Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/22

 be equally correct in all its parts, though drawn in golden lines on tablets of silver as if sketched in the roughest manner with the rudest materials. The demonstration, too, need be no less conclusive, though proved amid the elegancies of a drawing-room, than if worked out in the recesses of a cloister. So truths are not less true when decorated with the graces of poetry than when contemplated in the abstract; while in the former case they have the advantage of being more agreeable to the mental eye. This reminds us of a second objection, a plea against the subject-matter of L. E. L.'s poetry, viz., that her poems are always founded upon or connected with the passion of love. Admitting for a moment the truth of this objection, what does it prove but the writer's acquaintance with human nature, as developed in the sentiments of the mind and the feelings of the heart? Philosophy will tell us that love is the excitement of one class of our susceptibilities,—one order of our moral emotions.

Admitting that the delineation of such emotion occupies the chief part of our author's works, we cannot see why this circumstance should be adduced as a ground of objection against those writings. Such emotion is confessedly an inherent characteristic of human nature; a writer, therefore, who professes to make human nature an object of study, and yet considers as unworthy of attention one of its principal manifestations, cannot deserve the name of a philosopher. Now, the very essence of L. E. L.'s poetry is human nature. Intellect and feeling, the head and heart, are her leading topics. Genius and study, knowledge and taste, all concentre here; while nature and art, society and conventional life are made to subserve the grand design of