better but I hit upon an harmless deception by repeating my poems over a book as tho I was reading it this had the desird effect
they often praisd them and said if I coud write as good I shoud do I hugd my self over this deception and often repeated it and those which they praisd as superior to others I tryd to preserve in a hole in the wall but my mother found out the hurd2 and unconscously took them for kettle holders and fire lighters when ever she wanted paper not knowing that they were any thing farther then attempts at learning to write for they were writing upon shop paper of all colors and between the lines of old copy books and any paper I could get at for I was often wanting tho I saved almost every penny I had given me on sundays or holidays to buy it instead of sweet meats and fruit and I usd to feel a little mortified after I discoverd it but I dare not reveal the secret by owning to it and wishing her to desist for I feard if I did she woud have shown them to some one to judge of ther value which woud have put me to shame so I kept the secret dissapointment to myself and wrote on suffering her to destroy them as she pleasd but when I wrote any thing which I imagind better then others I preservd it in my pocket till the paper was chafd thro and destroyd by a diff[er]ent and full as vain presevation
2. Hoard. FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS 1793-1835
Born in Liverpool and brought up in Wales, Felicia Hemans published her first two volumes?Poems and England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism?when she was fifteen. She followed these four years later with The Domestic Affections and Other Poems (1812) and from 1816 on into the 1830s produced new books of poetry almost annually: short sentimental lyrics, tales and 'historic scenes,' translations, songs for
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music, sketches of women, hymns for children. She also published literary criticism in magazines and wrote three plays. Her work was widely read, anthologized, memorized, and set to music throughout the nineteenth century and was especially popular and influential in the United States, where the first of many collected editions of her poems appeared in 1825. When she died she was eulogized by many poets, including William Wordsworth, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett?a sign of the high regard in which she was held by her contemporaries.
A tablet erected by her brothers in the cathedral of St. Asaph, in north Wales, reads in part, 'In memory of Felicia Hemans, whose character is best pourtrayed in her writings.' But there are several characters in her poems, and some of them seem not entirely compatible with some of the others. She is frequently thought of as the poet (in the nineteenth century as 'the poetess') of domestic affections, at the center of a cult of domesticity in which the home is conceptualized as a haven apart from the stresses of the public world, to which only men are suited. Her poems have been viewed as celebrations of a feminine ethic founded on women's?especially mothers'?capacities for forbearance, piety, and long suffering. Among her most popular pieces in this vein, 'Evening Prayer, at a Girls' School' depicts the happy ignorance of schoolgirls whose enjoyment of life will end when they reach womanhood, and 'Indian Woman's Death-Song' is the lament of a Native American woman whose husband has abandoned her, sung as she plunges in her canoe over a cataract to suicide with an infant in her arms.
Many of Hemans's longer narratives, by contrast, recount the exploits of women warriors who, to avenge personal, family, or national injustice or insult, destroy enemies in a manner not conventionally associated with female behavior. In The Widow of Crescentius, Stephania stalks and poisons the German emperor Otho, the murderer of her husband; in 'The Wife of Asdrubal,' a mother publicly kills her own children and herself to show contempt for her husband, a betrayer of the Carthaginians whom he governed; the heroine of 'The Bride of the Greek Isle,' boarding the ship of the pirates who have killed her husband, annihilates them (and herself) in a conflagration rivaling the monumental explosion described in 'Casabianca.' Among the numerous themes of her work, patriotism and military action recur frequently; there may be a biographical basis for these motifs, given that her two oldest brothers distinguished themselves in the Peninsular War and her military husband (who deserted her and their five sons in 1818) had also served in Spain. But some of her most famous patriotic and military poems are now being viewed as critiques of the virtues and ideologies they had been thought by earlier readers to inculcate. 'The Homes of England,' for example, has been read as both asserting and undermining the idea that all homes are equal, ancestral estates and cottages alike; and in 'Casabianca,' the boy's automatic steadfastness has been interpreted as empty obedience rather than admirable loyalty.
Hemans was the highest paid writer in Blackwood's Magazine during her day. Her books sold more copies than those of any other contemporary poet except Byron and Walter Scott. She was a shrewd calculator of the literary marketplace and a genius in her negotiations with publishers (which she carried on entirely through the mails). Her self-abasing women of the domestic affections and her scimitar-wielding superwomen of the revenge narratives exist side by side throughout her works. These and other seeming dissonances clearly enhanced the strong appeal of her poems to a wide range of readers, men as well as women.
England's Dead
Son of the ocean isle! Where sleep your mighty dead?
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Show me what high and stately pile Is rear'd o'er Glory's bed.
Go, stranger! track the deep, Free, free the white sail spread! Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep, Where rest not England's dead.
On Egypt's burning plains, By the pyramid o'ersway'd, With fearful power the noonday reigns, And the palm trees yield no shade.1
But let the angry sun From heaven look fiercely red, Unfelt by those whose task is done!? There slumber England's dead.
The hurricane hath might Along the Indian shore, And far by Ganges' banks at night, Is heard the tiger's roar.
But let the sound roll on! It hath no tone of dread, For those that from their toils are gone;?? There slumber England's dead.
Loud rush the torrent floods The western wilds among, And free, in green Columbia's woods, The hunter's bow is strung.
But let the floods rush on! Let the arrow's flight be sped! Why should they reck whose task is done?? There slumber England's dead!
The mountain storms rise high In the snowy Pyrenees, And toss the pine boughs through the sky, Like rose leaves on the breeze.
