and temperament had been more buoyant; had not early bereavement and isolation from the active world cast her whole lyric mood into a permanent minor key. She had one of those delicate natures in which sorrow does not make itself strongly apparent, but sinks quietly and lastingly into the depths of their being. The death in their first youth of a loved sister, and then of a brother, the early loss of her mother, and the seclusion from the world of her father—and all this, together with uncertain health and a singular indifference (nay, rather an aversion) to the pleasures and distractions of conventional society—stamped upon all her intellectual products a note of uniform pathos, which the unthinking might easily mistake for hopelessness.
This tone is very marked even in her first verses as a girl in her 'teens, and it is maintained in "Gemma," in " Hannibal," in the "Elegies," and in the other dramas and lyrics. It was, I should have thought, rather a characteristic of her imagination than of her disposition, which, if far from elastic, was not otherwise prone to melancholy. But I speak from imperfect know
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