Sir Robert Peel



Mrs. Hemans' last hours were cheered by the kindness of Sir Robert Peel; and the letter promising an appointment to her eldest son, was one of the latest that she received. This fact is my excuse for having deviated from my general rule of leaving contemporary portraits to speak for themselves. I frankly confess that I can never write till interested in my subjects. Now, a female writer cannot pretend to even an opinion on the political and public characters of the day. The above incident, on the contrary, belongs to the many who look back with admiration and gratitude to the gifted and the gone.

Dim through the curtains came the purple twilight slowly,
Deepening like death’s shadow around that silent room;
There lay a head, a radiant head, but lowly,
And the pale face like a statue shone out amid the gloom.
    Never again will those white and wasted fingers
Waken the music they were wont to wake of yore,
A music that in many a beating heart yet lingers,
The sweeter and the sadder that she will breathe no more.
    It is a lovely world that the minstrel leaves behind him,
It is a lovely world in which the minstrel lives,
Deep in its inmost life hath the soul of love inshrined him,
And passionate and general the pleasure which he gives.
    But dear-bought is the triumph, what dark fates are recorded
Of those who held sweet mastery o’er the pulses of the lute,
Mournfully and bitterly their toil has been rewarded,
For them the tree of knowledge puts forth its harshest fruit.
    Glorious and stately the ever-growing laurel,
Flinging back the summer sunshine, defying winter’s snow,
Yet its bright history has the darkly-pointed moral,
Deadly are the poisons that through its green leaves flow.
    And she, around whose couch the gentle daylight dying,
Seems like all nature’s loving, last farewell;
She with the world’s heart to her own soft one replying,
How much of song’s fever and sorrow could she tell.
    Yet upon her lip a languid smile is shining,
Tokens of far-off sympathy have soothed that hour of pain;
Its sympathy has warmed the pallid cheek reclining
On the weary pillow whence it will not rise again.
    It is the far-off friend, the unknown she is blessing,
The statesman who has paused upon toils' hurried way,
To learn the deepest charm that power has in possessing,
The power to scatter benefits and blessings round its sway.
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Submitted by Madeleine Quinn on February 27, 2020

Modified on March 05, 2023

2:03 min read
17

Quick analysis:

Scheme X ABABCDCDEFEFXGXGHIHIJKJKJXJXJLJL
Characters 2,353
Words 411
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 1, 32

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet. Born 14th August 1802 at 25 Hans Place, Chelsea, she lived through the most productive period of her life nearby, at No.22. A precocious child with a natural gift for poetry, she was driven by the financial needs of her family to become a professional writer and thus a target for malicious gossip (although her three children by William Jerdan were successfully hidden from the public). In 1838, she married George Maclean, governor of Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast, whence she travelled, only to die a few months later (15th October) of a fatal heart condition. Behind her post-Romantic style of sentimentality lie preoccupations with art, decay and loss that give her poetry its characteristic intensity and in this vein she attempted to reinterpret some of the great male texts from a woman’s perspective. Her originality rapidly led to her being one of the most read authors of her day and her influence, commencing with Tennyson in England and Poe in America, was long-lasting. However, Victorian attitudes led to her poetry being misrepresented and she became excluded from the canon of English literature, where she belongs. more…

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