destiny That, with him, I could not have borne! I had been nurs'd in palaces; Yet earth had not a spot so drear, That I should not have thought a home In paradise, had he been near! How sweet it would have been to dwell, Apart from all, in some green dell