LECTURE VI. PART FIRST. Female constellation.-Joanna Baillie, Metrical Legends.-Love of Fame.Felicia Hemans.-Historic Scenes, Forest Sanctuary, Records of Woman, and Miscellanies.-Character of her poetry.-Specimens, Dirge, The Trumpet, and Vaudois Hymn.-Caroline Bowles, The Widow's Tale, Solitary Hours, The Birthday, Robin Hood.-Analysis of The Young Grey Head, with extracts.-Mary Russell Mitford, Maria Jewsbury, Letitia Elizabeth Landon; Improvisatrice, Venetian Bracelet, Golden Violet, Remains. -Mary Howitt, the excellence of her ballad poetry: The Spider and the Fly.-Caroline Norton: The Dream, Child of the Islands, and Songs.-Lady Flora Hastings, Harriet Drury, and Camilla Toulmin.-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her genius and its imperfect development: Drama of Exile, Cry of the Children.-Professor R. C. Trench.-Elegiac Poems, Justin Marytr, Poems from Eastern Sources, The Suppliant.-Thomas Pringle, John Clare, Bernard Barton, Thomas Haynes Bayley, Alaric A. Watts.-Specimen, Child blowing Bubbles.T. K. Hervey.-Rev. Charles Wolfe.-The Squire's Pew, by Jane Taylor. -Various other poets of the period. IN the same year that Wordsworth and Coleridge brought out the Lyrical Ballads-the first offerings of a new code of poetry, in contradistinction to that of Hayley, Darwin, and the Della Cruscans, Joanna Baillie gave the first volume of her "Plays on the Passions," to a Drama monopolised by the tame conventionalities of Cumberland and Murphy. Nor were their theories widely different; for, in the Preliminary Dicourse by which she ushered in that work, we find her emphatically maintaining, that "one simple trait of the human heart, one expression of passion, genuine and true to nature, will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, while the false and unnatural around it fades away on every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." Her dramas, both tragic and comic, were forcible illustrations of this code; and it must be admitted, from published proof, that she thus forestalled, or at least divided, the claim to originality indoctrinated in the theory and practice of Wordsworth, as shown by his " Lyric Ballads" and their preface. But Joanna Baillie, as the author of "Count Basil" and "De Montfort," is entitled to a much higher place among dramatists, than the author of "Metrical Legends" is among mere poets. With much imaginative energy, much observant thought, and great freedom and force of delineation, together with a fine feeling of nature, and an occasional Massingerian softness of diction, it may be claimed for Joanna Baillie that she uniformly keeps apart from the trite and commonplace; yet we cannot help feeling a deficiency of art, and tact, and taste, alike in the management of her themes and the structure of her verse. Her tales, as tales, often want keeping, and their materials are put together by a hand apparently unpractised. Nor even in her emotional bursts, where she ought to have certainly succeeded, is she always quite happy, as a dash of the falsetto is, occasionally at least, not unapparent. Of these "Metrical Legends," three in number—“ Sir William Wallace," "Columbus" and "Lady Griseld Baillie," the last ranks highest in poetical merit ; although all are more or less liable to the objections just stated. In that dedicated to Columbus, the following spirited lines occur :— "O! who shall lightly say, that Fame Is nothing but an empty name! BALLADS AND SONGS. As, thinking of the mighty dead, The young from slothful couch will start, Like them to act a noble part? A desert bare, a shipless sea? To earth-worn pilgrim's wistful eye That point to immortality?" 261 Joanna Baillie is happier in her mere ballads, especially in that entitled "The Ghost of Fadon ;" and several of her songs in the collection of George Thomson -alas! gone from among us since my last Lecture-as, "The Trysting Tree," and "Welcome Bat and Owlet Grey," as well as in those scattered throughout her dramas, are characterised by simplicity of feeling and freshness of nature. The most generally appreciated among her miscellaneous pieces has been that named "The Kitten," which, under a riant playfulness of tone, conveys many a sober moral, and may even bear comparison with Wordsworth's well-known verses on the same subject. It cannot be said, however, that Joanna Baillie's poetry has been so framed as to catch the public ear; for, like Coleridge, Savage Landor, and Aird, she has been much more admired than read. Otherwise has been the fate of Felicia Hemans, by far the most popular of our poetesses, alike at home and beyond the Atlantic: nor do I say undeservedly. She may indeed be said "to have lisped in numbers," as she rhymed almost as soon as she read, and her first collection of verses appeared when she was in her fifteenth year. These, as might have been expected, were only wonderful when the author's age was considered; and her real career may be set down as having commenced in 1817, in her poems, "The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy," and "Modern Greece." From that time, until her lamented death in 1835, she continued to write with untiring zeal and industry, exhibiting a variety and richness of genius which, in my opinion, fairly entitled her to the female laureate-crown. In rapid succession appeared her "Translations from the Spanish and Italian poets," the "Tales and Historic Scenes," "The Sceptic," "Dartmoor," "The Forest Sanctuary," "The Records of Woman" (the culminating point of her genius), the "Songs of the Affections," the "Lyrics and Songs for Music," and the "Hymns and Scenes of Life," together with an amazing number of detached pieces in almost every possible variety of style and measure, all far above commonplace in conception and execution, and not a few of matchless and unfading splendour. To Joanna Baillie, Mrs Hemans might be inferior, not only in vigour of conception, but in the power of metaphysically analysing those sentiments and emotions which constitute the groundwork of human action,—to Mrs Jameson, in the critical perception which, from detatched fragments of spoken thought, can discriminate the links which bind all into one distinctive character, -to Letitia Landon, in eloquent facility,-to Caroline Bowles, in simple pathos,-to Mary Howitt, in fresh nature, and to Mary Mitford, in graphic strength;but as a female writer, influencing not only the female but the general mind, she is undoubtedly entitled to rank above all these her cotemporaries, in whatever relation she may be supposed by some to stand to her successor, Mrs Browning; and this pre-eminence has HER VARIED EXCELLENCIES. 263 been acknowledged, not only in our own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the Eastern Ganges or the Western Mississippi. Her path was emphatically her own, as truly as that of Wordsworth, Scott, Crabbe, or Byron; and shoals of imitators have arisen alike at home and on the other side of the Atlantic, who, destitute of her animating genius, have mimicked her themes and parodied her sentiments and language, without being able to keep even within compare of her excellencies. In her poetry, religious truth, moral purity, and intellectual beauty ever meet together; and assuredly it is not less calculated to refine the taste and exalt the imagination, because it addresses itself almost exclusively to the better feelings of our nature. Over all her pictures of humanity are spread the glory and the grace reflected from virtuous purity, delicacy of perception and conception, sublimity of religious faith, home-bred delights, and the generous expansive ardour of patriotism; while, turning from the dark and degraded, whether in subject or sentiment, she seeks out those verdant oases in the desert of human life, on which the affections may most pleasantly rest. Her poetry is intensely and entirely feminine; and, in my estimation, this is the highest praise which, in one point of view, could be awarded it. It could have been written by a woman only for although, in the "Records" of her sex, we have the female character delineated in all the varied phases of baffled passion and of ill-requited affection, of heroical self-denial and of withering hope deferred, of devotedness tried in the furnace of affliction, and of "Gentle feelings long subdued, Subdued and cherished long " yet its energy resembles that of the dove, "pecking the hand that hovers o'er its mate;" and its exaltation of thought is not of that daring kind which doubts and |