Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/52

 lines from another poem, fraught with reflections most dear to the heart:—

It is a beautiful, a bless'd belief That the beloved dead, grown angels, watch The dear ones left behind; and that my prayers Are welcome to my mother's ears, as when I knelt a lisping infant at her knee; And that her pure and holy spirit now Doth intercede at the eternal throne; And thus religion, in its love and hope, Unites us still,—the mother and her child! "Thy childhood was thrice blessed, Thy young mind sanctified, and after life Made holy by the memory of the past. I knew no mother's cares to teach my lips Those prayers that like good angels keep the heart From uncurb’d passions that lay waste and curse." Ancestress.

Beautiful and graceful as are L. E. L.'s earlier poems, yet within the last four or five years her mind seems to have made an onward and widening progress; to have grown stronger beneath its own efforts, and to have added wealth, brilliant and precious, to her previous accumulations. The effect has been evinced in the increased vigor, in the higher aim, in the deeper beauty of her productions, wherein are manifested a yet more striking originality of style, a fuller earnestness of tone, a more valuable vein of truthful thought, and a more radiant glow of poetic imagery. Poems crowd upon the memory which we would fain quote in proof of these assertions. How eloquently wise, how truly patriotic are the "Birthday Verses to the Princess Victoria." The "Drawing-room Scrap Books" would of themselves afford