Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/77

 INTRODUCTION Ixxiii ������The last words of that sentence bring to my recollection a pleasing little poem, to which, in infancy, I have often listened with delight from the lips of my mother, who used frequently to repeat it as she sat at work. She had learnt it from a lady who was the friend of her youth. �Wholly without literary curiosity, as she never saw it printed, so she never asked after the author; consequently could give me no information on that subject. She had never taken the trouble of copying it; therefore was it mine as it was hers, by oral tradition, before I attained my tenth year. Its easy and tuneful numbers charmed; and, with a great deal of giddy vivacity on a thousand occasions, I had yet an inherent fondness for seeing the perspec- tives of opening life through the clare-oscure of a meditative fancy, particularly where the sombre tints were ultimately prevalent. �Behold this little orphan ode which I have searched for in vain through the pages of our poets. �Lady Winchilsea's Progress of Life is then quoted entire with many slight inaccuracies such as would result from oral transmission, but substantially identical with the form given in the volume of 1713. The "friend of Mrs. Seward's youth" must have been alive in Lady Winchilsea's day. It would be interesting to know who started the little poem on its oral way. It is at any rate a charming picture that we get of the gentlewoman at her needlework, perhaps like the lady of the ballad, letting "her silken seam fall till hertae" as she yields her spirit to the musical flow and pensive moral- izing of Ardelia's verse ; and of the child lured from her play by the charm of the words as they fall from her mother's lips. Another manuscript copy of this poem is to be found in a volume in the possession of Mr. George Finch- Hatton. If we may judge by verbal inaccuracies, this poem, too, had been orally transmitted to the writer. Such facts are evidences of an undercurrent of popularity, and popular- ity of the sort that would have been most pleasing to Ardelia. �Miss Seward's letter continues in a strain of elegant criticism. She endeavors to date the poem by internal ��� �