Heman

“ Next day, Heman went away into the woods chopping, and carried his dinner of doughnuts and cheese, with a chunk of bean-porridge frozen into a ball, to be thawed out by his noontime fire. He returned much earlier than usual, and the Widder was at the window awaiting him. The swelling in her cheek had somewhat subsided; and the bandage, no longer distended by a poultice beneath, seemed, in comparison, a species of holiday device. She was very impatient. She watched Heman, as he went first to the barn ”

“ There was no light in the kitchen, and only a glimmer in the chamber above. Heman went up to the kitchen door and knocked. The chamber window opened.
"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Cole. "Why, that you, Heman? Anybody sick?"
"Where's Roxy?" returned Heman, as if he demanded her at the point of the bayonet.
"Why, she's been abed as much as ten minutes. The Tuckers brought her home."
"You tell her to come here! I want to see her."
"What! down there? Law, Heman! you come in the mornin'. She'll ketch her death o' cold gittin' up an' dressin', now she's got all warmed through." ”

“ Calmet supposes it to refer to the captivity; the Israelitish nation being represented here under the figure of a person greatly afflicted through the whole course of his life. By some Heman is supposed to have been the author; but who he was is not easy to be determined. Heman and Ethan whose names are separately prefixed to this and the following Psalm, are mentioned as the grandsons of Judah by his daughter-in-law Tamar, [1098] , for they were the sons of Zerah, his immediate son by the above. ”

“ Hemans a happy person; and she said, "No; her enjoyment is feverish, and she desponds. She is like a lamp whose oil is consumed by the very light which it yields." What a cruel thing is the weakness of memory! How little can its utmost efforts recall of conversation that was once an instruction and a delight! ”

“ Hemans was, beginning life,—conscious, for genius must be conscious of itself,—full of hope and of belief;—gradually the hope darkens into fear, and the belief into doubt; one illusion perishes after another, "and love grown too sorrowful,"
No emotion is more truly, or more often pictured in her song, than that craving for affection which answers not unto the call. The very power that she possesses, and which, in early youth, she perhaps deemed would both attract and keep, is, in reality, a drawback. ”

“ Like all original writers, Mrs Hemans has her own mode and her own province. In reading the poetry of Wordsworth, we feel as if transferred to the mountainous solitudes, broken only by the scream of the eagle and the dash of the cataract, where human life is indicated but by the shieling in the sheltered holm, and the shepherd boy, lying wrapt up in his plaid by the furze-bush, with his "little flock at feed beside him." ”

“ The poet can give us nothing but the form under which the objects he describes present themselves to his own mind. That form must be noble, or it is not worthy of our consideration; it must be consistent, or it will fail to be true. Now, in the writings of Mrs Hemans, we are shown how life and its concerns appear to woman, and hear a mother intrusting to verse her experience and observation. So, in ‘The Hebrew Mother,’ ‘the spring-tide of nature’ swells high as she parts from her son, on devoting him to the service of the Temple ”

“ Without aspiring to the vehemence, which some writers have mistaken for energy, the poetry of Mrs Hemans is never languid, even in the depths of its taste, tenderness, and elegance. To the most graceful and harmonious diction, she wedded themes of endless variety,—the outpourings of piety, and love, and friendship,—the delights of the past and of the future,—records of household affections,—lays of patriotism,—and legends of history or romance. ”

“ Hemans's poetry which have already been mentioned—viz., the ideal, the picturesque, and the harmonious—a fourth must be added,—the moral. Nothing can be more pure, more feminine and exalted, than the spirit which pervades the whole: it is the intuitive sense of right, elevated and strengthened into a principle. It is a glorious and a beautiful memory to bequeath; but she who left it is little to be envied. Open the volumes which she has left, legacies from many various hours, and what a record of wasted feelings and disappointed hopes may be traced in their sad and sweet complainings! ”

“ Mrs Hemans is, indeed, the star that shines most brightly in the hemisphere; and in every thing she writes, there is, along with a fine spirit of poetry, a still finer spirit of moral and religious truth. Of all the female poets of the day, Mrs Hemans is, in the best sense of the word, the most truly feminine—no false glitter about her—no ostentatious display—no gaudy and jingling ornaments—but, as an English matron ought to be, simple, sedate, cheerful, elegant, and religious.”—Professor Wilson in Blackwood’s Magazine. ”

“ Hemans now made literature a profession, and wrote much and well. In 1826 Prof. Andrews Norton brought out an edition of her poems in America, where they became popular, and have remained so.
Mrs. Hemans's poetry is smooth and graceful, frequently tinged with a shade of melancholy, but never despairing, cynical, or misanthropic. It never deals with the highest themes, nor rises to sublimity, but its influence is calculated to make the reader truer, nobler, and purer. ”

“ Rossetti’s
Notice of
Mrs. Hemans.
*
“An engraved portrait of her by the American artist William E. West—one of three which he painted in 1827, shows us that Mrs. Hemans, at the age of thirty-four, was eminently pleasing and good-looking, with an air of amiability and sprightly gentleness, and of confiding candour which, while none the less perfectly womanly, might almost be termed childlike in its limpid depth. The features are correct and harmonious; the eyes full; and the contour amply and elegantly rounded. In height she was neither tall nor short. ”

“ Hemans, for this Congress.
Where met the Bards of old? the glorious throng,
They of the Mountain and the Battle song?
They met—Oh! not in Kingly Hall or Tower,
But where wild Nature girt herself with power! ”

“ The graceful powers of Mrs Hemans in the same walk which had been trodden so grandly by Miss Baillie, were manifested in her ‘Vespers of Palermo’, and her ‘Siege of Valencia.’ The latter is a noble work, and as a poem ranks with her highest productions, though it is filled too uniformly perhaps with the spirit of her own mind, to be very distinctively dramatic. It has indeed variety, but less of the variety of human nature, than of a godlike and exalted nature, which belongs to few among mankind, and to them, perhaps, only in strange and terrible crises. ”

“ That Felicia Hemans would have been a poetess, whether contemporary criticism had allowed the fact or not, admits not of dispute; but still we know not how far, in many respects, even the most gifted and intellectual are the children of circumstances. Many a flower of genius, which would have expanded under the sunshine of popular favour, has been nipt in the bloom by the chilling breath of disregard.
Mrs Hemans was about the middle height, and rather slenderly made than otherwise. To a countenance of great intelligence and expression, she united manners alike unassuming and playful ”

“ She described her conversation as singularly fascinating—full of poetry, very felicitous in illustration by anecdote, happy, too, in quotation, and very rich in imagery; "in short, her own poem on 'The Treasures of the Deep' would best describe it." She mentioned a very striking simile to which a conversation on Mrs. Hemans's own poem of "The Sceptic*" [1] had led:— "Like Sindbad, the sailor, we are often shipwrecked on a strange shore. We despair; but hope comes when least expected. We pass through the gloomy caverns of doubt into the free air and blessed sunshine of conviction and belief." ”

“ With an exquisite airiness and spirit, with an imagery which quite sparkles, are touched her lighter delineations; with a rich and glowing pencil, her descriptions of visible nature: a sublime eloquence is the charm of her sentiments of magnanimity; while she melts into tenderness with a grace in which she has few equals.
“It appears to us that Mrs Hemans has yielded her own to the public taste in conveying her poetry in the vehicle of tales.” ”

“ Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 29, Pages 451-452
THE PROCESSION,
BY MRS HEMANS.
"The peace which passeth all understanding," disclosed itself in her looks and movements. It lay on her countenance like a steady unshadowed moonlight. ”

“ Mrs Jameson has truly said, that "the poetry of Mrs Hemans could only have been written by a woman." In all her thoughts and feelings she is intensely and entirely feminine; and there is a finish and completeness about her composition, singularly accordant with the fine perception, and delicate discrimination of the female mind. In her poetry religious truth and intellectual beauty meet together, and blend in delightful union; and assuredly it is not the less calculated to refine the taste and exalt the imagination, because it addresses itself only to the better feelings of our nature. ”

“ In the spring of 1820, Mrs Hemans first made the acquaintance of one who became afterwards a zealous and valuable friend, revered in life, and sincerely mourned in death—Bishop Heber, then Rector of Hodnet, and a frequent visitor at Bodryddan, the residence of his father-in-law, the late Dean of St Asaph, from whom also, during an intercourse of many years, Mrs Hemans at all times received much kindness and courtesy. Mr Reginald Heber was the first eminent literary character with whom she had ever familiarly associated ”

“ Shrouding Heaven’s inmost sanctuary and throne,
The curtain of the unutterably bright,
Was raised!—to him, in fearful splendour shown,
Ancient of days! e’en Thou mad’st Thy dread presence known.
Mrs. Hemans.
In all the immense, the strange, and old,
Thy presence careless men behold;
In all the little, weak, and mean,
By Faith be thou as clearly seen. [463]
Thou teachest not a leaf can grow,
Till life from Thee within it flow;
That not a speck of dust can be,
O Fount of Being, save by Thee! ”

“ Her last poem, the Sabbath Sonnet, was dedicated to her brother on Sunday April 26th, and she died in Dublin on the 16th of May 1835 at the age of forty-one.
Mrs Hemans’s poetry is the production of a fine imaginative and enthusiastic temperament, but not of a commanding intellect or very complex or subtle nature. It is the outcome of a beautiful but singularly circumscribed life, a life spent in romantic seclusion, without much worldly experience, and warped and saddened by domestic unhappiness and physical suffering. An undue preponderance of the emotional is its prevailing characteristic. ”

“ Who or what Mrs Hemans is, we know not: we have been told that, like a poet of antiquity—
——‘Tristia vitæ
Solatur cantu,’——
If it be so, (and the most sensible hearts are not uncommonly nor unnaturally the most bitterly wounded,) she seems, from the tenor of her writings, to bear about her a higher and a surer balsam than the praises of men, or even the ‘sacred muse’ herself can impart. Still there is a pleasure, an innocent and an honest pleasure, even to a wounded spirit, in fame fairly earned; and such fame as may wait upon our decision, we freely and conscientiously bestow. ”

“ Nothing can stand its test. The love which the spirit hath painted has too much of its native heaven for earth. In how many and exquisite shapes is this vain longing introduced on her page. Some slight incident gives the framework, but she casts her own colour upon the picture. In this consists the difference between painting and poetry: the painter reproduces others,—the poet reproduces himself. We would draw attention especially to one or two poems in which the sentiment is too true for Mrs. Hemans not to have been her own inspiration. ”

“ The bewilderment of the mother betrayed into guilt by overpowering affection, and the death of the beautiful enthusiast Ximena, are sketched in a style of excellence little inferior; and the peculiar powers of Mrs Hemans’s poetry, less dramatic than declamatory, have full scope in the spirit-stirring address of the latter to the fainting host of Valencia, as she lifts in her own ancient city the banner of the Cid, and recounts the sublime legend of his martial burial. Spain and its romances formed the darling theme of Mrs Hemans’s muse ”

“ We will not say that Mrs Hemans has filled the whole canvass as it might have been filled, but unquestionably her poem is beyond all comparison with any which we have seen on the subject; it is full of fine and pathetic passages, and it leads us up through all the dismal colourings of the foreground to that bright and consoling prospect which should close every Christian’s reflections on such a matter. An analysis of so short a poem is wholly unnecessary, and we have already transgressed our limits ”

“ But Mrs Hemans has chosen the better and the nobler cause, and, while she has left in the poem before us every trace of vigorous intellect of which the subject admitted, and has far transcended in energy of thought the prosing pioneers of unbelief, she has sustained throughout a tone of warm and confiding piety, and has thus proved that the humility of hope and of faith has in it none of the weakness with which it has been charged by the arrogance of impiety, but owns a divine and mysterious vigour residing under the very aspect of gentleness and devotion. ”