A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings
Edited by Edward Harston, M.A., Vicar of Tamworth.

London: Longman and Co.

A pleasing little collection of poems.  Much of the volume is mere rhyme, but it contains likewise some genuine poetry.  The author has fancy, and an ardent love for the beautiful in nature.  An antique simplicity of diction, however, too frequently degenerates into a familiarity of expression ill-suited to the language of beauty.  'The Golden Spurs' is a pleasing, and really poetical version of a fine old Saxon tradition connected with the death of Edmund, King of East Anglia.  'Margaret of Xebec' is a plaintive romance of the sea, written with elegance and feeling.  Several of the Scripture poems are indicative of superior merit.

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THE ATHENÆUM
FOR THE YEAR 1850.
(No. 1169, March 23)

. . . . A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings, edited by Edward Harston, M.A., Vicar of Tamworth.—In this Chronicle, we find confidence in an excess.  Some of the sweetest and most sacred affections of the home-circle, those murmurings over the cradle, those tears beside the grave, those momentary fantasies which to indifferent spectators must seem merely so much foolishness—have been committed to print with a trusting simplicity which sometimes looks like affectation or callousness, when, in truth, it is neither the one nor the other.  We do not recollect to have seen the subject of personality in poetry treated, according to any code of united tenderness and justice.  So far from this, the world has adopted favourites, made exceptions, "blessed and banned" as its caprice dictated;—too cruelly anatomized A.'s cry of misery,—too fulsomely accredited B.'s marketable raptures over the pap-boat of "our youngest" or "my dear daughter's doll."  But the Vicar of Tamworth must not be kept waiting while we "charge" a jury of tender-hearted but manly citizens, recalling inconsistencies of former tribunals,—in order that some verdict may be given whereby the law for future cases may be laid down.  In the verses which Mr. Harston has "edited" there are too much music and fancy to admit of our hesitating.  Mrs. Browning seems to have been here the model elect of more than one poem, in choice of subject and form of metre, &c,— though the writer does not command that quaint and fantasy-embossed phraseology, which his original has derived from her commerce with the antique poets.  From the first poem in Mr. Harston's book, 'The Tradition of the Golden Spurs,' we will gather two strophes of the song of a river, to show with how tuneable a lyrist we have to deal.—
 

In 'Margaret by the Mereside' we are detained by a picture, winning from its truth, delicacy and geniality.—
 

'Mimie's Grass-nest,' in its title and in its frame-work, is referable to a model,—yet it contains passages to prove that the poet need copy from none.  A few verses from one of the legends told to humour the fancy of a little girl have an old-world colour and romance, which recall to us a favourite modern picture—Lessing's 'Knight beside the Fountain,'—in the Frankfort Gallery.—
 

This snatch of romance will tempt more than one hand to turn to the page at which we have stopped,—to see what comes next.  A short collection of scriptural verses follows this legend,—and lastly come the family poems, to which allusion has been made.

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To Miss Hollway (of Spilsby) my father wrote about her cousin Miss Jean Ingelow's poems, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings.

        MY DEAR MISS HOLLWAY,

Many thanks for your very kind note.  I have only just returned to town, and found the Rhyming Chronicle.  Your cousin must be worth knowing: there are some very charming things in her book, at least it seems so to me, tho' I do not pique myself on being much of a critic at first sight, and I have really only skimmed a few pages.  Yet I think I may venture to pronounce that she need not be ashamed of publishing them.  Certain things I saw which I count abominations, tho' I myself in younger days have been guilty of the same, and so was Keats.  I would sooner lose a pretty thought than enshrine it in such rhymes as '"Eudora" "before her," "vista" "Sister."  She will get to hate them herself as she grows older, and it would be a pity that she should let her book go forth with those cockneyisms.  If the book were not so good I should not care for these specs, but the critics will pounce upon them, and excite prejudice.  I declare I should like to know her.

    I have such a heap of correspondence to answer that I must bid you good-bye.  What the German lady says is very gratifying.  I shall perhaps see you again in the autumn.  My best remembrances to each and all of your circle.

Ever yours truly, A. TENNYSON.

    P.S. Strange! that I did not see it.  I turned to the title-page, and find that the book is published.  I fancied it had only been printed.  Forgive my hurry!  Well, your cousin will amend, perhaps, the errors I have mentioned, in her next edition.

From Alfred Lord Tennyson: a memoire by his son (Hallam Tennyson) Vol I.

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Allerton and Dreux; or, the War of Opinion.
By the Author of a "Rhyming Chronicle."

Two Vols. London: Wertheira and Macintosh.

The "War of Opinion" ran very high in the town of Westport, where Allerton and Dreux, two clergymen—the one of High Church and the other of Low Church tendency—disputed the palm of superiority.  After a pamphlet war of some bitterness on either side, the two clergymen, though still maintaining their antagonistic opinions, become the warmest of friends.  This intimacy is, however, broken off in consequence of the refusal of Dreux to give his sister in marriage to Allerton on account of his unorthodox principles.  They are at length reconciled, Allerton renouncing his errors, and both are united to the objects of their affection.  Such are the main features of this work, though the story is enlivened by the introduction of several characters of a lighter cast.  Notwithstanding this, the work is essentially religious, with a spirit of earnest piety and serious feeling pervading throughout.  The characters are all well-imagined and clearly defined—those of Allerton and Dreux being especially well-drawn, while, that of Marion is replete with all the deep feeling and warm tenderness that mark the true woman.  It is written in an elegant yet unaffected style, and at times with a geniality and quaintness of humour that are highly amusing.  Certain members of the religious community at Westport are thus happily hit off:―

"These (ladies) were among the first to declare themselves 'greatly edified with dear Mr. Allerton's excellent discourses,' in proof of which edification they always abstained from giving tea-parties on Fridays—took care to attend service on every Saint's day—talked about the Anglican branch of the holy Catholic Church—wore slight mourning during Lent—spoke of the Reformation with a shake of the head—talked with rapture of the ancient custom of confession, and hoped that 'privilege would soon be restored to us.'

"These ladies caricatured all Mr. Allerton's opinions, and caused him infinite vexation.  They were a set of retainers whom he would fain have been rid of.  They had a book-club of their own—most of the books had decorated margins; and, to hear some of them talk, one might have been led to suppose that they conceived the distinction between them and their late friends, the evangelical party, to lie chiefly in some such trivial peculiarities as dress, form, and fashion.  They had never troubled themselves much with the doctrines of either party: consequently, when they apparently came over to Mr. Allerton's side, they had no better way of deciding to 'which set' a clergyman belonged than by observing whether he preached in his black gown; and of certain people they would affirm that it was impossible they could be High Church, because they had no fish on a Friday."

    The author seems to be well-versed in the various points in dispute between the parties above referred to, and manifests considerable tact in the discussions between the two clergymen upon their favourite dogmas.  It is clear, from the general tenor of the work, to which party the author inclines; but he, nevertheless, places his opponents on such equal ground that we cannot accuse him of partiality in advocating the one cause to the disadvantage of the other.

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Poems.
Jean Ingelow, Longman & Co.

by

Gerald Massey.

THERE is a Strong tendency in human nature to set the bud above the rose full-blown.  We all feel it, and most of us give way to it.  The promise folded in the bud makes such a childlike appeal; it stirs us more than the full, unfolded glory of the flower.  There is a glow and grace of novelty, a tenderness of dawn, an opening into the infinite, which make all that is known seem old and stale; all that is measured seem small and narrow by comparison.  Therefore, we are guarded, and desire not to exaggerate what we have found in the little book published under the title of 'Poems, by Jean Ingelow.'  But the new name undoubtedly belongs to a new poet, and this new volume will make the eyes of all lovers of poetry dance with a gladder light than if they had come upon a treasure-trove of gold.

    Oftentimes has the "Lo here!" the "Lo there!" been raised; prophetic eyes have been set rolling in a frenzy that was not fine, and the new dawn of poetry has been announced in the East, when it was only a false and fading flush reflected from some great sunset sinking in the West. Yet here, we think, is the unmistakeable touch and breath of freshness: the clear early carol and dewy light.  Here is the presence of Genius which cannot easily be defined, but which makes itself surely felt in a glow of delight such as makes the old world young again.  Here is the power to fill common earthly facts with heavenly fire; a power to gladden wisely and to sadden nobly; to shake the heart, and bring that mist of tears into the eyes through which the spirit may catch its loftiest light.

    The new singer comes quietly enough. —We are not carried away by the loudness of the music, nor dazzled by a glare of colour.  There is no mistaking of the vague for the vast,—the monstrous for the magnificent;— no heaping of the diamond-dust to try and make it balance the diamond.  We see no hectic flush, nor strain and collapse of spasm.  All is healthy sound and sweet.  Indeed, some of the poetry has the strength of man's heart, the sweetness of woman's mouth.  The writer is not imitative.  She has produced a volume not Tennysonian.  Of course she has read her contemporaries but has not been swayed this way and that by their influences.  She keeps her own personality, has her own style, and by the fullness of her own possession prevents other voices raising their echoes within her, which, as we all know, occurs most where tenements are most empty.

    The first line arrested our attention:—

An empty sky, a world of heather.

—A perfect picture in a single line.  Many a painter has tried hard to put that into a frame and failed.  The poem is called "Divided," and the old image whereby life is likened to a river was never used with more freshness, seldom touched with so new a beauty.  Two lovers walk beside the stream, hand-in-hand, and Nature smiles, the birds warble and the bonny beck sings; it is yet a mere babe in the arms of its two banks:—

    This, we think, is very happily done.  There is much pathetic poetry in the book, but no trait whatever of whining sentimentality.  Indeed, if the book had been dropped on our table in answer to what we were asking for, the other day, in the Athenæum,—a little more of the blithe heart in our singers, a little more cheeriness in our poetry,—it could not have been more appropriate.  Here is a specimen of the writer's lighter mood, from some poems called 'Songs of Seven.'  This represents a child aged "seven times one," and her feeling of exultation:

    That is charming in its naturalness.  The reader will notice how much child character is evolved in a few lines!   This strikes us as, perhaps, the most remarkable thing in these new poems, the amount of personal character dramatically rendered.  We have had plenty of fine descriptive poetry; lots of splendid images heaped about a subject; but seldom do we meet with real, living, human brings who live their life and unfold their character while telling their story.  Here, however, it is so, and in a great range of variety.  Hence it would be impossible to do justice to the poetry by a brief extract here and there, as may be done with some books.  You may pick the spangles from the coat of Harlequin Fancy, and they will shine as jewels of richness in the new setting; but not so when the genuine vesture of Imagination is worn by real shapes of humanity.  Our quotations cannot fairly and fully illustrate our observations; we must appeal to the book itself.  Three or four of these poems are perfect as an Idyll by Tennyson, but we cannot bring away a piece of the picture.  We can only refer to them, and take our samples elsewhere.  But, let the reader turn to a poem called 'Supper at the Mill,' where, in the briefest way, we get a glimpse into three or four characters, sufficient to unfold the kind of natures and the lives they live.  The 'Reaping' is admirable from the youngster who wants a "little yellow duck to take to bed" up to the comfortable granny who looks at most, things, through her spectacles, from the farm-wife point of view.  The ballad of 'Lettice-White,' in this poem, is exquisite.  The writer is not afraid of commonplace if it belongs to her picture.  She is rightly realistic; having the mind that expands in circles, not in straight lines; she includes the less with the greater, embraces her subject all round.  She is not afraid of the churn, the wash-tub and ironing-board.  This reminds us, too, of the cheerful, mellow pastoralism of some of the poetry which breathes of soundest health and sunburnt beauty, simple life and country cheer; a nature, so to say, with much milk in it; a mellowness as of buttercups and fresh butter; the red gold of harvest-sheaves, and the rich light of harvest moons.  We cannot condense this into a quotation, but there is something of it in a poem entitled 'Looking over a Gate at a Pool in a Field':—

    Many will appreciate the grace of ease and charm of quiet belonging to poetry like this, after all the grand pyrotechnic displays we have had of late years.  This does not leave us smitten breathless with surprise, but satisfied, and breathing a clearer, ampler ether.  We also feel that here the victory is won without the writer crowding all her forces into the field, which gives a present pleasure and a future hope.

    In a different style is 'The Wedding Song,'—full of vigour, and timed to the genuine lyrical leap of the soul into song.  Nothing better was written about the bridal.  It has a smack of heartiness quite akin to that kiss which echoed through all the land, from Gravesend to John o' Groats:—

    The High Tide on the coast of Lincolnshire in 1571 is the subject of a poem full of power and tenderness.  The story is related by an old mother, whose son's wife and babes were drowned.  It is done with such a sweet, Quakerly precision of manner, and such subtle touches of unconscious self-portraiture, that the old lady lives before us; and her repeated words,—

are something to brood over.  But the power of the book culminates in a poem called 'Honours'—notable for its self-questioning reach of thought, its probing, of a wounded spirit, its striking out straight towards the Cross of Christ for the balm of healing; and in the dramatic poem entitled 'Brothers, and a Sermon.'  In the latter, two brothers, the elder of whom has just come into possession of his large heirdom, lie out on the reef of rocks, watching the "syle" come in, the star-fish creep, the mackerel shoot, the snow-white gulls sitting lovingly in social rings, twittering as they feed.  The elder brother grumbles at his hard lot, in being born to riches and robbed of his birthright—work.  The younger rails at him for his ingratitude.  To them comes an old fisherman, with his unfathomable simplicity of face.  He tells them how the Grace of Sunderland, was wrecked just below:—

    Thus introduced to the parson, and hearing the bells chiming for church, the brothers ask if the people attend service on week-evenings.

So to the church the brothers go, and hear such a sermon as is seldom preached.  The text is, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock"; and never has it been more pathetically enforced than by this grey-headed speaker, with his grand gruff voice, within hearing of the sound of that sea which keeps knocking for over at its cliffs for poor fishermen's and sailors' lives.  We quote one episode:—

What we have quoted will show that here is another living poet; one in whom all men and women, rich and poor, have an interest.  Her range is larger than common; she can command the smile of humour and the tear of pathos.  We note with pleasure the more outward-looking spirit and richer objectivity of her poetry.  She has an earnestness of purpose and attention to business which are not to be turned aside for the usual lures of youthful fancy.  Her genuine insight goes right home in the many directions in which it turns.  She touches nature at many points; she writes with delightful ease.  And after all the commendation, the critic has no need to offer up that prayer of the old Scotch clergyman for his young friend, who was not particularly modest and whose better qualities he had been praising, with this addendum,—"But, O Lord, please tak a brog and prod him weel and let the wind out of him!"

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THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Volume 98, Issue 203, April 1864

JEAN INGELOW’ S POEMS.

Poems.  By JEAN INGELOW.  Boston: Roberts Brothers.  1863, pp. 256.

“JEAN INGELOW” has such a very odd look that one feels inclined, at first, to believe it a pseudonyme.  It sounds very much like one of those names which a young author might choose for his heroine after the fashion that came in with “Jane Eyre,” plain but not vulgar, musical in an unpretending way, and attractive by a spice of oddity to ears somewhat palled by the high-sounding titles that were once the mode.  A doubt about the name might lead us to suspect that the sex also was a device.  If these poems are written by a woman, they are remarkable for a certain firmness of thought and style; if by a man, for sweetness and delicacy of sentiment.  This is already saying a great deal in their praise.  Assuming them to be the first productions of a young woman, they are full of promise, for they have a simplicity that is very uncommon in female verse-writing.  It is rather singular that women, who write letters with so much ease and grace as to have almost a monopoly of writing them well, are apt to seek originality in poetry in quaintness of phrase and overstraining of sentiment.  They seem to mistake vehemence for force, and become harsh in endeavoring to escape the control of that refinement of organization which gives to their intellect its most charming quality.  Mrs. Browning, in some of her later poems, was as rugged and obscure as the elder Edda, and Miss Rossetti seems to us in danger of throwing away a really fine imagination by choosing to be whimsical when she might be original.  There is no falser axiom than that which denies sex to mind.

    The poems of Miss Ingelow, like those of all young writers, show traces of the influence of the prevailing school.  There are tricks of verse and turns of phrase which she has caught of Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, and there is too much of that landscape-painting which applies the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism to poetry, where they are out of place, and gives all the particulars that can be found by an eye at leisure instead of the few essential features into which a scene is generalized by a mind under strong emotion.  Miss Ingelow, as young poets are wont, strives to say all that can be said, rather than to leave out all but what must be said.  But making all the allowances which an honest criticism should, there is quite enough in her volume to give her a place among the better poets of the day.  There is a genuine originality in her choice of subjects and her conception of situations and motives.  She has a true eye for what is lovely and touching, both in the outward world and the inward one of the emotions, and a fine instinct of the way in which each reproduces itself in the other, giving or taking, as the case may be, the hue of its own sentiment.  Some of her lyrics have the highest charm of feeling and measure; fresh and full of unexpected turns, they have the freedom and simplicity, the delightful nonchalance, of nursery rhymes, but such as are sung only by the Muse over the cradles of her favorites.  They have that exhilarating want of purpose, that singing for mere singing’s sake, that seemed to be lost since the day of the Old Dramatists.  Miss Ingelow raises high expectations, which we have no doubt her maturer powers will fully justify.

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THE CONTINENTAL MONTHLY
VOL V.

JANUARY—JUNE, 1864.

ADELAIDE A. PROCTER AND JEAN INGELOW.

EXTREMES ever meet, and our age, which is pre-eminently occupied with physical science and material comfort and aggrandizement, is also eminently productive in good poetry.  There should be no antithesis between the words physical science and poetry.  The secrets of the Universe, the ways of God’s working, are surely the highest poetry; but the greater number of scientists have willed a divorce between the material and the spiritual, and decry that very imaginative faculty which, in the case of Kepler, bore such wonderful fruits for science.  Facts are very well, and induction is also well but science requires the aid of the creative and divining imagination to order the details and draw thence the broader and higher generalizations.  Let us hope that the good common sense of the incoming half-century will annul the divorce, and again unite on a solid basis spheres that should never have been so far sundered.

    Meantime, we cannot but remark the number of good poems meeting us on every hand, not only from writers known to fame, but also from the living tombs of obscure country newspapers.  We know it is the fashion to deride such productions, and sneer at the ‘would-be poets.’  Let critics speak the truth fearlessly, but let them never prefer the glitter of a self-glorifying search for faults to the more amiable but less piquant occupation of discovering solid thought, earnest feeling, and poetic fancy.  It is well to discourage insipidity, impudent pretension, and every species of affectation; but critics are, like authors, fallible, and not unfrequently present glaring examples of the very faults they condemn.  In any case where the knife is needed, let it be used firmly but gently, that, while the patient bleeds, he may feel the wound has been inflicted by no unloving, cynical hand, but was really intended for his ultimate good.  Let the instrument be finely tempered, and neither coarse nor rough.  We can all recall a few cases where a rude treatment has effected a cure, but only by draining the life blood of the victim, or by turning every better human feeling into bitterness and corroding gall.  Words of blame intended to fall upon the hearts of the young, or of the old, should always be spoken kindly, for we can never know how deeply they may penetrate, what tender schemes for widowed mother, aspiring brother, portionless sister, or starving wife and children they may shatter.  The public is a pretty keen judge, and will in most cases drop works devoid of the immortal elements of genius.  The critic may point the way, but he need add no unnecessary stab to a downfall sure and bitter.

    This digression, however, has no bearing upon the honored names heading this table, as both now have become ‘household words' in our midst.  Both are acknowledged as real poets, but how different are they in style, and mode of thought!  Jean Ingelow, as the more brilliant, is the more general favorite, Adelaide Procter having as yet scarcely received her due meed of praise.  Miss Ingelow exhibits an exuberant fancy, a luxurious wealth of diction, and a generally fine poetic sense of form; her thoughts are sound, and their dress new and glittering; but the volume we have read is one to please the fancy and gratify the intellect rather than touch the heart.  The style is occasionally obscure and the thought difficult to follow.  Of course one can always find a meaning, but one is not always sure of interpreting according to the author’s intentions.  This quality, found largely in the school of Robert Browning, is one to be guarded against.  Mrs. Browning sometimes deals in such involutions, but her style is so evidently an essential part of herself, that we rarely think of affectation in connection with it.  It is pleasanter to dream our own dreams, than to follow any author into a tangled maze, whence we, and not he, must furnish the clew for egress.

    The ‘Songs of Seven’ and ‘The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire’ are truly fine poems, to us the most complete and sustained in the entire collection.  In ‘Requlescat in Pace,’ we are carried so far away from the actualities of life that we scarcely care whether the lover be dead or living.  As in a fairy tale, we read for the sake of curiosity, admiring sundry touches here and there, but feeling nothing.  Miss Ingelow’s rhythm is good, and her language musical.

    The style of Adelaide Procter is singularly lucid and direct; she has but little command of poetic ornament, and we rarely think of her choice of words.  Pathos, and a close, keen representation of human experience, are her distinguishing characteristics.  She is a poet to read when the soul is wrung, and longs for the solace of communion with a noble, tender, sympathetic human heart.  The very absence of ornament brings the thoughts and feelings nearer to our needs.  Her poems are evidently pictures of real human souls, and not poetic imaginings of what human beings might feel under such and such circumstances.  There are many of Miss Procter’s tales and shorter poems which bring tears to the eyes of all who have really lived and sorrowed, and the more we read them, the more do they come home to us.  We feel as if we could take their author into our heart of hearts, and make all the world love her as do we.  With her, brilliancy of imagery and description are replaced by a sententiousness and concentration of expression that suddenly strike home some truth perhaps well known, but little dwelt on.  For instance, in ‘A Legend of Provence' we find:

Again, in ‘The Present:’

    ‘Links with Heaven‘ is a continued series of tender, original thoughts, expressed in the same terse and striking, but simple manner. ‘Homeless,’ ‘Treasures,’ ‘Incompleteness,’ ‘Light and Shade,’ are, among the smaller poems, fine specimens of her distinguishing merits; while of the longer, ‘Three Evenings in a Life,’ ‘Philip and Mildred,’ and ‘Homeward Bound’ cannot fail to charm all who love to read a real pate from the experience of humanity.

    Both Jean Ingelow and Adelaide Procter are thoroughly penetrated by profound religious convictions, the faith and charity of the latter being especially vivid and pervading.  The one has a preponderance of the beautiful gift of a rich fancy, while to the other was given in greater degree the power of the penetrative and sympathetic imagination.  The one, as we read, recalls to us a glittering heap of precious, shining jewels; the other, the first cluster of spring violets, wreaths of virginal lilies and midsummer roses, growths of cypress sound to the core, rosemary, sage, and all healing herbs, branches of scarlet maple leaves, and lovely wayside gentians, adorned by the hand of the Great Artist, and blue as heaven itself.

    But a little while ago, the Angel, Death, ‘who comes in love and pity, and, to save our treasures claims them all,’ [ED.—Our Dead, final stanza] bore away her pure soul along the ‘misty pathway’ to everlasting peace and joy.

L. D. P.

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LITTELL’S LIVING AGE.

VOL. XCIV.
JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER,
1867.


JEAN INGELOW, THE POETESS.

“WILL you come and call on Jean Ingelow?” said my hostess, one fine day.  Of course I would.  So away we went along a shady lane, with the old oaks of Holland Park on the one side and the ivy-crowned walls of Aubury House on the other; for, though a part of London, Notting Hill is rich in gardens, lawns, and parks, such as one sees only in England.  Our way led us by Kensington Palace, the residences of Addison, the Duke of Argyle, Macaulay, and, better than all the rest to me, the house of Thackeray.  A low, long brick house, covered with ivy to the chimney top; a sunny bit of lawn in front, trees and flowers all about, and, though no longer haunted by the genial presence of its former master, this unpretending place is to many eyes more attractive than any palace in the land.  I looked long and lovingly at it, feeling a strong desire to enter its hospitably open door, recalling with ever fresh delight the evening spent in listening to the lecture on Swift long ago in America, and experiencing again the heavy sense of loss which came to me with the tidings that the novelist whom I most loved and admired would never write again.  Leaving my tribute of affection and respect in a look, a smile, and a sigh, I gathered a leaf of ivy as a relic, and went on my way.  Coming at last to a quiet street, where all the houses were gay with window boxes full of flowers, we reached Miss Ingelow’s.  In the drawing-room we found the mother of the poetess, a truly beautiful old lady, in widow’s cap and gown, with the sweetest, serenest face I ever saw.  Two daughters sat with her, both older than I had fancied them to be, but both very attractive women.  Eliza looked as if she wrote the poetry, Jean the prose—the former wore curls, had a delicate face, fine eyes, and that indescribable something which suggests genius; the latter was plain, rather stout, hair touched with gray, shy, yet cordial manners, and a clear, straightforward glance, which I liked so much that I forgave her on the spot for writing these dull stories.  Gerald Massey was with them, a dapper little man, with a large, tall head, and very un-English manner.  Being oppressed with “the mountainous me,” he rather bored the company with “my poems, my plans, and my publishers,” till Miss Eliza politely devoted herself to him, leaving my friend to chat with the lovely old lady, and myself with Jean.  Both being bashful, and both labouring under the delusion that it was proper to allude to each other’s works, we tried to exchange a few compliments, blushed, hesitated, laughed, and wisely took refuge in a safer subject.  Jean had been abroad, so we pleasantly compared notes, and I enjoyed the sound of a peculiarly musical voice, in which I seemed to hear the breezy rhythm of some of her charming songs.  The ice which surrounds every Englishman and woman was beginning to melt, when Massey disturbed me to ask what was thought of his books in America.  As I really had not the remotest idea, I said so; whereat he looked blank, and fell upon Longfellow, who seems to be the only one of our poets whom the English know or care about.  The conversation became general, and soon after it was necessary to leave, lest the safety of the nation should be endangered by overstepping the fixed limits of a morning call.  Later I heard that Miss Ingelow was extremely conservative, and was very indignant when a petition for women's rights to vote was offered for her signature.  A rampant Radical told me this, and shook her handsome head pathetically over Jean's narrowness; but when I heard that once a week several poor souls dined comfortably in the pleasant home of the poetess, I forgave her conservatism, and regretted that an unconquerable aversion to dinner parties made me decline her invitation.—M. L. Alcott in the "Queen."

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

VOLUME XX. Issue 119.
1867.

A Story of Doom, and other Poems.  By JEAN INGELOW.  Boston: Roberts Brothers.

PEOPLE who remember things written as long ago as five years have a certain stiffness in their tastes which disqualifies them for the enjoyment of much contemporaneous achievement; and it is fortunate for the poets that it is the young who make reputations.  Miss Ingelow’s first volume, indeed, had something in it that could please not only the inexperience of youth, for which nothing like it existed, but even the knowledge of those arrived at the interrogation-point in life, who felt that here there was a movement toward originality in much familiar mannerism and uncertain purpose.  If there was not a vast deal for enjoyment, there was a reason for hope.  It was plain that the author’s gift was not a great one, but it was also clear that she had a gift.  She was a little tedious and diffuse; she was often too long in reaching a point, and sometimes she never reached it at all.  But then she wrote “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” and the “Songs of Seven,” and “Divided,”—none of them perfect poems, yet all very good and fresh,—and showed a true feeling for nature, and some knowledge of humanity as women see it.  In this second volume, however, she abandons her maturer admirers to their fate, and seeks the favor of the young ladies and gentlemen who have begun to like verses since Mr. Tennyson’s latest poems were written, and the old balladists and modern poetical archaists ceased to be read.  In fact, it is amazing to see how this author, who had a talent of her own, has contentedly buried it, and gone to counterfeiting the talents of others.  The “Story of Doom” here given is an unusually dreary copy of the unrealism of Mr. Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King,” and makes the history of Noah more than ever improbable; while “Laurance,” mimicking all the well-known effects and smallest airs and movements of the laureate’s poems of rustic life, is scarcely to be read without laughter.  “Winstanley” presents an incident that, if told in simple contemporary English, would have made a thrilling ballad; but what with its quoth-he’s, brave skippers, good master mayors, ladies gay, and red suns, it is factitious, and of the library only,—it came from Percy’s “Reliques” and “The Ancient Mariner,” not from the poet’s heart.  It seems worthy of the sentimental purpose with which it was written; but we doubt if any child in the National School in Dorsetshire learned it by heart as his forefathers did the old ballads.

    In pleasant contrast with its affectations is the beautiful little song entitled “Apprenticed,” which the author tells us is in the old English manner, but which we find full of a young feeling and tenderness belonging to all time, expressed in diction quite of our own.  This, and that one of the Songs with Preludes entitled “Wedlock,” seem to us the best, if not the only, poems in the book.  Miss Ingelow’s forte is not in single lines and detachable passages, and her efforts are apt to be altogether successful or unsuccessful.  In the long rhyme called “Dreams that came True,” there is but one inspired line, and that is merely descriptive,—

“In eddying rings the silence seemed to flow”

round him that waked suddenly from an awful dream. There is an inglorious ease in the sarcasm, but we must express our regret that Miss Ingelow did not leave this story in the prose which she says first received it.

    We suppose we can scarcely call the reader’s attention to the fact that certain faults of Miss Ingelow’s first book are exaggerated in this.  The rush of half-draped figures, and the pushing and crowding of weak and unruly fancies, are too obviously unpleasant for comment.  Perhaps they are most unpleasant in the Song with a Prelude which opens with the bewildering statement that

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SCRIBNER'S MONTHLY
November, 1870.

. . . . Monitions of the Unseen, and Poems of Love and Childhood, the latest offering of Jean Ingelow to her admirers.  The work will excite, we think, a general feeling of disappointment, as indicating no advance upon her previous efforts in song.  There is a great deal of tenderness in these recollections of early life, but the sadness that pervades them becomes a monotone.  In the longer poem with which the book opens, the teaching is set forth in charming cadences and with befitting dignity of expression the lyrics, upon which more careful workmanship has been expended, have a finish that seems to have been purchased, in some instances, in a loss of strength, and there is an excess of response in them—of dreamful quiet, of folding of the hands to sleep, as if they had been inspired of poppy rather than of Hippocrene.  But if they suggest no elevation of her wonderful powers, they are such poems as no other woman in England than Jean Ingelow might have written, and we recognise in her here, as in her previous volumes, a poet always tender and true, whose writings are calculated to make us better and purer, to enlarge our sympathies and exalt our aims.

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HARPER'S
NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Vol. XLII., Dec.1870.

JEAN INGELOW’S last volume of poems receives its name, Monitions of the Unseen (Roberts Brothers), from the first and most considerable piece in the book.  We have read nothing from her pen which we like better.  It is a simple story of a faithful, overworked, disheartened curate taught to look up and out, and see that his work, which seems all useless, is not to be measured by its seen results, but by effects he can but imperfectly imagine, much less fully perceive; and the issue of the vision, in which some glimpses of the unseen world are vouchsafed to him, is the resolution,

It is the old, old story—old as the days of Abraham, of Joseph, of Moses, and of the prophets—of the contrast between the visible and the invisible, yet wrought out in a form that is fresh, if not absolutely new, and with a poetic expression which is not always rhythmical, is indeed often awkward and involved, and yet, withal, possesses beauties which perhaps shine the brighter for the blemishes to which they are so closely mated.  It is a poem which will bear not only re-reading, but much meditation; at least by all wearied, and sometimes discouraged, Christian workers.—It may be a question with some readers whether Jean Ingelow’s poems repay study. They certainly require it.

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THE DESERET NEWS
19 February, 1873.


Jean Ingelow.
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The following letter from Jean Ingelow to Mrs. Lucy Stone, of Boston will be read with interest:

"Dear Madame: I have been long in the habit of receiving from America your interesting paper, the Woman's Journal, and, as I do not know who is the kind and courteous donor, I hope I may convey my thanks through you, as one of the editors".

    "I am glad of the information I derive from the Journal, but I have not found time hitherto to give the whole subject of rights such an amount of study as to make it wise to utter my crude thoughts respecting them; other things appear to be given to me to do, and take them up to the exclusion of what lies beyond.

    "You have, I venture to think, more than one problem to work out in America, on which in a great degree, depends the welfare of women.  In one of these I take a keen interest, and I hope to see you settle it for yourselves and for us.  I want you to discover how domestic work is to be combined with high culture.

    So long as household work is thought degrading (and nowhere is this so much the case as in America), there can never be anything like universal education; there must always be some who can work all their lives because others will not at all.  It is to be one of the great things that you Americans, I believe, are raised up for, to teach this world how this is to be done; but the teachers can never be those who are poor; they must be those who are not obliged to work at all.

    "How to make clear starching and ironing graceful and pretty occupations (and such they were thought by our great-great-grand-mothers,) how to keep a house clean, and to assist, even in a kitchen, without the least sensed of being lowered, or the slightest personal deterioration, might surely be managed if women gave their minds to it—if more delicate machinery was invented for helping them, and if it could even be made the fashion for all women, young or old, to pride themselves on their domestic skill.

    "I hope, if you can, you will convey my thanks to the lady who sends me your paper and will believe that I take a deep interest in everything which so sincerely aims at your good.

"I am, dear madam, very truly yours,

"JEAN INGELOW."

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Vol. XXXI., 1873.

RECENT LITERATURE.

MISS INGELOW’S novel, Off the Skelligs, we are told, makes as great a stir as Jane Eyre did in its day, and is claimed to be the great work of fiction of the present time, as if Middlemarch were not, and Turgénieff’s novels were still buried in the original Russian.  There is, as we all know, a certain sort of praise which from its very warmth prepares the mind of the reader for a very moderate enjoyment of its object; but this new novel, we hoped, might well be good without deserving such loud-sounding admiration.  The story is told autobiographically by a young girl who begins the account of her life with her earliest recollections.  Passing over her infancy, we find her sailing in her uncle’s yacht with him and her brother Tom.  While they are cruising about the Irish coast they are fortunate enough to save some people from a burning ship; among them is one very grimy and scorched man whom Dorothea, the heroine, mistakes for a common sailor, while in reality he is of gentle blood, as she finds out when he attempts with his blistered hand to hold a Greek Testament.  His name is Brandon, and many pages further on we find Dorothea staying with his family and his step-family, Lou, Liz, and Valentine, who is sometimes called the “the oubit,” just as Mr. Brandon is known as “St. George,” over and above his own name, which is Giles.  Valentine is a rattle-pated hobble-dehoy, with the fearful loquacity sometimes seen in lads of his age, although, fortunately, it is generally held in subjection by their elders.  Dorothea has a certain admiration for Brandon, not unmingled with awe for his great age,— he is almost thirty; but Valentine studies Greek with her, amuses her by his nonsense, and finally asks her to marry him.  She seems to think that disposing of her life is as trifling a matter as the directing of an empty envelope, and assents.  In time, however, his wish to marry her grows cold, he disappoints her at the last moment, and so she gently marries Mr. Brandon instead, who has been in love with her all the time, but who, from high mindedness, has been keeping out of the way, in order to give Valentine a chance, and with this the story ends.  Few, we fancy, would claim that the merit of the novel lay in the construction.  The story drags fearfully; but it is in the alleged naturalness of talk and action that we are bidden to find pleasure.  Yet naturalness in itself is no more interesting than a photograph, quoad photograph, is entertaining to the eye.  There is a naturalness which concerns itself with the representation of agreeable or interesting scenes of human life and which is sufficient to please even the surliest reader.  Take, for instance, Miss Thackeray’s charming story, Elizabeth.  There we have a perfectly natural account of the hopefulness, the little joys, the heart-racking agonies of a very pleasing young girl told with unexcelled truth and simplicity.  The Initials,— again, is it not a model of natural drawing in its record of the sayings and doings of the gracious heroine, her half-vulgar sister, and the ever-blushing hero?  Neither of these novels treats of frenzies of passion, nor of improbable feelings and actions.  They merely describe very ordinary, every-day love-affairs; they are, so to speak, genre-pictures of love-making; but is there a girl living, unless perhaps those whose taste has been ruined by the strong waters of intenser novels, who does not sympathize with the well-told troubles of these heroines?  In these novels there is plenty of naturalness, but it is naturalness applied to a deserving subject, not displayed in the wearying gossip and badinage of an extremely ordinary set of people.  The paltriness of the subject of Off the Skelligs,—a girl and a boy, without an atom of love for one another, preparing to marry and to go to New Zealand together,—the absence of any passion in the characters, (not that they need be rolling their eyes about and biting their nether lips, but they should have some other emotion than the childish desire to ridicule one another,) the luke-warmness of all their feelings, seem to us to make a picture as unattractive as it is unnatural.  The story is spun out with reports of all their long talks, as if a painter who wanted to try to paint a picture of domestic life could do nothing better than paint a panorama representing all the actions of a family for a whole month.  He might give us an accurate copy of their life, but he would prove himself a poor artist.

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THE TIMES
Sep 30, 1875; pg. 4

"Fated to be Free" (3 vols, Tilney Brothers) is only the second novel which Jean Ingelow has given us, and her readers will be tempted to wish it had been prolonged, as was "Off the Skelligs," into four volumes, if only for the sake of larger space over which to spread a certain most tantalizing mystery.  The literary merits of this new book, from the pen of one of our sweetest singers, are far above the standard reached by the annual tellers of stories for the million.  Its style is fresh and bright, and sparkles with the oxygen drawn from a pure and bracing moral atmosphere belonging to a region considerably above the altitude to which the stray goose plume of lady novelists usually can bear them.  Miss Ingelow is a poet as well as as novelist—a rare but not impossible union, and the happy admixture of the two qualities makes the book one to be especially valued.  Although the story is interesting up to the point of sensation, the interest is almost lost sight of in the amusement and benefit to be derived.  "Benefit" is perhaps an unusual epithet to apply to a novel, but Miss Ingelow's readers will admit that it is by no means out of place here, for nearly every page has its clever aphorism, its epigrammatic truth made up into the smallest possible compass, and gilded until it sparkles like a joke.  Here is a specimen taken from the first chapter, in which we are at once given the clue to the inner natures of the principal characters in the story.  It occurs in the description of Laura Melcombe, one of those amiable, well-meaning fools with which the world abounds, and whose existence is a perpetual wonder and difficulty to people somewhat wiser than themselves:—

"She was of imagination all compact, but that is a very unlucky case where there is weak judgement, little of no keenness of observation, a treacherous memory, and a boundless longing for the good things of life.  Of all gifts, imagination, being the greatest, is least worth having, unless it is well backed by moral culture, or other intellectual qualities.  It is the crown of all thoughts and powers; but you cannot wear a crown becomingly if you have no head (worth remembering) to put it on."

    Laura is of that age only uncertain to herself.  She has long wished to find a mate, and was quite ready to stoop to conquer.  The account of her making love to the good-looking young plumber, and her curious shame at her own fancy, is admirably given, for Miss Ingelow understands the strange inconsistencies of the human heart, its paradoxical reasonings, and unexpected conclusions.  Miss Laura is, however, one of the subsidiary personages of the book, and has only been alluded to as an example how perfectly conceived and carefully carried out even such a subordinate character as hers can be by a passed master (or mistress) in the Joyeuse science.  The book opens with a powerful description of an old manor-house and family, over whose head hangs the mysterious blight of some unknown misfortune, crime or disgrace.  No one knows what it is that wraps the agèd Madame Melcombe in its grey shade of silence and gloom.  She is profuse in her charities, of unblemished reputation, and strict in the observance of her religions duties.  Yet trouble and sorrow attend her steps, and in the extreme of her old age she is left almost alone, her fine family of boys having deserted her or come to an untimely end.  The picture of the ruined garden, the gates of which had been fastened up half a century before, and over whose wilderness of tangled bloom the poor old lady keeps incessant watch and ward, is excellent, and the reader can see, as he reads, the figure of the lonely little boy, Madame Melcombe's great grandson, as he watches a ball or a top which he has flung into the garden and so lost for ever.  In no part of the story is Miss Ingelow more at home or happier than in her descriptions of child nature and life.  This peeps out in many of her best-known poems, and in the present book it comes well to the front over and over again.  The children are real children, too, and would be absolutely insupportable even to think of if they were not provided with a large loft, called ''Parliament," where they can romp to their heart's content, and which is invested with as many privileges as if it had been Alsatia.  The elements of the story are tragical its the extreme, but, the crime, or disgrace, or misfortune—whichever it may be, for the reader is never told in so many words—is not permitted to overshadow the landscape and cause the people to go heavily.  This is one of the ways in which Miss Ingelow shows her deep intuitive knowledge of the ways of human life and human folk.  The inner life may be convulsed by some strange and unforeseen occurrence, but still the outer routine goes on, meals are served, children play—all as though nothing had stirred the surface.  If a fault is to be found with the construction of the story, it is that the reader fails to see why the hapless Dorothea should be so bandied about from brother to brother.  It is incredible that a young man like Valentine should desert his promised bride at the very altar, that she should immediately console herself with his elder brother, and that before they returned from their honeymoon Valentine should veer round again and make his moan that he always loved Dorothea, and considers himself badly used, inasmuch as she consoled herself so quickly.  It may be ever so true to life, but it is unpleasing truth, and shows that neither Dorothea nor Valentine had ever laid to heart the old advice about being off with the old love before they were on with the new.  On the other hand, nothing can be more original, more artful, or, it must be added, more provoking than the way in which nothing is to told decisively.  The reader is left, just as he would be in real life, to draw his own conclusion from the narration of certain events.  The brothers Daniel and Augustus Melcombe are a delightful pair of old men.  The are agèd men when we first catch sight of their stately white heads, as they stand before their old mother, the weak nonagenarian, who says, "You see my time may be getting short now."  Yet these grand old heads have been secretly bowed for half a century and more beneath the knowledge of some act which has blighted the rooftree under which it occurred.

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HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.
VOLUME LX., DECEMBER, 1879, TO MAY, 1880.

Sarah de Berenger. A Novel.

12mo, pp. 415. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

By JEAN INGELOW.

Nothing could be simpler or more realistic than the treatment of the materials out of which Jean Ingelow has constructed the new novel which she has named, after one of its most amusing secondary characters, ´Sarah de Berenger.´  It is the story of the heroic endurance and repressed love of a mother for her two young and delicately nurtured daughters, whose father, after having been cruel and false to their mother, had deserted them in their infancy, had been convicted as a felon, and, as subsequent events reveal, found been guilty of a more heinous crime than the one he was punished for.  In the daily and hourly apprehension of his release from prison, and of his return to claim a competency which she had inherited, and which she is devoting to her children’s nurture and education, and in making provision for them in case she should die, and moved by the still greater dread that the man she had learned to loathe and fear will separate them from her, and drag them down to his atmosphere of shame and crime, the mother takes an assumed name and bears an assumed relation to the children, being known to them and to the world only as their nurse.  The necessity for the repression of her maternal instincts and endearments, and the utter renunciation of the filial love that she yearns for, which this relation to her children involves, and the perplexities, trials, involvements, and anguish to which time mother is subjected from constantly occurring accidents and incidents which threaten to reveal the real facts, with all their shameful consequences to her darlings, are worked up into a story of sustained pathos and tenderness, in which we see how a resolute and loving woman can school herself to give up all things, even her own children, for their sakes, and could die holding her secret fast, not only unloved by them as their mother, but not known to them as such.

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
VOLUME XLV., BOSTON, 1880.

Sarah de Berenger. A novel.

Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1879.

By JEAN INGELOW.

. . . . There are books, indeed, whose materials are excellent, which are made worthless and woful simply by the indolence of their writers; but there are a great many more in which the author naïvely relies on his own fancied fascinations, on the indirect revelation of a personality which is supremely self-interesting, to render attractive themes altogether too slight and trite.  Just now, to be sure, the roman intime is not specially in fashion, and it had better, perhaps, be resigned to the Latins who invented it.  But when a writer who has already won the affections of the public, and who has given abundant proof upon other occasions of some dramatic ability, is willing to lay self aside, and hunt the humble by-places of unrecorded fact for strange characters and fates perturbed and implicated by sinister and incalculable events, we have the second-best reason possible for expecting an engrossing result.

    And this is precisely what Miss Ingelow has done in her latest prose romance, ´Sarah de Berenger.’  Her first, Off the Skelligs, was a novel of conversation and character purely; the incidents, for the most part, simple and domestic, the sentiment mild.  In Fated to be Free, still working with the same commonplace materials, she sought to heighten their effect by introducing a mystery,—a family secret, which the author herself respected so profoundly that she could not quite make up her mind to disclose it even at the end, and so its importance to the story was never made perfectly clear.  In her third attempt, she has proceeded in a much more workman-like manner.  She has discovered, or devised, a situation at once extremely new and curious, and not absolutely improbable.  An English peasant woman, with an education somewhat above her rank in life, and a soul very much so, marries an exceedingly bad man, a lame cobbler, with a delicate, handsome face, who, after committing almost every crime in the decalogue, is convicted of burglary and sentenced to penal servitude for fourteen years.  The woman—Hannah Dill by name—has an infant girl born after the father’s conviction, and another not quite two years old, and is left, of course, in abject poverty.  But before she has regained her strength after her confinement, she falls heir to a little fortune from a far-away relative,—a thriving tradesman in a distant town.  It is enough to place herself and her children beyond the reach of want, and she resolves that, at the cost of any sacrifice to herself, she will so use this money as to place them, at least, beyond the reach of shame.  She therefore changes her own name and that of the children, taking a homely one herself, and adopting for the little girls, almost at random, the aristocratic De Berenger.  She then quits the region where her husband’s story was known, and appears at a quiet watering-place on a distant part of the coast in the character of the children’s nurse.  She dresses and treats them in all respects like the children of gentlefolks, who have been placed in her charge by parents in some foreign land,—presumably India; and her extremely respectable appearance and unremitting devotion to her little charges go far to justify the extraordinary confidence which seems to have been reposed in her.  As time goes on, everything favors the success of her self-abnegating stratagem.  She falls in with bonafide De Berengers, who are led by a singular succession of accidents to accept, and in some sort adopt, the little waifs as connections of their family.  The rich and eccentric spinster for whom the book (mistakenly, we think) is named having resolved, with a characteristic contempt of evidence, that these are the children of a certain favorite nephew of her own, a scapegrace who died under a cloud in India, proceeds to prefer them to all her authentic heirs-at-law, and in the end bequeaths them her wealth.  The plot is really so very skilfully and up to a certain point strongly made that, like an ingenious machine, it seems for a while to go of itself, and to evolve strange incidents and complications without the perceptible interference of the author’s hand.  The children, who have inherited the delicate personal beauty of their worthless father, grow up, in the refined atmosphere of the rural rectory which becomes their home, sweet-tempered, high-minded, and thorough-bred.  The mother, having first managed legally to transfer her little competence to her girls, takes service in the same house, feeds her eyes upon their ripening loveliness, her heart by humble cares for them, and never once betrays her consanguinity.  Just as they are blooming into early womanhood, the father is released from prison, having served out his full term.  The wife tries for a time to keep herself hidden, but is at last seen and recognized by her husband.  He is apparently a reformed man.  The woman for whom he once forsook his wife is dead.  He has heard, and fully believes, that his legitimate children are also dead, and his wife’s little legacy lost by an unfortunate investment; and she tacitly allows these impressions, but considers it a matter both of conscience and prudence to return to her husband,—quitting abruptly the happy place of service where she had her darlings constantly under her eye, and leaving there no clue to her whereabouts.  From this point the story moves faster, and constantly gains in power and pathos.  The tale of the cobbler’s conversion in prison, the strange explanation and agreement between husband and wife, the sad and stern reconcilement of the injured woman, the curious association in her simple soul of a mystical faith in the criminal’s “forgiveness” with an instinctive shrinking, which deepens into intense aversion, whenever he inclines to publish or parade his repentance,—all these are wonderfully well studied and poetically portrayed.  The pathos of the story, which becomes extreme at its close, is very finely reserved.  It is all in situation, as it should be,—never in phraseology.  The mother sees her daughters, whom she had lifted up by her own self-annihilation, only once again before she leaves them in the lot to which they were not born.  It is on the morning of the marriage of the elder and of her own death, and even then she is recognized only as the fond old servant, and her true story is never known.

    There are some artistic faults in Miss Ingelow’s romance.  Sarah de Berenger herself must be pronounced a failure.  She may very well have existed, or even have been selected from life, but she is not well “taken.”  There are plenty of absurd people in the world, and no end of inconsequent talk, but hers has not the ring of reality.  The right note is never quite reached.  Miss Ingelow seems to have reasoned that we have all known people queer and perverse enough to have assisted, out of their mere wrong-headedness, the unnatural consummation of her story; and so we have.  But queer characters are like extraordinary effects in nature,—it is extremely difficult to represent them artistically.  When a particularly quaint or glaring object is introduced the whole picture must be toned up to it, or it remains a helpless monstrosity.  Miss Austen may possibly not have known this, but she did it perfectly, in Mr. Collins, in Miss Bates, in all her pre-eminently delightful fools, whose effect she subdued by such fine gradations of folly in the minor characters.  The other De Berengers do not so subdue Sarah, and her crowning freak, whereby the poor mother is enabled to complete and confirm her self-sacrifice, appears like a preposterous invention.  The story is also marred by much fragmentary and futile discussion of the temperance question.  It is not proven that a novel with a purpose can be, under any circumstances, a first-rate novel, but it is quite certain that he who would present his theories in a dramatic form must have the one-sidedness of absolute conviction and be impelled by overmastering zeal.  Idle and impartial considerations are only so much rubbish impeding the movement of the play.  Just so the question of pauper emigration was dragged into Off the Skelligs, and dragged out again.  It had no vital connection with the tale, and no more had temperance with the tragedy of Hannah Dill.

    And still Sarah de Berenger is a marked book, more than ordinarily symmetrical and impressive.  Indirectly, moreover, and quite independently of the temperance tirades, it suggests thought—as the work of so thoughtful and philanthropic a spirit could hardly fail to do—on more than one doubtful problem of morals and sociology: whether deception is ever justified by beneficent results,—for of course the first and last word of any honorable man of affairs on such a performance as poor Hannah’s would be that it was both virtually impossible and unpardonably wrong; and again, is breeding really so much more than birth that the Dill children could possibly, even under circumstances happy as theirs became, have grown up into the dainty, tender, delicate-minded De Berengers?

Miss Ingelow’s answer to the latter query is radically democratic.

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THE OGDEN STANDARD EXAMINER
31 July, 1892.

A Popular English Poet.

Jean Ingelow, it may be said, is the most popular of the English poets.  She is a quiet, shy looking old lady of sixty-two [Ed.- seventy-two?] years of age, and inhabits a pretty house in London, where those who take the trouble to seek her out receive always a kind and cordial reception.  She has a very accurate mind and a horror of untidy or slipshod ways.  She works hard and finds her greatest relaxation in the study of botany.  Her kindness of heart has become proverbial, for three times a week she gives what she calls a copyright dinner to twelve poor persons just discharged from hospitals.  Although not a frequent visitor to fashionable drawing rooms, Miss Ingelow has an immense circle of friends.  She believes in hard work, and always says that perseverance is the better part of genius.  She is kind to many young authors, and keeps abreast of modern literature in all its branches.

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THE LIVING AGE.
VOL. CCXIV., 1897.

From The Academy.

JEAN INGELOW.

JEAN INGELOW (the Jean came from her Scottish mother, and the 'g' in the surname is a soft one) was born in 1820 at Boston, in Lincoinshire.  She has made music out of Boston bells; more uniformly than Tennyson does Lincolnshire and the East Coast appear and reappear in her poetry.  Her father was a banker, and afterwards moved to Ipswich.  Banking and Evangelicalism have conspicuously run together in certain well-known families; and they did in hers.  Almost Quaker-like some of her likings and aversions might be called.  She had no sympathy, for instance, with the warnote which nearly every modern poet has awakened.  Even Tennyson, for whom she had an intense admiration, had no message for her there; and the younger poets, who took Tommy Atkins for their hero, could never be hers.  In all her many poems not one line, not one word, will be found in justification, still less in praise, of war.  In “Kismet” the story of a boy’s longing for freedom and the sea is given; and somebody once suggested to her that she had helped perhaps to recruit the Navy.  This suggestion meant only horror for her, and she gave the verses a careful re-reading, intending, if she thought that interpretation a possible one, to cancel the offending stanza, or, if necessary, the whole poem.  She not only hated evil, she loved to do good.  Her charities to the poor were unceasing.

    Miss Ingelow’s first volume, “A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings,” appeared anonymously in 1850.  Then in 1863 came the “Poems by Jean Ingelow,” which never paused till fourteen editions had been sold, and which are selling, but less resolutely, to this day.  Her fame was made in a month.  She was set to music, she was recited, she was parodied by Calverley [ED.—Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884), poet and lawyer], and brought out in an illustrated édition de luxe.  From Boston, not indeed in Lincolnshire, but in New England, she had hundreds of letters and two newspaper notices to tell her that in America, even more quickly than in England, she had made her mark on contemporary sentiment.  James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes were her admirers.  Even Tennyson was generous in his encomiums.  Mr. Ruskin, whose praise has always been precious to women, was at her feet.  So that the critic and the casual reader for once agreed together in their appreciation.  Of this quick and keen popularity there has been some failure, no doubt, in later days.  Her “Story of Doom, and other Poems,” had a welcome only second to its predecessor; but the third series of “Poems” had to make its way among a crowd of new competitors.  Time, however, will always right the slight injustice of reaction; and even at this hour there is a sort of remorse of reconsideration among those who have left Miss Ingelow’s poems neglected on their shelves these last ten or twenty years.  Their old beauty comes as a new surprise.  Never hungry for fame, she did not mourn over any signs of its decline.

    She did a vast amount of prose-writings in the seventies—“Off the Skelligs,” “Fated to be Free,” “Don John,” and “Sarah de Berenger.”  Other books of hers were: “Stories Told to a Child,” “Studies for Stories,” and “Mopsa the Fairy.”  She wrote with great facility; and she did not alter or polish much in either prose or verse.  Though influenced in style by Coleridge, by Tennyson, by Wordsworth, she had her own definite note, distinguishable by its simple freshness.  She thought she was meant to be “more original than the creature afterwards become;” but that saying she applied, we imagine, to her life more than to her literature.  Among her intimate friends was Mr. Mundella, who survived her only one day.

    Very conventional were her surroundings when, after her mother’s death, she moved from Holland Street to Holland Villas Road, Kensington.  The little house had a little garden; and, perhaps, the greatest excitement in her later life was a garden-party of her own giving.  One of the last appearances of Mr. Locker-Lampson was in that very garden one summer afternoon; and in that guest and hostess have passed away types that are rapidly becoming extinct, delightful in old-world courtesy, indulgent to the errors of days gone by, if a little impatient to the moods of a generation younger than their own.

    In accounting for the great popularity obtained by Miss Ingelow, one has only to remember how often and how well she sang of the sea: not the sea on which our warships and our mercantile navies ride gloriously, but the sea we have known best in childhood, on which the herring fleet puts forth in the evening.  We think, indeed, that Miss Ingelow will be longest remembered as the fisherman’s poet.  No poet has been more haunted by the roar of winter seas beneath the cliffs on which the lights of the fishing village flit and flicker.  No poet has so persistently sung the dirges of those whom the sea has claimed.  Take the verses from the “Requiescat in Pace:”

    It is significant that one of the very sweetest lyrical passages in Miss Ingelow’s poetry has a terrible context.  For the milking-song that my “sonne’s wife, Elizabeth,” sings in “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” is the last her lips make before the tide, deaf to the mad ringing of Boston church bells, sweeps over the pasture.  This is how Elizabeth sung:—

    Such verse is not great, but it is pleasant.  Much of Miss Ingelow’s poetry speaks from the heart; particularly is this true of the verse which we will quote in conclusion:—

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THE LIVING AGE
VOL. CCXIV., 1897.

From the Athenæum.

A POETIC TRIO.

IT occurs to me that now, when we have so recently lost the last of the three women whose names were once so often linked together by the reading public—Dora Greenwell, Christina Rossetti, and Jean Ingelow (I am naming them in the order in which they died)—you might like to print some of the letters which passed between them before they had met each other face to face, after which they naturally became much more intimate. Their first meeting took place some time not very long after the dates of the following letters. I must premise that these ladies lived in the days when the cry, "Go spin, ye jades, go spin!" was still not infrequently heard if a woman wished to devote herself to any branch of art, and all three were anxious to show that though they wrote poetry they were none the less proficient in the usual womanly crafts.

    Miss Greenwell had challenged Miss Rossetti to produce a creditable sample of skilled needlework. Dora Greenwell’s own Meisterstück was a well-made workbag. This is Miss Rossetti’s letter acknowledging the gift:—

5, Upper Albany St., London, N. W.
31 December, 1863.

My Dear Miss Greenwell,—Your very kind gift reproaches me for so late an acknowledgement, but indeed I have been so busy as to feel excused for not having till now thanked you for it.  Even now I have not made myself acquainted with its contents, but I must soon do so, having just succeeded in clearing off a small batch of work for the S. P. C. K.*

The last day of the year suggests more good wishes than I venture to express to you.  Thank you for the friendly welcome accorded to my carte.  I should be truly pleased to possess yours; but will not bore you with too urgent a request, as probably so many persons are in my case.

What think you of Jean Ingelow, the wonderful poet?  I have not yet read the volume, but reviews with copious extracts have made me aware of a new eminent name having risen among us.  I want to know who she is, what she is like, where she lives.  All I have heard is an uncertain rumour that she is aged twenty-one, is one of three sisters resident with their mother.  A proud mother I should think.  If our dear Scotts move away altogether from the North, I fear my prospect of making your personal acquaintance must dwindle to the altogether vague.  Your kindness, however, has made us no strangers, even should we never meet—or, rather, never meet here; for on of the last days of the year the separations and meetings of time should not alone be thought of. Yours cordially,

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.

    Miss Ingelow must have been drawn into this competition very soon after the date of this letter, for on 9th February she wrote—

6, Denmark Place, Hastings.

    My Dear Miss Greenwell,—I have for some time been anxious to write to you, both to thank you for your kind note and for the poems you sent me.  I like them much, and really think they are likely to reach the class for which they were written.  The poor men here are all of the seafaring class, or I should have given those verses away.  Do you know that I have finished a bag for you?  I shall send it, I think by railway, for my brother is coming to-morrow as usual, and he will convey it as far as London.  The pattern is of my own invention!  Is the kettle-holder worked yet?  I shall be proud of it.  When I next see Miss Rossetti I shall ask for proof that she can do hemming and sewing. . . . It is a pleasure to me that you like those little stories.  They have not much in them, but it is an amusement to me to write them; writing for children is so completely its own reward; it obliges one to be simple and straightforward, and clears away some of the mystical fancies in which one is apt to indulge, and which are a mere luxury.  They never do us any good, and I am often humiliated by meeting with sensible fellow creatures who ask me what some of them mean. . . .There has been so much leisure here that my new volume is all but finished.  It is, however, not to be printed yet. I am, believe me, Very affectionately yours,

JEAN INGELOW.

    Miss Ingelow's workbag was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.  Garlands of flowers, done from those to be found in almost any pretty and well-cared-for garden, were wrought with narrow china ribbon of all colours and shades and blending on a ground of black cloth—no work of the kind could have been better executed.  Here my knowledge of this great sewing competition comes to an end.  I have even forgotten whether Miss Rossetti's piece of work was ever sent, but my impression is that it was not.

M.

* ED.—Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

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THE CITIZEN
Vol. 3, No. 10, December, 1897.

JEAN INGELOW

by

Jennette Atwater Street.

WHEN Tennyson died, when Morris and Stevenson, Lowell and Holmes laid their pens down for the last time, there was such a sense of activity arrested, of immediate loss, that we look even yet for this to be made good to us.  Far different, however, is the feeling with regard to the English poetess recently deceased.  Her death seems rather the loss of an earlier generation who read her novels and memorized her verse which the younger of us, to whom much richer treasures of literature have fallen, have never cared to con or peruse.  It is partly because of the years that have elapsed since Miss Ingelow's period of publication, partly because of her own extreme reticence in reference to the facts of her life, that the public came almost to forget that this winning poetess, though mute in song, was living with us still.  Yet by the large circle of friends to whom she had endeared herself as much by her warm heart and quick sympathy as by her literary gifts, the death of Jean Ingelow was most keenly felt.  Until recent years when failing health made seclusion necessary, her home was the resort of nearly every writer of note, American as well as English.  Many of the poor profited, too, by the hospitality offered in the little house at Kensington, for it was her habit for years to entertain semi-weekly, some twelve indigent persons who had just left a London hospital.  And so it was, that living, rather than writing, a message of goodwill and charity to all, she passed quietly out of the world which she had done her part to make better.

    It was not far from the sea she loved so well that Jean Ingelow was born in 1820, in a large house on the outskirts of the English Boston—the place was called Southend.  At the back of the house was a garden and then the river, where the swell of the tide, the sound of her own steps on the wharves as the water washed against the piles afforded her as a child the utmost delight, especially when the sun shone and the water seen through the cracks was glittering below.  Her nurse was a sailor's widow, and as she talked constantly in the children's presence of storms and wrecks, their earliest sense of tragedy came to be connected with the sea.  Little wonder, then, that in describing the sea, there is always distinguishable a mournful note in Jean Ingelow's writing.

    One anecdote that the author has related of her early childhood well illustrates her nature.  “I used to feel how dull it must be for the pebbles in the causeway to be obliged to lie still and only see what was round about.  When I walked out with a little basket for putting flowers in, I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry them on to have a change; then at the furthest point of the walk, turn them out, not doubting that they were pleased to have a new view.”  In these early days, she gives evidence also of sensitiveness in the matter of cadence and rhyme, for at any sacrifice of sense she would alter the hymns and verses taught her, to make the rhyme “go right.”  In short it would seem that the author's plaintive comment, “I was meant to be more original than the creature I afterwards became,”—was not without justification, as well as her warning thereby deduced, against too regular teaching for children of tender age.  When she concludes, however, that with scriptural instruction, a mastery of the “three R's,” possibly some knowledge of history, and a fair acquaintance with French, the education of the average girl should be deemed complete, we are again conscious of the gap between the views of her generation and those of to-day.

    The child grew to womanhood in pleasant surroundings and in an atmosphere of refinement and taste.  Not being of precocious genius, it was not until 1850 that she published her first volume of verse, bearing the old-world title,—A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings.  This was issued anonymously and made no impression.  Her next volume in 1863, Poems by Jean Ingelow, brought immediate recognition, possibly because of the dearth of really good English verse just at this time, but largely because of their undeniable charm and quaint simplicity.  In a month her fame was made, and hundreds of letters, from the United States even more than from the home-land, gave evidence of the warm and generous admiration of the public.  And this recognition came not only from the reading public at large but from such men as Lowell, Tennyson, Holmes, and Ruskin.  The Story of Doom and Other Poems followed in 1867, but proved less attractive, while her last publication in the sixties, Mopsa the Fairy, was a charming fantasy containing only occasional bits of poetry.

    The seventies introduce Miss Ingelow to the public as a novelist, Off the Skelligs appearing in 1872, Fated to be Free in 1875, Sarah de Berenger in 1880, and Don John in 1881.  To complete the list, we add Stories Told to a Child, and Studies for Stories the latter of which reveals the systematic way in which Miss Ingelow set to work to write fiction.

    As often happens with those who write easily, Miss Ingelow's work wears the characteristics of improvisation;—generalization in description of scenery and in delineation of sentiments and emotions; genuine and sincere expression of thought marked alike by lack of affectation and deep insight; freshness and spontaneity, but not always force or polish.  In her novels we grow impatient with the coy development of the plot or its unsatisfactory solution.  Fated to be Free is illustrative of both these defects.  The grave problem of the relations between necessity and free will is here introduced and Valentine in whom the action centres, though easy-going and inclined to drift as circumstances urge, is placed in a position where he must definitely accept or refuse an attractive inheritance, but one against which his own father had warned him.  Why the warning should have been given and wherefore the consequence of Valentine's disregarding it fell heavily upon his early years, even the reader is never privileged to know, except by inference.  Thus the book fails in dramatic effect despite its decided charm of picturesqueness, its bright incidents of mirthful, boisterous childhood, and its vivid delineation of unostentatious English life.

In Sarah de Berenger, likewise, though we concede cleverness in plot-conception, and still more in the skill which represents the pious fraud of a mother assisted by many apparently trivial happenings,—yet the self-sacrifice involved meets, after all, with rather doubtful success, since, though the objects of it gain ease and comfort, the uncertainty that in consequence surrounds their birth, gives rise to many disagreeable conjectures.  Through all of Miss Ingelow's novels we discern the machinery at work in the progression of the story, which suggests limitation in scope, lack of dramatic subtlety in interweaving separate threads of narrative.  Clean and wholesome, charming in their domesticity and in the conscientious portrayal of the English home-loving people, even sparkling at times in relating discussions between children or the sparring among servants, Miss Ingelow's novels derive their chief interest from the studies they present of commonplace and everyday folk with their homely accessories and from the narration of those unexciting events which come within the range of ordinary experience.

    In her poetry, where she is at her best, Miss Ingelow has been likened to Longfellow, though the comparison fails when applied at all closely.  Like Longfellow she most often narrates in verse and the tendency to point a moral is frequently to be noticed.  Yet her range in story-telling is necessarily limited by her narrow experiences, while Longfellow's scholarship and extensive travels gave at once a variety to his diction and a diversity to his tales which are wanting to the English poetess.  Briefly, then, Miss Ingelow's popularity as a singer is most due to the clear pathetic notes in which she voices the moan of the sea, or the gentle sliding of the river seen far across dappled meadows, or the dirge for the fisherman whom the sea has claimed for its own.  These are repeated again and again and in all of her poems that we count the best,—“Requiescat in Pace,” “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,” “Divided,” the mother's plaintive song in the “Supper at the Mill,” and even in “Songs of Seven.” The other dominant chord in her verse, that of quiet content and restful sympathy, is heard in her “Songs with Preludes,” where we are told:

or it rings pleasantly out in the sonnet called “Failure,” with the quoting of which we take present leave of an author whose heart was ever warm and whose word, if not always great, was ever gracious.