Mrs Hemans was born at Liverpool, Felicia Dorothea Browne, on the 25th of September 1793. Her father was a merchant, who after some reverses removed in 1800 with his family to Gwrych near Abergele in North Wales, and there Felicia was inspired by a new love of nature. A volume of Poems (1808) proved far from successful, but was followed that same year by England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism, which called forth more than one letter from Shelley. In 1812 she published The Domestic Affections, and other Poems, and the same year was married to Captain Hemans, an Irish officer who had served in Spain. She continued her studies, acquiring several languages and still cultivating poetry. In 1818, after she had borne him five sons, Captain Hemans went off to Italy, and they never met afterwards. In 1819 Mrs Hemans obtained a prize of £50 offered by a patriotic Scotsman for the best poem on the subject of Sir William Wallace. Next year she produced a poem on The Sceptic. In June 1821 she secured the prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for a poem upon Dartmoor. Her next effort was a tragedy, the Vespers of Palermo, which when produced at Covent Garden in December 1823 was not successful, though supported by the admirable acting of Kemble and Young. In 1826 appeared what was generally accounted her best poem, The Forest Sanctuary, and in 1828 Records of Woman; later collections were Lays of Leisure Hours and National Lyrics. In 1829 she paid a visit to Scotland, and received a warm welcome from Sir Walter Scott, Jeffrey, and the Scottish literati; Scott's parting words are memorable: 'There are some whom we meet and should like ever after to claim as kith and kin; and you are one of these.' In 1830 appeared her Songs of the Affections. The same year she visited Wordsworth, and, deeply impressed by the beauty of Rydal Lake and Grasmere, heartily sympathised with Wordsworth's own enthusiasm: I would not give up the mists that spiritualise our mountains for all the blue skies of Italy.' From 1809 to 1827 she had lived near St Asaph, and then for four years at Wavertree, Liverpool; now, in 1831, she went to reside in Dublin, where one of her brothers, Major Browne, was chief commissioner of police. The education of her five boys occupied much of her time and attention; ill-health pressed heavily on her, and she soon fell into premature decay. In 1834 appeared her little volume of Hymns for Childhood and a collection of Scenes and Hymns of Life; Thoughts during Sickness were in the form of sonnets. Her last, dictated to her brother on a Sunday three weeks before her death, was this:

Sunday in England.

How many blessed groups this hour are bending, Through England's primrose meadow-paths, their way Toward spire and tower, 'midst shadowy elms ascending, Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallowed day;

The halls, from old heroic ages gray,

Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,
With whose thick orchard blooms the soft winds play,
Send out their inmates in a happy flow,
Like a freed vernal stream.

I may not tread
With them those pathways-to the feverish bed
Of sickness bound; yet, O my God! I bless
Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled
My chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled
To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.

She died on 16th May 1835, aged forty-one, and was buried in St Anne's Church, Dublin. On her tomb are these lines from one of her own dirges :

Calm on the bosom of thy God,

Fair spirit! rest thee now!
Even while with us thy footsteps trod,

His seal was on thy brow.

Dust to its narrow house beneath!

Soul to its place on high!

They that have seen thy look in death,

No more may fear to die.

Mrs Hemans was not a profound or subtle poet, but had the true poet's gifts of grace, sweetness, and tenderness. Her poems, as Scott hinted, ‘have too many flowers for the fruit;' the longer poems, and especially the tragedies, are unquestionably insipid and tedious. But some of her shorter pieces and lyrics are perfect in sentiment and pathos; 'The Child's First Grief' ('O call my brother back to me'), 'The Better Land,' 'The Treasures of the Deep,' the pieces quoted below, and 'Casabianca,' which belongs to a somewhat different category, are still found in school-books, and will keep her memory green while the language endures. One of her hymns, 'He knelt, the Saviour knelt,' is in common use; and 'Lowly and solemn,' from a poem on Sir Walter Scott's funeral day, is frequently sung as a hymn.

From 'The Voice of Spring.'

I come, I come! ye have called me long,
I come o'er the mountains with light and song;
Ye may trace my step o'er the wakening earth,
By the winds which tell of the violet's birth,
By the primrose stars in the shadowy grass,
By the green leaves opening as I pass.

I have breathed on the South, and the chestnut-flowers
By thousands have burst from the forest-bowers :
And the ancient graves, and the fallen fanes,
Are veiled with wreaths on Italian plains.
But it is not for me, in my hour of bloom,
To speak of the ruin or the tomb!

I have looked on the hills of the stormy North,
And the larch has hung all his tassels forth,
The fisher is out on the sunny sea,
And the reindeer bounds o'er the pastures free,
And the pine has a fringe of softer green,

And the moss looks bright where my foot hath been.

I have sent through the wood-paths a glowing sigh,
And called out each voice of the deep-blue sky,
From the night-bird's lay through the starry time,
In the groves of the soft Hesperian clime,

To the swan's wild note by the Iceland lakes, When the dark fir-bough into verdure breaks.

From the streams and founts I have loosed the chain;
They are sweeping on to the silvery main,
They are flashing down from the mountain-brows,
They are flinging spray on the forest boughs,
They are bursting fresh from their sparry caves,
And the earth resounds with the joy of waves.

Come forth, O ye children of gladness, come!
Where the violets lie may now be your home.
Ye of the rose-lip and dew-bright eye,
And the bounding footstep, to meet me fly;
With the lyre, and the wreath, and the joyous lay,
Come forth to the sunshine-I may not stay.

MRS HEMANS.

From the Bust by Angus Fletcher in the National Portrait Gallery.

Away from the dwellings of careworn men,
The waters are sparkling in grove and glen;
Away from the chamber and dusky hearth,

. The young leaves are dancing in breezy mirth;
Their light stems thrill to the wild-wood strains,
And Youth is abroad in my green domains. . .

The summer is hastening, on soft wings borne,
Ye may press the grape, ye may bind the corn;
For me I depart to a brighter shore-

Ye are marked by care, ye are mine no more.
I go where the loved who have left you dwell,

And the flowers are not Death's-fare ye well, farewell!

The Homes of England.

The stately Homes of England,

How beautiful they stand!

Amidst their tall ancestral trees,

O'er all the pleasant land.

The deer across their greensward bound
Through shade and sunny gleam,

And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream.

The merry Homes of England!
Around their hearths by night,
What gladsome looks of household love
Meet in the ruddy light!

There woman's voice flows forth in song,

Or childhood's tale is told,
Or lips move tunefully along
Same glorious page of old.
The blessed Homes of England!
How softly on their bowers

Is laid the holy quietness

That breathes from Sabbath-hours!

Solemn, yet sweet, the church-bell's chime

Floats through their woods at morn;
All other sounds, in that still time,
Of breeze and leaf are born.

The cottage Homes of England!
By thousands on her plains,
They are smiling o'er the silvery brooks,
And round the hamlet-fanes.

Through glowing orchards forth they peep,
Each from its nook of leaves,

And fearless there the lowly sleep,
As the bird beneath their eaves.

The free, fair Homes of England!
Long, long, in hut and hall,
May hearts of native proof be reared
To guard each hallowed wall!
And green for ever be the groves,
And bright the flowery sod,
Where first the child's glad spirit loves
Its country and its God!

The Graves of a Household.
They grew in beauty, side by side,
They filled one home with glee;
Their graves are severed, far and wide,
By mount, and stream, and sea.

The same fond mother bent at night
O'er each fair sleeping brow;
She had each folded flower in sight-
Where are those dreamers now?

One, 'midst the forest of the West,
By a dark stream is laid-
The Indian knows his place of rest,
Far in the cedar shade.

The sea, the blue lone sea, hath one,
He lies where pearls lie deep;

He was the loved of all, yet none
O'er his low bed may weep.

One sleeps where southern vines are dressed
Above the noble slain :

He wrapt his colours round his breast,
On a blood-red field of Spain.

And one-o'er her the myrtle showers
Its leaves, by soft winds fanned;
She faded 'midst Italian flowers-

The last of that bright band.

And parted thus they rest, who played
Beneath the same green tree;
Whose voices mingled as they prayed
Around one parent knee!

They that with smiles lit up the hall,

And cheered with song the hearth-
Alas for love, if thou wert all,

And nought beyond, O earth!

Besides her sister's Memoir of Mrs Hemans in the seven-volume edition of her works published in 1839, there are Memorials by H. F. Chorley (1836); recollections by Mrs Laurence (1836); the Poetical Remains, with a Memoir by Delta (1836); and the Poetical Works, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti (1873). See also Espinasse's Lancashire Worthies (1874), Mrs C. J. Hamilton's Women Writers (1892), and Mrs L. B. Walford's Twelve English Authoresses (1892).

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), better known as 'L. E. L.,' from the initials which were her nom de guerre, is reputed to have been, with the possible exception of Moore only, the most popular English poet in the period between Byron's decline and Tennyson's rise. But at the present day the most approved anthologies of English Lyrics and English Verse give no specimen of her work, and there are histories of modern English literature that do not even mention her name; to hardly any English writer has Fame proved so fickle. Among her poetical works were The Fate of Adelaide (1821), The Improvisatrice (1824), The Troubadour (1825), The Golden Violet (1827), The Venetian Bracelet (1829), and The Vow of the Peacock (1835). She wrote two or three novels, beginning with Romance and Reality (1830); Ethel Churchill (1837) was her most successful tale. There was also a tragedy on Castruccio Castracani (1837); but 'L. E. L.' was perhaps best known and beloved for her innumerable contributions to the Literary Gazette, edited by her warm friend Jerdan, and other magazines and annuals. She was born at Hans Place, Chelsea, and was the daughter of an army-agent. Lively, susceptible, and romantic, she early commenced writing poetry, and after her father's death she not only maintained herself but assisted her relations by her literary labours. Unkind tongues caused the breaking off of an engagement (said to have been with John Forster); and in 1838 she was married to George Maclean, the governor of what is now part of the Gold Coast Colony, and in the same year she sailed for Cape Coast Castle with her husband. She had spent barely two months in her African home, but had resumed her literary work, when one morning, after writing overnight some cheerful and affectionate letters to her friends in England, she was found dead in her room, having in her hand a bottle from which she was reported to have swallowed an overdose of poison as a relief from spasms. Her friends at home did not all accept this, the official verdict. It was known that she was disappointed in her husband's character (though as an administrator he was energetic and successful), and she felt lonely and unhappy in her married life. The doubt has never been dispelled. The Athenæum obituary of 'Mrs Maclean' in the first week of January 1839 recognised that her ceaseless composition had 'necessarily precluded the thought

and cultivation essential to the production of poetry of the highest order. Hence, with all her fancy and feeling, her principal works . . . bear a strong family likeness to each other in their recurrence to the same sources of allusion and the same veins of imagery-in the conventional rather than natural colouring of their descriptions, and in the excessive though not unmusical carelessness of their versification.' The critic greeted her last published verses, 'The Polar Star,' printed after her death in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, as an earnest of deeper seriousness, wider knowledge, and more careful technique. Her novels resemble her poems in being stories of sentiment, and reflect in some degree the conversation of their authoress, which sparkled always brightly with quick fancy and a badinage which astonished those matter-of-fact persons who expected to find in the manners and discourse of the poetess traces of the weary heart, the broken lute, and the disconsolate willow-tree which were so frequently her themes of song.' Her fluency was a truly fatal gift; the very variety of her subjects and of her measures is suspicious; the sentiment, whether poetically far-fetched or commonplace, is usually conventional; and in her Troubadours and Laras, her Hindoo Brides and Bayadères, her Lays of Scottish and Spanish minstrels and German minnesingers, there are echoes of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Moore, along with notes that suggest her less popular contemporary, Mrs Hemans, and anticipations of Longfellow. She remains a landmark in the history of popular taste in literature and its vagaries. Her poems are seldom bought and seldomer studied, but 'L. E. L.' is still largely represented in quotation books; and fragments of her verse still float about disembodied, such as: Dreams of truth,

The Eden birds of early youth
That make the loveliness of love.

Genius, like all heavenly light,
Can blast as well as bless the sight.
It is deep happiness to die,
Yet live in love's dear memory.

O, silence is

Love's own peculiar eloquence of bliss.
How often woman's heart must turn
To feed upon its own excess

Of deep yet passionate tenderness !
How much of grief the heart must prove
That yields a sanctuary to love!

Sappho's Song.

Farewell, my lute!-and would that I Had never waked thy burning chords! Poison has been upon thy sigh,

And fever has breathed in thy words. Yet wherefore, wherefore should I blame Thy power, thy spell, my gentlest lute? I should have been the wretch I am, Had every chord of thine been mute.

It was my evil star above,

Not my sweet lute, that wrought me wrong; It was not song that taught me love, But it was love that taught me song. If song be past, and hope undone,

And pulse, and head, and heart are flame; It is thy work, thou faithless one!

But, no!-I will not name thy name;
Sun-god! lute, wreath are vowed to thee!
Long be their light upon my grave—
My glorious grave-yon deep blue sea:
I shall sleep calm beneath its wave !
A Poetical Portrait.

Ah! little do those features wear
The shade of grief, the soil of care;
The hair is parted o'er a brow
Open and white as mountain snow,
And thence descends in many a ring,
With sun and summer glistening.

Yet something on that brow has wrought
A moment's cast of passing thought;
Musing of gentle dreams, like those
Which tint the slumbers of the rose:
Not love, love is not yet with thee,—
But just a glimpse what love may be :
A memory of some last night's sigh,
When flitting blush and drooping eye
Answer'd some youthful cavalier,
Whose words sank pleasant on thine ear,
To stir, but not to fill the heart ;-
Dreaming of such, fair girl, thou art.—
Thou blessed season of our spring,
When hopes are angels on the wing;
Bound upwards to their heavenly shore,
Alas! to visit earth no more.
Then step and laugh alike are light,
When, like a summer morning bright,
Our spirits in their mirth are such
As turn to gold whate'er they touch.
The past 'tis nothing-childhood's day
Has roll'd too recently away,

For youth to shed those mournful tears
That fill the eye in older years,

When Care looks back on that bright leaf

Of ready smiles and short-lived grief.
The future! 'tis the promised land,
To which Hope points with prophet hand,
Telling us fairy tales of flowers

That only change for fruit-and ours.

Though false, though fleeting, and though vain,
Thou blessed time, I say again.—

Glad being, with thy downcast eyes,
And visionary look that lies
Beneath their shadow, thou shalt share
A world where all my treasures are-
My lute's sweet empire, fill'd with all
That will obey my spirit's call;

A world lit up by fancy's sun!

Ah! little like our actual one.

On the Picture of a Child screening a Dove from a Hawk.

Ay, screen thy favourite dove, fair child;

Ay, screen it if you may,

Yet I misdoubt thy trembling hand

Will scare the hawk away.

That dove will die, that child will weep,

Is this their destinie?

Ever amid the sweets of life
Some evil thing must be.

Ay, moralise, is it not thus

We've mourn'd our hope and love? Ah! there are tears for every eye, A hawk for every dove !

The Polar Star.

A star has left the kindling sky-
A lovely northern light;
How many planets are on high,
But that has left the night.

I miss its bright familiar face,
It was a friend to me;
Associate with my native place,
And those beyond the sea.
It rose upon our English sky,
Shone o'er our English land,
And brought back many a loving eye,
And many a gentle hand.

It seemed to answer to my thought,
It called the past to mind,

And with its welcome presence brought
All I had left behind.

The voyage it lights no longer, ends
Soon on a foreign shore;

How can I but recall the friends
That I may see no more?
Fresh from the pain it was to part-
How could I bear the pain?
Yet strong the omen in my heart
That says, We meet again-
Meet with a deeper, dearer love;
For absence shows the worth
Of all from which we then remove,
Friends, home, and native earth.
Thou lovely polar star, mine eyes
Still turned the first on thee,
Till I have felt a sad surprise,
That none looked up with me.
But thou hast sunk upon the wave,
Thy radiant place unknown;

I seem to stand beside a grave,
And stand by it alone.

Farewell! ah, would to me were given

A power upon thy light!

What words upon our English heaven

Thy loving rays should write!

Kind messages of love and hope

Upon thy rays should be;

Thy shining orbit should have scope

Scarcely enough for me.

Oh, fancy vain, as it is fond,

And little needed too;

My friends, I need not look beyond

My heart to look for you.

'L. E. L.'s' Life and Remains, published by Laman Blanchard in two volumes in 1841, reached a second edition in 1855; and William Bell Scott brought out an edition of her poems, with a Memoir, in 1873. A French estimate of her may be found in Le Fèvre Deumier's Célébrités Anglaises (1895).

Anna Jameson (1794-1860), art critic, the eldest of the four daughters of Brownell Murphy, miniaturist, was born at Dublin and brought up in England at Whitehaven, at Newcastle, and in or near London. From sixteen a governess, in 1825 she married Robert Jameson, a barrister, who from 1829 held appointments in Dominica and Canada. They never got on well together, and from that date, with the exception of a dismal visit to Canada (1836-38), she lived apart from him. Her numerous writings include The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), memoranda made during a tour in France and Italy; Loves of the Poets (1829); Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831); Characteristics of Women (1832); Beauties of the Court of Charles II. (1833); Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834); Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838); Pictures of the Social Life of Germany, as represented in the Dramas of the Princess Amelia of Saxony (1840). Works so various cannot all be of like temper or equal interest, but there was good ground for Professor Wilson's warm eulogium on Mrs Jameson as one of the most eloquent of our female writers; full of feeling and fancy; a true enthusiast with a glowing soul.' Her most famous contributions to literature were in the department of art criticism, and her Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art (1842) and Companion to Private Galleries of Art in and near London (1844) were long standard works. Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters and Memoirs on Art, Literature, and Social Morals (1845 and 1846) gave more scope to her literary gifts and artistic sympathies. But she is now mainly remembered as authoress of Sacred and Legendary Art (2 vols. 1848), dealing with the evangelists, apostles, and other scriptural characters, with the early saints and doctors, as represented in art. To this succeeded Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), practically a second series; Legends of the Madonna (1852), a third; and The History of Our Lord as exemplified in Works of Art, a fourth, which was finished after her death by Lady Eastlake. So that her magnum opus constituted a history of Christian art, and of the Church through art, down to the seventeenth century. Her Commonplace Book was issued in 1854; and her niece, Geraldine Macpherson, published Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson in 1878. She took a keen interest in philanthropic enterprises, warmly supported the Sisters of Mercy, promoted the training of nurses, and, before most of her contemporaries, advocated the thorough education of women so as to qualify them for various employment.

Mrs Jameson's work has not quite lost either its value or its popularity, though new art canons have had their vogue and Raphael has yielded the palm to Botticelli. Her criticism is some of it out of date, and at her best and even for her own day her technical knowledge of art was very defective. She was an art critic of the pre-Ruskinian period, and of quite pre-Morellian methods and principles.

Her legends she took from the obvious sources, quite uncritically, as in duty bound-from the Legenda Aurea, from Ribadeneyra, or from Alban Butler, as was most convenient or picturesque ; her historical equipment was that of an accomplished, sympathetic, well-read, and industrious but not profoundly or really learned woman. Her sensibilities often ran away with her judgment, or she wandered off into the history of the picture and then talked of all it suggested to her rather than of the picture itself. Therein lies part of her charm ; she wrote out of the fullness of her heart, and became one of the most popular and attractive teachers on subjects for which the movement associated with Tractarianism had prepared the English public. Her technical weakness in nowise affects the beauty of her stories; her work was for many much more than a history. Longfellow wrote to her 'God bless you for this book! How very precious it is to me! Indeed, I can hardly try to express to you the feelings of affection with which I have cherished it from the first moment it reached us. It most amply supplies the cravings of the religious nature.'

Sir Gerard Noel.

Our Chef de Voyage-for so we chose to entitle him who was the planner and director of the excursion-was one of the most accomplished and most eccentric of human beings: even courtesy might have termed him old at seventy; but old age and he were many miles asunder, and it seemed as though he had made some compact with Time, like that of Faust with the Devil, and was not to surrender to his inevitable adversary till the last moment. Years could not quench his vivacity nor 'stale his infinite variety.' He had been one of the Prince's wild companions in the days of Sheridan and Fox, and could play alternately blackguard and gentleman, each in perfection; but the high-born gentleman ever prevailed. He had been heir to an enormous income, most of which had slipped through his fingers unknownst, as the Irish say, and had stood in the way of a coronet, which somehow or other had passed over his head to light on that of his eldest son. He had lived a life which would have ruined twenty iron constitutions, and had suffered what might well have broken twenty hearts of common stuff; but his self-complacency was invulnerable, his animal spirits inexhaustible, his activity indefatigable. The eccentricities of this singular man have been matter of celebrity; but against each of these stories it would be easy to place some act of benevolence, some trait of gentlemanly feeling, which would at least neutralise their effect. He often told me that he had early in life selected three models after which to form his own character and conduct-namely, De Grammont, Hotspur, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and he cer tainly did unite, in a greater degree than he knew himself, the characteristics of all three. On looking round after Donna Anna's song, I was surprised to see our Chef de Voyage bathed in tears; but, no whit disconcerted, he merely wiped them away, saying, with a smile, 'It is the very prettiest, softest thing to cry to one's self!' Afterwards, when we were in the carriage, he expressed his surprise that any man should be ashamed of tears. For my own part,' he added, 'when I wish