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Updated: September 17, 2025
Ask of the winds, that far around With fragments strewed the sea Ask the waves. Ask the fragments. Ask Mrs. Hemans. Or, to save time, inquire of me. He has become totally extinct. He is no more and he never was very much. Still we need not worry. Mentally he must have been from the very outset a liability rather than an asset.
Hemans, with a few odd volumes of the illustrated gift-books of the period, composed the bulk of the little library. Midwinter turned to leave the room, when an object on one side of the window, which he had not previously noticed, caught his attention and stopped him. It was a statuette standing on a bracket a reduced copy of the famous Niobe of the Florence Museum.
"Time that breaks all things," according to the dictum of a great poet still living, does not happily break all in literature; but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments the once not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. It was not a fortunate union, and by far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans' married life was spent, owing to no known fault of hers, apart from her husband.
He made her the keynote of a talk one day upon the poetry of women. The poems entitled "Joy," "Thought," "Ariadne," he liked especially. Of Mrs. Hemans he found many poems which still survive, and he believed must always live. Matthew Arnold was one of the minds and men to whom he constantly reverted with pleasure.
You know so much more and could appreciate so much better. At the Palace of the Cæesars, where the very dust is a mélange of exquisite marbles, I saw for the first time an acanthus growing, and picked my first leaf. Our little ménage moves on prosperously; the doctor takes excellent care of us and we of him. One sees everybody here at Rome, John Bright, Mrs. Hemans' son, Mrs. Gaskell, etc., etc.
Hemans' songs, like 'Passing Away' or 'He Never Smiled Again. Perhaps there was a comic recitation, at which no one laughed, and finally we had wine and hot water they called it 'port negus' and tongue sandwiches and caraway cakes. My dear Ethel, I yawn now when I think of those dreary evenings.
Hemans has immortalized; Elisabetta Sirani, painter, sculptor, and engraver on copper, herself called a "miracle of art," the honored of popes and princes, dying at twenty-six; Marietta Tintoretta, who was invited to be the artist at the courts of emperors and kings, dying at thirty, leaving her father inconsolable; Sophonisba Lomellini, invited by Philip II. of Spain to Madrid, to paint his portrait, and that of the Queen, concerning whom, though blind, Vandyck said he had received more instruction from a blind woman than from all his study of the old masters; and many more.
Hemans Behold! they come those sainted forms, Unshaken through the strife of storms; Heaven's winter cloud hangs coldly down, And earth puts on its rudest frown; But colder, ruder, was the hand That drove them from their own fair land; Their own fair land Refinement's chosen seat, Art's trophied dwelling, Learning's green retreat; By Valor guarded and by Victory crowned, For all but gentle Charity renowned.
I do not believe that to be sublime is in the power of a woman, any more than to be logical; and Mrs. Hemans, who is neither, writes charmingly, and one loves her as a Christian woman even more than one admires her as a writer.
Hemans loved him well; so did a very different person, Lady Blessington, so that altogether you may fancy him a very likeable person; but he is much more, generous, unselfish, loyal, and as true as steel, worth all his writings a thousand times over. If my house be in such condition as to allow of my getting to London to see "Old Love and New Fortune," I shall consult with Mr.
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