But at Lady Ann Barnard, I said "I must do it."[2]
As the god made us see them;—but Sappho was there,
As brown as a berry, and little of size;
But lord! with such midnight and love in her eyes!
Aspasia's however we thought still more loving:
Heart sat in their pupils, and gentlest approving.
We saw (only fancy it!) Pericles hand her;
And both (I can testify) look'd up at Landor.
Of Romans (whose women more startle than lull us)
Came none but the dame that's bound up with Tibullus;[3]
- ↑ Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, in the time of Pope, whom she knew. Gay introduces her among Pope's welcomers home from Greece (his finish of the Iliad) as
—"Winchelsea, still meditating song."
Her poems, amidst a good deal of inferior matter, contain evidences of a true feeling for nature, which has obtained the praise of Wordsworth. "It is remarkable," says he, in the Essay in his Miscellaneous Poems, "that excepting a passage or two in the 'Windsor Forest' of Pope, and some delightful pictures in the Poems of Lady Winchelsea, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the 'Paradise Lost,' and the 'Seasons,' does not contain a single new image of external nature." In Mr. Dyce's "Specimens of British Poetesses" are to be found two of her best specimens, the "Nocturnal Reverie," and the truly philosophical and fine-hearted effusion entitled the "Spleen;" but I am surprised that he has omitted her "Petition for an Absolute Retreat," a charming aspiration after one of those sequestered states of felicity which poets love to paint. It is equally beautiful for its thoughts, its pictures, and the music of the burthen which it repeats at the close of each paragraph.
- ↑ Lady Ann Barnard, of the house of Balcarres, authoress of "Auld Robin Grey,"—the most beautiful ballad that ever was written.
- ↑ Sulpicia; respecting whom, after all, there is much dispute.
