Page:Mrs Elwood 1843.pdf/5

Rh tears which rose too readily in her eyes were imputed to sullenness, rather than to their real source, bashfulness.

When about seven years of age, Miss Landon's parents removed to Trevor Park, not far from East Barnet, where, amidst scenes vividly depicted in various passages in her later works, were passed many of the happiest days of her childhood. In the "Traits and Trials of Early Life," in "The History of a Child," she is supposed to have portrayed that of her own early years, but the account is part romance and part reality. She describes "a large, old, and somewhat dilapidated place,"—of which "only part of the grounds were kept in their original high order." Here she was wont "to wander in the almost deserted shrubberies, where the flowers grew in all the luxuriance of neglect over the walls." According to the same fictitious picture, on a small island, in a deep pond, almost dark with the depth of shadow, and partly covered with water lilies, "with the large green leaves that support the loveliest of ivory boats, fit for the fairy queen and her summer court," grew one curiously-shaped but huge yew-tree, and in the shadows of this gloomy tree the embryo poetess was wont to conceal herself for the whole of her play-time, "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy," and brooding over the troubles and sorrows which necessarily await every shy and sensitive person, and which are perhaps never more acutely felt than in the days of early childhood. Her childhood, however, was cheerful, and often joyous.

Miss Landon appears to have been endowed with peculiarly sensitive feelings, which, though they caused her perhaps to magnify and exaggerate "the ills and woes that mortal man await;" yet, at the same time,