do honour to her woman's heart. These portions of L. E. L.'s writings require to be yet more truly appreciated.
There is another characteristic of her prose writings which is peculiar. Never were the feelings and experiences of authorship so cordially and accurately described. She tells us freely all that she has learned. She puts words into the mouth of Walter Maynard, of which all who have known anything of literary life must instantly acknowledge the correctness. The author's heart never was more completely laid open, with all its hopes, fears, fatigues, and enjoy ments, its bitter and its glorious experiences. In the last hours of Walter Maynard, she makes him utter what must at that period have been daily more and more her own conviction. "I am far cleverer than I was. I have felt, have thought so much! Talk of the mind exhausting itself!—never! Think of the mass of materials which every day accumulates! Then experience, with its calm, clear light, corrects so many youthful fallacies; every day we feel our higher moral responsibility, and our greater power.”
They are the convictions of "higher moral responsibilities and greater power," which strike us so forcibly in the later writings of L. E. L.
But what shall we say to the preparation of prussic-acid, and its preservation by Lady Marchmont? What of the perpetual creed of L. E. L., that all affection brings woe and death?
Whether this melancholy belief in the tendency of the great theme of her writings, both in prose and poetry,—this irresistible annunciation, like another Cassandra, of woe and desolation,—this evolution of scenes and characters in her last work, bearing such dark resemblance to those of her own after experience,—this tendency, in all her plots, to a tragic catastrophe, and this final tragedy itself,—whether these be all mere coincidences or not, they are still but parts of an unsolved mystery. Whatever they are, they are more than strange, and are enough to make us superstitious; for surely, if ever
"Coming events cast their shadows before,"
they did so in the foreboding tone of this gifted spirit.
The painful part of Miss Landon's history is, that almost from the first outbreak of her reputation, she became the mark of the most atrocious calumnies. How far any girlish thoughtlessness had given a shadow of ground on which the base things said of her might rest, is not for me, who only saw her occasionally, to say. But my own impressions, when I saw and conversed with her, were, that no guilty spirit could live in that bright, clear, and generous person, nor could look forth through those candid, playful, and transparent eyes. It was a presence which gave you the utmost confidence in the virtuous and innocent heart of the poetess, however much you might regret the circumstances which had diverted her mind from the cultivation of its very highest powers. In after years, and when I had not seen her for a long time, rumours of a like kind, but with a show of foundation more startling, were spread far and wide. That
