Inscribe one sentence—life's first truth and last
On the pale marble where our dust is sleeping—
We might have been.'
The able writer, whose speculations on her death have been already adverted to and quoted, eloquently bore witness to the noble generosity of her nature as indicated in her works:—
"The loss of a writer, and that writer a woman whose career had commenced so brilliantly and promised so much, had her life been spared and her circumstances propitious, of fame for herself and enjoyment to others, is properly regarded as a public loss. Her works indicated a noble and generous nature, an organization of passionate sensibility, and a correctness and keenness of observation rarely combined with those qualities in early life. And if this lustre was not wholly unobscured by occasional conventionalism, by a luxuriant verbiage, and by a factitious melancholy, still there was reason to hope that the poetical genius which was in her would, as its strength became matured, have scattered the mists and shone forth in its natural splendour. That hope is suddenly blighted. 'A star has left the kindling sky,' (to borrow from the beautiful song that was one of her latest compositions, and is so full of seeming presentiments or analogies of her own fate); and
"'The voyage it lights no longer, ends
Soon on a foreign shore.'
She sleeps in the barren sands of Africa, and the mournful music of the billows to which she listened in her solitary sea-girt dwelling, is now the dirge that resounds over her distant grave."
What remains of our task is of a less doubtful and less melancholy character. It is simply to introduce to public notice her latest writings; the
