verse or prose, for about three years. The "New Monthly Magazine," however, of all periodicals, obtained by far the most finished of her poetical efforts; the subjects being her own, and not her publisher's. To these compositions reference will be made hereafter. Nor would it be right to omit the various graceful tributes to great names with which, from the year 1836, she annually added to the beauty of Mr. Schloss's "Fairy Almanac;" or her "Birth-day Tribute to the Princess Victoria," which appeared in May, 1837. Princesses have rarely been hailed in such hearty and passionate strains.
The spirit of her poetry during these later years, while retaining some of the early weaknesses that miscoloured and misdirected it, exhibited a progressive alteration that fully justified the impression stamped on the mind of one of her critics, some time before; relative to her capacity (of which she was then giving some evidence) to escape from false shackles, and to discover, at last, the real exercise of her highest powers. This she may be said to have described in one of the many fine and lofty poems to be found in the "Drawing-room Scrap-book:"
"'Tis in the lofty hope, the daily toil,
'Tis in the gifted line,
In each far thought divine,
That brings down heaven to light our common soil.
'Tis in the great, the lovely, and the true,
'Tis in the generous thought
Of all that man has wrought,
Of all that yet remains for man to do."
"Miss Landon," says her critic, "seems to have discovered, at last, that genius can have some nobler aim than to plant along the road of life an avenue of yews and cypresses. It may be that
