Page:Hemans in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 38 1835.pdf/3



cannot allow these verses to adorn, with a sad beauty, the pages of this Magazine—more especially as they are the last composed by their distinguished writer, and that only a few days before her death—without at least a passing tribute of regret over an event which has cast a shadow of gloom over the sunshiny fields of cotemporary literature. But two months ago, the beautiful lyric, entitled Despondency and Aspiration, appeared in these pages, and now the sweet fountain of music from which that prophetic strain gushed has ceased to flow. The highly-gifted and accomplished, the patient, the meek, and long-suffering is no more. She died on the night of Saturday the 16th May, at Dublin, and met her fate with all the calm resignation of a Christian, conscious that her spirit was winging its flight to another and a better world, where "the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."

Without disparagement of the living, we scarcely hesitate to say, that in Mrs Hemans our female literature has lost perhaps its brightest ornament. To Joanna Baillie she might be inferior not only in vigour of conception, but in the power of metaphysically analyzing those sentiments and feelings, which constitute the bases of human action; to Mrs Jameson in that critical perception which, from detached fragments of spoken thought, can discriminate the links which bind all into a distinctive character;—to Miss Landon in eloquent facility;—to Caroline Bowles in simple pathos;—and to Mary Mitford in power of thought;—but as a female writer, influencing the female mind, she has undoubtedly stood, for some by-past years, the very first in the first rank; and this pre-eminence has been acknowledged, not only in her own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the eastern Ganges, or the western Mississippi. Her path was her own ; and shoals of imitators have arisen alike at home, and on the other side of the Atlantic, who, destitute of her animating genius, have mimicked her themes, and parodied her sentiments and language, without being able to reach its height. In her poetry, religious truth, and intellectual beauty meet together; and assuredly it is not the less calculated to refine the taste and exalt the imagination, because it addresses itself almost exclusively to the better feelings of our nature alone. Over all her pictures of humanity are spread the glory and the grace reflected from purity of morals, delicacy of perception and conception, sublimity of religious faith, and warmth of patriotism; and turning from the dark and degraded, whether in subject or sentiment, she seeks out those verdant oases in the desert of human life, on which the affections may most pleasantly rest. Her poetry is intensely and entirely feminine—and, in our