Page:Woman Triumphant.djvu/217

 chiefly on her "Drama of Exile," the "Casa Guidi Windows," and "Aurora Leigh." The latter is a social epic, which contains many noble passages that give evidence of great originality and power.

Sarah Coleridge has been much admired for the gracefulness and the beautiful language of her poems "Phantasmion, a Fairy Tale"; "Sylvan Stay," and "One Face Alone."

The poems of Felicia Hemans have been the result of a fine imagination and temperament, and of a life spent in romantic seclusion. Many of them, as for instance "Homes of England," "The Treasures of the Deep," "The Better Land," and "The Wreck" rank among the best ever produced.

Adelaide Ann Proctor, Catherine Fowler Philips, Christina Rosetti, Mary Blackford Tighe, and Caroline Oliphant have been the authoresses of many poems, still cherished for their beauty and nobility of thought.

The United Kingdom has also several woman historians, among them Catharine Macaulay, whose "History of England," in six volumes, appeared in 1763.

The love and reverence she was taught from childhood to cherish for the queens of her country induced Miss Agnes Strickland, of Roydon Hall, Suffolk, to write her great work "The Lives of the Queens of England." Its twelve volumes appeared at intervals from 1840 till 1848. In 1850 she began to publish a similar series about the "Lives of the Queens of Scotland," completing it in eight volumes in 1859. Unresting in her industry, she wrote likewise "The Lives of the Last Four Stuart Princesses," published in 1872.

Harriet Martineau too deserves an honorable place among English women of letters. Her series of tales designed as "Illustrations of Political Economy" and "Illustrations of Taxation" brought her at once into great prominence. Later on she produced an amazing quantity of works, relating to the laws of man's nature and development, mesmerism, travel, and other subjects.

In American literature woman's activity began with Anne Bradstreet, the daughter of Governor Bradstreet of Massachusetts. To him she dedicated the first volume of poetry published on the Western hemisphere. Printed in 1642, it had the somewhat verbose title: "Several Poems, compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of delight; wherein especially is contained a complete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, seasons of the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies, viz. : the Assyrian, Persian, Greecian, and Roman Commonwealth, from the beginning to the end of their last