SABBATH SONNET. COMPOSED BY MRS HEMANS A FEW DAYS BEFORE HER How many blessed groups this hour are bending, Through England's primrose meadow-paths, their way Towards spire and tower, 'midst shadowy elms ascending, Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallow'd day! The halls from old heroic ages grey Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low, With whose thick orchard-blooms the soft winds play, Send out their inmates in a happy flow, Like a freed vernal stream. I may not tread With them those pathways, to the feverish bed April 26th, 1835. CRITICAL ANNOTATIONS. "WE cannot allow these verses to adorn, with a sad beauty, the pages of this Magazine-more especially as they are the last composed by their distinguished writer, and that only a few days before her death-without at least a passing tribute of regret over an event which has cast a shadow of gloom through the sunshiny fields of contemporary literature. But two months ago, the beautiful lyric entitled Despondency and Aspiration,' appeared in these pages, and now the sweet fountain of music from which that prophetic strain gushed has ceased to flow. The highly gifted and accomplished, the patient, the meek, and long-suffering FELICIA HEMANS, is no more. She died on the night of Saturday, the 16th of May 1835, at Dublin, and met her fate with all the calm resignation of a Christian, conscious that her spirit was winging its flight to another and a better world, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' "Without disparagement of the living, we scarcely hesitate to say, that in Mrs Hemans our female literature has lost perhaps its brightest ornament. To Joanna Baillie she might be inferior, not only in vigour of conception, but in the power of metaphysically analysing those sentiments and feelings which constitute the basis of human actions ;—to Mrs Jameson in the critical perception which, from detached fragments of spoken thought, can discriminate the links which bind all into a distinctive character;-to Miss Landon in eloquent facility;-to Caroline Bowles in simple pathos;—and to Mary Mitford in power of thought;—but as a female writer, influencing the female mind, she has undoubtedly stood, for some bypast years, the very first in the first rank; and this pre-eminence has been acknowledged, not only in her own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the eastern Ganges or the western Mississippi. Her path was her own; and shoals of imitators have arisen, alike at home and on the other side of the Atlantic, who, destitute of her animating genius, have mimicked her themes, and parodied her sentiments and language, without being able to reach its height. In her poetry, religious truth and intellectual beauty meet together; and assuredly it is not the less calculated to refine the taste and exalt the imagination, because it addresses itself almost exclusively to the better feelings of our nature alone. Over all her pictures of humanity are spread the glory and the grace reflected from purity of morals, delicacy of perception and conception, sublimity of religious faith, and warmth of patriotism; and, turning from the dark and degraded, whether in subject or sentiment, she seeks out those verdant oases in the desert of human life on which the affections may most pleasantly rest. Her poetry is intensely and entirely feminine-and, in our estimation, this is the highest praise which could be awarded it :-it could have been written by a woman only; for, although in the Records' of her sex, we have the female character delineated in all the varied phases of baffled passion and of ill-requited affection; of heroical self-denial, and of withering hope deferred; of devotedness tried in the furnace of affliction, and of 'Gentle feelings long subdued, Subdued and cherish'd long;' 6 yet its energy resembles that of the dove, pecking the hand that hovers o'er its mate,' and its exaltation of thought is not of the daring kind, which doubts and derides, or even questions, but which clings to the anchor of hope, and looks forward with faith and reverential fear. "Mrs Hemans has written much, and, as with all authors in like predicament, her strains are of various degrees of excellence. Independently of this, her different works will be differently estimated, as to their relative value, by dif ferent minds; but among the lyrics of the English language which can scarcely die, we hesitate not to assign places to The Hebrew Mother- The Treasures of the Deep The Spirit's Return'-'The Homes of England' The Better Land'-' The Hour of Death'-' The Trumpet and The Graves of a Household.' In these gems of purest ray serene,' the peculiar genius of Mrs Hemans breathes, and burns, and shines pre-eminent; for her forte lay in depicting whatever tends to beautify and embellish domestic life-the gentle overflowings of love and friendship-' homebred delights and heartfelt happiness' the associations of local attachment-and the influences of religious feelings over the soul, whether arising from the varied circumstances and situations of man, or from the aspects of external nature. We would only here add, by way of remark, that the writings of Mrs Hemans seem to divide themselves into two pretty distinct portions —the first comprehending her Modern Greece,' ' Wallace,'' Dartmoor,' Sceptic,' 'Historic Scenes,' and other productions, up to the publication of The Forest Sanctuary;' and the latter comprehending that volume, The Records of Woman,' 'The Scenes and Hymns of Life,' and all her subsequent productions. In her earlier works, she follows the classic model, as contradistinguished from the romantic, and they are inferior in that polish of style and almost gorgeous richness of language, in which her maturer compositions are set. It is evident that new stores of thought were latterly opened up to her, in a more 'extended acquaintance with the literature of Spain and Germany, as well as by a profounder study of the writings of our great poetical regenerator-Wordsworth."-DELTA, in Blackwood's Magazine, July 1835. 6 "Did we not know this world to be but a place of trial— our bitter probation for another and for a better—how strange in its severity would seem the lot of genius in a woman. The keen feeling-the generous enthusiasm-the lofty aspiration-and the delicate perception-are given but to make the possessor unfitted for her actual position. It is well; such gifts, in their very contrast to the selfishness and the evil with which they are surrounded, inform us of another world-they breathe of their home, which is heaven; the spiritual and the inspired in this life but fit us to believe in that which is to come. With what a sublime faith is this divine reliance expressed in all Mrs Hemans' later writings. As the clouds towards nightfall melt away on a fine summer evening into the clear amber of the west, leaving a soft and unbroken azure whereon the stars may shine; so the troubles of life, its vain regrets and vainer desires, vanished before the calm close of existence-the hopes of heaven rose steadfast at last the light shone from the windows of her home, as she approached unto it. 'No tears from thee!-though light be from us gone No tears for thee! They that have loved an exile must not mourn O'er the dark sea.' "We have noticed this yearning for affection-unsatisfied, but still unsubdued as one characteristic of Mrs Hemans' poetry: the rich picturesque was another. Highly accomplished, the varied stores that she possessed were all subservient to one master science. Mistress both of German and Spanish, the latter country appears to have peculiarly captivated her imagination. At that period when the fancy is peculiarly alive to impression-when girlhood is so new, that the eagerness of childhood is still in its delights-Spain was, of all others, the country on which public attention was fixed-victory after victory carried the British flag from the ocean to the Pyrenees; but, with that craving for the ideal which is so great a feature in her writings, the present was insufficient, and she went back upon the past;-the romantic history of the Moors was like a storehouse, with treasures gorgeous like those of its own Alhambra. "It is observable in her minor poems, that they turn upon an incident rather than a feeling. Feelings, true and deep, are developed; but one single emotion is never the |