Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/50

24 well, but the life and spirit which friendly argument would have evoked was absent from a speech laboriously committed to paper, and she could not trust herself to speak extempore. Public discussion would have suited her well; as the hostess of a brilliant salon, could she but have escaped the danger of being monopolised by the most distinguished among her guests, she might have been a second Roland or Rahel. As it was, the auditors of her lectures certainly took away an impression of remarkable ability, but it was ability to make the best of an uncongenial element. The auditors of her colloquies departed with other feelings: "I do not remember," says Mr. Watts-Dunton, "that she ever talked with me upon any subject that was not connected with poetry or art or science or those great issues of the human story about which she thought so deeply and felt so keenly."

She continued to deliver public addresses, though at considerable intervals, for several years. The most important were one on the Volsunga Saga, as translated by William Morris, delivered in May, 1870, to a highly intellectual audience in St. John's Wood; and one on Shelley delivered in St. George's Hall in December, 1869, the only one which attained the honour of print. This gained her the acquaintance of Dr. John Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review, who in the following July inserted an article on Shelley from her pen. This essay, mainly an ethical and æsthetical criticism, embodied a number of important corrections of Shelley's text, communicated to her by the present writer, who had derived them from an examination of the original manuscripts of Shelley's poems then preserved at Boscombe, and now in the Bodleian. They have been turned to account in all subsequent editions.