artist the fascinating features of a chef-d'œuvre. It is, in truth, a study, the character of Hermione, of Sorrow majestic in mould and symmetry:-how different in the sanctity of her distress is this cruelly-divorced wife, to the clamorous widow Constance! Hermione longing for her father's presence in her tribulation," for pity, not revenge;" Constance, in boisterous impre

cation

E-Call the expression of that ardent Mother's heart vehement, not boisterous. Count it pragmatical if you will, but I interpose an objection to "clamour' also, as descriptive of the energy of an anguished mother's love—and it is from anguished love that the fervor, sometimes the fearful fervor, of Constance derives its prime impetus. Ah! that maternal instinct, which dwells in many mothers as a profound affection seldom seen in strife, is in Constance developed in the throe and paroxysm of quick passion; her heart is as it were a volcano,.whence, mingling with the anathemas of indignant wrong, her mother's love gushes like terrific torrents of lava, and you wonder that her bosom is not burned by its indwelling fire. O, but a mystery of mysteries is, in the abstract, a Mother's love! of many human feelings unfathomable,

Well affirms one who knew its

the most fathomless.

intensity,

"There is none

In all this cold and hollow world-no fount

Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within
A Mother's heart!"*

I protest that in all the copious chronicles which tell us of the heart's purest sensations and sympathies, I hear no low but thrilling tones of

"The still, sad music of Humanity,"

which move me more mightily than does this Beauty of History, told, I fancy, with greater pathos in the French tongue than in ours: its brief exordium likewise justifies recital:

"Quelle plume pourroit peindre toutes les scènes de douleur ou de joie qui se passent dans le sein d'une mère! Qui pourroit décrire ses tendres sollicitudes pour l'objet de sa tendresse; ses allarmes, ses agitations, lorsqu'elle est en danger de le perdre; son désespoir lorsqu'elle l'a perdu? La femme d'un noble Vénitien, ayant vu mourir son fils unique, s'abandonnoit aux plus cruelles douleurs: un réligieux tâchoit de la consoler.- Souvenez-vous,' lui disoit-il,

Mrs. Hemans.

'du patriarche Abraham, à qui Dieu commanda de plonger lui-même le poignard dans le sein de son fils, et qui obéit, sans murmurer. 'Ah! mon révérend père,' répondit-elle, Dieu n'auroit jamais commandé ce sacrifice à une mère!""

C.-Nor would any but a mother's heart have suggested the impossibility of God's requiring such a sacrifice. How many tender tales are told of maternal love, the most unquenchable and unselfish of the affections; and often how unrequited is it by the object of its solicitude-solicitude which, in its quality of long-sufferance, is of all human properties the nearest of kin to the divine attributes of pitying patience and freeness to forgive; to the marvellous tenacity of maternal above all other tenderness it belongs, to live on through despisal and rejection and long acquaintance with grief. Shakspeare, in Lear, has made the maddened king invoke a malediction upon Goneril, which, dire in its import, affords proof of the unbounded degree in which the Poet was conversant with the anatomy of the moral feelings, and with their respective vulnerability to the shafts of Calamity:

"Turn all her mother's pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!"

Of those who have most touchingly depicted the heaven-moulded lineaments of maternal love, conspicuous is the Poetess whose affirmation of a mother's heart being the sole earthly fount of deathless love you just now repeated. "Unused albeit to the melting mood,"* I remember well, that on first reading her lines entitled "Flowers and Music in a Room of Sickness,"

E." Build there, carpenter; the air is sweet!"+

C. moist symptoms of "my mother came into C.—moist mine eyes," and "made me play the woman." "It is impossible," remarked an eloquent preacher whom I recently heard, "it is impossible to possess without grief, if not without passion ;" and it does indeed appear inevitable to the abode of pure Love, if impetuous, that Sorrow also should have joint possession. No light or easy yoke was that of the Affections to this most passible poetess, with whose lay of love there ever mingled an "under-music of lament:" the tears of her love and sorrow" flow into one another like crystal rivers," which bear along an ark magnificent; from whence proceeds awhile the voice of repining, anon of resignation, and then of rapt anticipation. Her allusions to the land which "Sorrow * Othello, v. 2. + Troilus and Cressida, iii. 2. ‡ Hen. viii. iii. 2.

M

and Death may not enter," are, for the most part, glowing images of beatitude; and her spirit's communings with its Source, though differently reported, have much of the impressive and august grandeur of the Night Thoughts. You will remember Lilian, checking the hopeful Mother when she would cheer her child with the promise of again gladly "going forth with the day-spring:"

"Hope it not!

Dream it no more, my mother!-there are things
Known but to God and to the parting soul
Which feels his thrilling summons."

Over many of her paintings there is the mingled gorgeousness and sadness of an autumnal eve. There is a melancholy interest in the meditation of those

66

mantling shadows" that in their density sometimes shut out from her sight Faith's beckoning finger and Hope's radiant smile: true, in the eternal field of stars the brightest planet may be temporarily eclipsed; but a vision like hers, divinely fostered, could not long be darkened by the April-cloud of Life or the Wintercloud of Death; and as she advanced nearer to the Everduring Spring, it is the gladness of a triumph to know that

"hour by hour her soul's dissolving shroud, Melted to radiance like a silvery cloud."