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To pour on broken reeds-a wasted shower!
And to make idols, and to find them clay,
To bewail that worship'-

"If such was the mind of her works, the manner in which she wrought out her conceptions was equally individual and excellent. Her imagination was rich, chaste, and glowing : those who saw only its published fruits little guessed at the extent of its variety.

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"It is difficult to enumerate the titles of her principal works. Her first childish efforts were published when she was only thirteen, and we can speak of her subsequent poems, Wallace,'' Dartmoor,' The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy,' and her Dramatic Scenes,' only from memory. These were, probably, written in the happiest period of her life, when her mind was rapidly developing itself, and its progress was aided by judicious and intelligent counsellors; among whom may be mentioned Bishop Heber. A favourable notice of one of these poems will be found in Lord Byron's letters; and the fame of her opening talent had reached Shelley, who addressed a very singular correspondence to her. With respect to the world in general, her name began to be known by the publication of her Welsh Melodies,' her Siege of Valencia,' and the scattered lyrics which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then under the direction of Campbell. She had previously contributed a series of prose papers, on Foreign Literature, to Constable's Edinburgh Magazine, which, with little exception, are the only specimens of that style of writing ever attempted by her. To the Siege of Valencia,' succeeded rapidly her Forest Sanctuary,' her 'Records of Woman,' (the most successful of her works,) her Songs of the Affections,' (containing, perhaps, her finest poem, The Spirit's Return,') her National Lyrics and Songs for Music,' (most of which have been set to music by her sister, and become popular,) and her ' Scenes and Hymns of Life.' A few words with respect to the direction of her powers in later days, may be worthily extracted from a letter of hers which lies now before us. She had been urged by a friend to undertake a prose work,

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and a series of Artistic Novels,' something after the manner of Tieck, and Göethe's Kunst-Romanen, as likely to be congenial to her own tastes and habits of mind, and to prove most acceptable to the public.

"I have now,' she says, 'passed through the feverish and somewhat visionary state of mind often connected with the passionate study of art in early life; deep affections and deep sorrows seem to have solemnized my whole being, and I now feel as if bound to higher and holier tasks, which, though I may occasionally lay aside, I could not long wander from without some sense of dereliction. I hope it is no self-delusion, but I cannot help sometimes feeling as if it were my true task to enlarge the sphere of sacred poetry, and extend its influence. When you receive my volume of " Scenes and Hymns," you will see what I mean by enlarging its sphere, though my plan as yet is very imperfectly developed.'

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"Besides the works here enumerated, we should mention her tragedy, the Vespers of Palermo,' which, though containing many fine thoughts and magnificent bursts of poetry, was hardly fitted for the stage; and the songs which she contributed to Colonel Hodges' Peninsular Melodies;" and we cannot but once more call the attention of our readers to her last lyric, Despondency and Aspiration,' published in Blackwood's Magazine' for May 1835. It is the song of the swan-its sweetest and its last!" *—H. F. CHORLEY, in the Athenæum, No. 395.

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ON THE POETRY OF MRS HEMANS.
BY PROFESSOR NORTON.

"We have now received the last of the imperishable gifts of Mrs Hemans's genius. The period of her spirit's trials and sufferings, and its glorious course on earth, has been completed. She has left an unclouded fame; and we may say, in her own words :

:

* It has already been shown that this was not the case.

'No tears for thee !-though light be from us gone
With thy soul's radiance:

No tears for thee!

*

They that have loved an exile, must not mourn
To see him parting for his native bourne

O'er the dark sea.'

"As this, therefore, will be the last time that we shall review any productions of Mrs Hemans, we may be permitted to recall, with a melancholy pleasure, the admiration and delight with which we have followed the progress of her genius. The feelings with which her works are now generally regarded, have been expressed in no publication earlier, more frequently, or more warmly, than in our own. Without repeating what we have already said, we shall now endeavour to point out some of their features, considered in relation to that moral culture in which alone such writings can exist.

"Mrs Hemans may be considered as the representative of a new school of poetry, or, to speak more precisely, her poetry discovers characteristics of the highest kind, which belong almost exclusively to that of later times, and have been the result of the gradual advancement, and especially the moral progress, of mankind. It is only when man, under the influence of true religion, feels himself connected with whatever is infinite, that his affections and powers are fully developed. The poetry of an immortal being must be of a different character from that of an earthly being. But, in recurring to the classic poets of antiquity, we find that, in their conceptions, the element of religious faith was wanting. Their mythology was to them no object of sober belief; and, had it been so, was adapted not to produce but to annihilate devotion. They had no thought of regarding the universe as created, animated, and ruled by God's all-powerful and omniscient goodness. To them it was a world of matter.—

The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring.
Or chasms and watery depths,'

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never existed except in the imagination of modern poets. The beings intended were the fair humanities' of Ovid's Metamorphoses, whose attributes, derived from the baser parts of our nature, were human passions lawlessly indulged, accompanied with more than mortal power. Gibbon, who was any thing rather than what he affected to be-a philosopher-speaks of the elegant mythology of the Greeks.' The great fountains of their popular and poetical mythology were Homer and Hesiod. Hesiod does not surpass Homer in the agreeable or moral character of his fictions, and, as regards the elegance of the mythology found in the great epic poet, a single passage, if we had no other means of judging, might settle the question, the address of Jupiter to Juno at the commencement of the Fifteenth Book of the Iliad :—

'Oh, versed in wiles,

Juno! thy mischief- teeming mind perverse
Hath plotted this; thou hast contrived the hurt
Of Hector, and hast driven his host to flight.
I know not but thyself mayst chance to reap
The first-fruits of thy cunning, scourged by me.
Hast thou forgotten how I hung thee once
On high, with two huge anvils at thy feet,
And bound with force defying cord of gold
Thy wrists together? In the heights of heaven
Did I suspend thee. With compassion moved,
The assembled gods thy painful sufferings saw,
But help could yield thee none; for whom I seized,
Hurl'd through the portal of the skies, he reach'd
The distant earth, and scarce survived the fall.'

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I thus remind thee now, that thou mayst cease
Henceforth from artifice, and mayst be taught

How little all the dalliance and the love

Which, stealing down from heaven, thou hast by fraud
Obtain'd from me, shall favour thy designs.'

"It may be incidentally remarked, that these lines illustrate not merely the features of the ancient mythology, but also the condition of woman as treated by the heroes of Homer and by his contemporaries. We happen just to have opened upon another striking example of the elegance of the ancient mythology during the Augustan age. It is

a passage of Ovid, almost too indecent and silly to be alluded to, though Addison was not ashamed to translate it, beginning

Fortè Jovem memorant, diffusum nectare, curas

Seposuisse graves, vacuâque agitasse remissos
Cum Junone jocos.' *

"From the passage referred to, we may judge something of the convivial manners of the Romans, and of the habits of intercourse between the sexes.

"It is remarkable, that in all religious and moral conceptions, the noblest materials of poetry, the philosophers were very far in advance of the poets. The Fables of Hesiod and Homer,' says Plato, are especially to be censured. They have uttered the greatest falsehoods concerning the greatest beings.' Referring to the loathsome and abominable fables about Coelus, Saturn, and Jupiter, he says We must not tell our youth that he who commits the greatest iniquity does nothing strange, nor he who inflicts the most cruel punishment upon his father when injured by him; but that he is only doing what was done by the first and greatest of the gods.' A little after he subjoins, The chaining of Juno by her son, the throwing of Vulcan from heaven by his father, because he attempted to defend his mother from being beaten, and the battles of the gods described by Homer, are not fictions to be allowed in our city, whether explained allegorically or not.' Though we praise many things in Homer,' he says, we shall not praise him when he represents Jupiter as sending a lying dream to Agamemnon, nor Eschylus when he makes Thetis complain of having been deceived by Apollo.' 'When any one thus speaks of the gods we are indignant, we grant no permission for such writings, nor shall we suffer teachers to use them in the instruction of youth.'† "The poets of this nation did not, in Plato's opinion,

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"It is related that Jove chanced, being exhilarated by nectar, to lay aside his weighty cares, and interchange pleasant jokes with idle Juno."

† See De Republica, Lib. II. pp. 373–383.

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