Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/61

 Rh other attached friends, among whom are particularly to be mentioned Mr. J. R. Wilkinson and Mr. Charles Rowley, the moving spirit of the Ancoats Brotherhood.

Notwithstanding sinking health and spirits, the last decade of Mathilde Blind's life was more prolific of actual publication than the preceding. In 1886 she ably prefaced selections from Byron's letters and poems for the Camelot Series. A translation of choice aphorisms from Goethe had appeared a few years before in Fraser's Magazine. She occasionally wrote for the Athenæum, and minor poems appeared in print now and then. The relief from the arduous task of Madame Roland's biography, and the generally desultory character of her occupations for some time, left her open to new impressions, and she suddenly felt herself nerved to grapple with a theme which had at various periods dimly floated before her, the celebration in verse of the theory of Evolution. A grand subject indeed! and truly worthy of an inspired pen, rebuking the little faith of Coleridge when he deemed all subjects for epic exhausted saving the Fall of Jerusalem. The fittest pen could write but tentatively upon the subject at present, and such pens must be rare in an age whose most notable defect in the domain of poetry is an almost universal incapacity for the sublime. Mathilde Blind, who frequently approached the sublime and sometimes reached it, was more fit than many a contemporary whom posterity will on the whole rank above her. Passionately interested in her theme, as deeply versed in its scientific lore as was necessary for a poet, struggling heroically against its gigantic difficulties, she produced in her "Ascent of Man" (1888), not indeed the desiderated epic, but a dithyramb, noble in many parts, here and there marred by grandiloquence and want of