Page:New Monthly Memoir 1837.pdf/6

brighter than a pretty ornament to be worn in a ball-room. By the time she had found out its value, she seemed to have grown tired of it. To her active and unwearied mind, the contest for the prize was better than the possession of it. Quick and vivid sensation was a necessity in her nature; dreams, rhapsodies, reveries, were the natural offspring of her exciteable and imaginative temperament; these would make themselves heard, taking the expression of the moment, and she "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came;" she wrote on, because she could not help it. But to what advantage—to what end? she probably asked. Was she to go on writing troubadours and golden violets all her days—apostrophising loves, memories, hopes, and fears, for ever and ever, in scattered songs and uncompleted stanzas, and running the chance of marring the first sweetness of the string, weakening her past music by the monotony of the note? Yet how stop, when the pen appeared the only safety-valve to keep sensation and longings after the visionary—the only link connecting her with the remote, which she desired, as an escape from the impending, which she dreaded! There seemed no help for it; like Pope, she "was born for nothing but to write ;" and "write, write, write," forms, as she has herself remarked, the history of her life. Luckily, however, there were a few envious and evil-natured persons in the world, and some good speedily began to grow out of their jealousy, spleen, and detraction. L. E. L. had her enemies; what would the most invincible genius be without them? She was reviled, ridiculed—her poetry was called sing-song, her sentiment "namby-pamby." Nothing could have been better qualified to make her feel her strength, to enable her to put it forth, to win her from words to things, from dreams to realities. The positive experience of a hard contact with the actual, was startling and disagreeable; the chill of a sudden plunge into society, after a revel in ideal luxuries, was like the shock of a cold bath; but this was just what was wanted. Her thoughts found a deeper channel, and flowed still more freely; her observations took a wider range, and scanned the features of life as they presented themselves to her earnest gaze—not as she had imaged them in the pages of chivalry and romance, or shaped them for herself amidst the grotesque fancies of a dream. She discovered that her powers acquired elasticity, as the subjects on which they were exercised became more various; and that the world widened as she went on. Reality, in short, grew as familiar to her as Romance. She led Prose captive, as she had led Poetry. She became the author of "Francesca Carrara!" A page of praise could not have greater force than this little sentence to him who has read that noble work studiously and reflectingly. Nobody who had been familiar only with the casual and careless writings of L. E. L. could have given her credit for the searching and many-winding power which is evinced in various passages of that composition. The rich painting, the poetical description, the happy portraiture of manners, the reading and the knowledge, the grace and the tenderness, were to be expected—but the insight into motive, the penetration into the mysteries of character, the revealings of the inner world, the firm-handed dissection of the philosophy of life, ever curious in the speculations struck out, though often erring in the judgment, and always setting man's worst foot foremost—these are triumphs of her pen that few