It is not our intention here to pause, over this sudden quenching of so lovely and brilliant a luminary, nor to attempt to dissipate a single mystery which hangs over it. Her amiable and excellent friend, Emma Roberts, has drawn, in the introduction to “The Zenana, and Minor Poems of L. E. L." published since her death, an admirable, and admirably just, character of her. Our present object is to take a review of her literary career—rapid, yet sufficiently full to point out some particulars in her writings, which we think too peculiar not to interest strongly her former readers.
The subject of L. E. L.'s first volume was love—a subject which we might have supposed, in one so young, would have been clothed in all the gay and radiant colours of hope and happiness; but, on the contrary, it was exhibited as the most fatal and melancholy of human passions. With the strange wayward delight of the young heart ere it has known actual sorrow, she seemed to riot and revel amid death and wo, laying prostrate hope, life, and affection. Of all the episodical tales introduced into the general design of the principal poem, not one but terminated fearfully or sorrowfully: the heroine herself was the fading victim of crossed and wasted affections. The shorter poems which filled up the volume, and which were, mostly, of extreme beauty, were still based on the wrecks and agonies of humanity.
It might be imagined that this morbid indulgence of so strong an appetite for grief, was but the first dipping of the playful foot in the sunny shallows of that flood of mortal experience, through which all have to pass, and but the dallying, yet desperate pleasure afforded by the mingled chill and glittering eddies of the waters which might hereafter swallow up the passer through, and that the first real pang of actual pain would scare her youthful fancy into the bosom of those hopes and fascinations with which the young mind is commonly only too much delighted to surround itself. But it is a singular fact, that, spite of her own really cheerful disposition, and spite of all the advice of her most influential friends, she persisted in this tone from the first to the last of her works, from that hour to the hour of her lamented death. Her poems, though laid in scenes and times capable of any course of events, and though filled to overflowing with the splendours and gauds and high-toned sentiments of chivalry, though enriched with all the colours and ornaments of a most fertile and sportive fancy, were still but the heralds and delineations of melancholy, misfortune, and death. Let any one turn to any, or all, of her poetical volumes, and say whether this be not so, with few, and, in most of them, no exceptions. The very words of her first heroine might have literally been uttered as her own.
"Sad were my shades; methinks they had
Almost a tone of prophecy—
I ever had, from earliest youth,
A feeling what my fate would be."The Improvisatrice, p. 3.
This is one singular peculiarity of the poetry of L. E. L.; and her poetry must be confessed to be peculiar. It is entirely her own. It had one prominent and fixed character, and that character belonged solely to itself. The rhythm, the feeling, the style and phraseology of, L. E. L.'s poetry, were such, that you could immediately recognize it, though the writer's name was not mentioned. Love was still the great theme, and misfortune the great doctrine. It was not the less remarkable, that she retained to the last the poetical tastes of her very earliest years. The themes of chivalry and romance, feudal pageants and Eastern splendour, delighted her imagination as much in the full growth as in the budding of her genius.
