The story of her life is the story of a mind, of a spirit, ever
seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth
and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing
them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather
the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry
was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak,
for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and
reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" with those around
her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she
literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the
War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts.
Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume.
Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and utterly
condemned by the writer's later judgment, they are, nevertheless,
highly interesting and characteristic, giving, as they do, the
keynote of much that afterwards unfolded itself in her life. One
cannot fail to be rather painfully impressed by the profound
melancholy pervading the book. The opening poem is "In Memoriam,"--
on the death of a school friend and companion; and the two following
poems also have death for theme. "On a Lock of my Mother's Hair" gives
us reflections on growing old. These are the four poems written at
the age of fourteen. There is not a wholly glad and joyous strain in
the volume, and we might smile at the recurrence of broken vows,
broken hearts, and broken lives in the experience of this maiden just
entered upon her teens, were it not that the innocent child herself
is in such deadly earnest. The two long narrative poems, "Bertha" and
"Elfrida," are tragic in the extreme. Both are dashed off apparently
at white heat: "Elfrida," over fifteen hundred lines of blank verse,
in two weeks; "Bertha," in three and a half. We have said that Emma