its cherished purpose. At the age of seventeen, she wrote 'The Sorrows of Rosalie;' and, although it was not published until some time afterwards, she had scarcely passed her girlhood before she had established for herself the distinction which had long been attached to her maiden name."
When about nineteen years of age. Miss Sheridan married the Hon. George Chapel Norton, brother of the present Lord Grantley. He had proposed to her three years before, but her mother had postponed the engagement on account of her daughter's youth; and in the meantime Miss Sheridan had made an acquaintance with one whose early death prevented a union more consonant to her feelings. When Mr. Norton again sought her hand, he received it; but the marriage was an unhappy one, and they were separated in 1840. The world has heard the slanders to which she has been exposed, and a verdict of entire acquittal from all who listened to them, can scarcely have atoned for the cruel and baseless suspicions and persecution to which she was subjected. Her reputation as a virtuous woman is now established beyond suspicion. England may well be proud of this gifted daughter of song; and her own sex throughout the world should honour her for the noble courage of soul by which she overcame the malignity of unmerited persecution.
Mrs. Norton's second work was "The Undying One," a poem, founded on the legend of the Wandering Jew. In 1840, she published "The Dream, and other Poems." In noticing these two works, a writer in the "Quarterly Review" says of Mrs. Norton—"This lady is the Byron of our modern poetesses. She has very much of that intense personal passion by which Byron's poetry is distinguished from the larger grasp and deeper communion with man and nature of Wordsworth. She has also Byron's beautiful intervals of tenderness, his strong practical thought, and his forceful expression. It is not an artificial imitation, but a natural parallel." Another writer, commenting on the subject, more justly observes—"That Mrs. Norton has a fervour, a tenderness, and a force of expression, which greatly resemble Byron's, there can be no doubt; but there all similarity ceases. Byron is the personification of passionate selfishness; his range of sympathy is extremely small. Mrs. Norton, on the other hand, has a large and generous heart, essentially unselfish in its feelings, and universal in its sympathies. (How perfectly these two persons typify the differences in the characteristics of the sexes!) Byron has a sneering, mocking, disbelieving spirit; Mrs. Norton a simple, beautiful, child-like implicitness of soul. Byron's strains resemble the vast, roaring, wilful waterfall, rushing headlong over desolate rocks, with a sound like the wail of a lost spirit; Mrs. Norton's, the soft, full-flowing river, margined with flowers, and uttering sweet music."
With these opinions we entirely concur; and there are some remarks by an American writer, the Rev. Dr. Bethune, which are highly creditable to his own cultivated taste and moral feelings, as well as truly just to this distinguished lady. "The traces of Mrs. Norton's sufferings are burned deeply on her pages. She scorns to hide the workings of her embittered memory and outraged heart; yet her tone, though unconstrained, is lofty, yielding not to man, but to the force of nature. What she has endured, has taught her not misanthropy, but a stronger sympathy with the
