THE POETRY OF JEAN INGELOW

mong the women poets of England, most critics would, I imagine, agree in assigning the first place to Elizabeth Barret Browning.  The next place belongs probably to Jean Ingelow.  True, it is not a very difficult matter to decide the order of merit, seeing that English poetesses of any note may be counted almost on the fingers of one hand.  It might be interesting to discuss the question whether there is any peculiarity in the female character to account for this rareness of the poetic gift.  That women can write poetry, and poetry of a very high order, no one who has studied the works of Mrs. Browning, Jean Ingelow or Adelaide Proctor, can reasonably doubt.

    The most striking feature of Miss Ingelow's poetry, and that which renders it so peculiarly attractive, is its metrical beauty.  To appreciate this fully, it ought to be read aloud, in order, as George Macdonald said in one of his most fascinating books, to "get all the good of its outside as well as inside—its sound as well as thought, the one being the ethereal body of the other."  Read thus, Jean Ingelow carries you away upon a flood of delicious sound which wholly fascinates and almost intoxicates you with its beauty.  Everyone must be struck by the wonderful ease of expression, the smoothness, the exquisite music of her rhymes.  Hers truly is

"The voice which like a stream could run  Smooth music from the roughest stone."

She is, above all, a singer, and she sings with a sweet rhythmic cadence which entrances us, so that we are in danger of forgetting the sense in the delight of the sound.  If poetry consistent only in beauty of form, she would be an infinitely greater poet than Mrs. Browning.  Take, for example, the worst poem (probably) that she ever wrote, "Divided," and read it aloud, listening to the sound and shutting your mind to the meaning, and how deliciously melodious it his.  Or take such a verse as this, chosen, at haphazard, from "Requiescat in Pace":—

"Men must die—one dies by day, and near him moans his mother;      They dig his grave, tread it down, and go from it full loth.  And one dies about the midnight, and the wind moans and no other,      And the snows give him a burial.   And God loves them both,"

It is really difficult to choose examples of special beauty where all is so beautiful.  It would hardly be going too far to assert that Jean never wrote an unmusical line, and never could write one.  Perhaps the most striking instance or this wonderful gift of poetic beauty is that ballad written for the Portfolio Society, "Persephone."  Place that side by side with any one of the best of E. B. Browning's ballads, and how infinitely superior it is in the mere external qualities of form, rhythm, and melody.

"She reigns upon her dusky throne,      'Mid shades of heroes dread to see;  Among the dead she breathes alone,      Persephone — Persephone!  Or seated on the Elysian hill  She dreams of earthly daylight still,  And murmurs of the daffodil. "A voice in Hades soundeth clear,      The shadows mourn and flit below;  It cries—'Thou Lord of Hades hear,      And let Demeter's daughter go.  The tender corn upon the lea  Droops in her goddess gloom when she  Calls for her lost Persephone.'"

    The second special characteristic of Miss Ingelow's poetry is, I think, its facility of expression.  As she is a living writer, and therefore has not yet been torn to pieces and dissected by the biographers and critics, we do not know the secrets of her manner of working; but if the impression produced on the readers mind be considered a trustworthy guide, her poems run straight from her brain (or soul) on to the paper, and hardly need an after touch.  Half their charm lies in their apparent spontaneity and absence of effort.

    Thirdly, she is pre-eminently the poetess of nature, as she is, and because she is, the High-priestess of Beauty.  She seems to have drunk so deep of nature's loveliness that she is inebriated with it.  Like Shelley—though in a lesser degree—she often catches the every spirit of nature and photographs it in her verse.  The well-known ballad, "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," is an example of what I mean.  It is not merely that she describes the scene—the flat Lincolnshire fen, the river flowing through the reeds, the solitary figure standing out against the sunset sky—so that we can see it in the mind's eye; the power of vivid description is no uncommon gift; but that the very verse itself seems permeated with the tranquil beauty of the afternoon, so that you seem to feel the strange hush, the lazy stillness, the indescribable sensation which such an afternoon does actually produce on the mind.  And this effect is given, not with pages of elaborate description, but with broad strong touches such as:"

". . . dark against day's golden death, She moved where Luidis wandereth;

Or . . . .

"The swanherds where their sedges are  Moved on in sunset's golden breath.'

But no quotations can give any idea of the effect produced by reading the poem carefully through, and giving oneself up to the enjoyment of it.  Another instance of this peculiar power is found, to my mind, in the description of dawn in book vi of "A Story of Doom ":

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  . "Then he lift His eyes, and day had dawned.  Right suddenly The moon withheld her silver, and she hung Frail as a cloud.   The ruddy flame that played By night on dim, dusk trees, and on the flood, Crept red amongst the logs, and all the world And all the water blushed and bloomed.   The stars Were gone, and golden shafts came up, and touched The feathered heads of palms, and green was born Under the rosy cloud, and purples flew Like veils across the mountains."

Or read that beautiful poem, "Scholar and Carpenter"—a poem which is peculiarly characteristic of its author as regards the three points which I have mentioned, especially the first seven verses culminating in that splendid outburst of trust and confidence:

"Grand is the leisure of the earth  She gives her happy myriads birth,  And afters harvest fears not dearth,  But goes to sleep in snow-wreaths dim.  Dread is the leisure up above,  The while He sits whose name is Love,  And waits, as Noah did for the dove,  To wit if she would fly to him."

In the fourth verse of the same poem she tells us what she considers to be the secret of her sympathy with nature.  Speaking of her heart, she says—

"The morning freshness that she viewed  With her own meanings she endued,  And touched with her solicitude  The natures she did meditate."

Now those lines give the keynote to Jean Ingelow's poetry, the keynote both to its strength and to its weakness, its merits and defects.  Her poetic nature is like a rare and sensitive instrument, played on by nature in all her moods.  When she yields herself wholly to nature, and simply writes down the impressions of her influence, as they photograph themselves upon her brain, she succeeds most perfectly.  But when, reversing the position, she considers nature as the instrument to be played on by her soul, she fails.  Take, for instance, a thoughtful little poem, and one not very easy to understand, "The Nightingale Heard by the Unsatisfied Heart."  She speaks of the nightingale thus:

"But thou in the trance of light.  Stayest the feeding night,  And Echo makes sweet her lips with the utterance wise;  And casts at our glad feet,  In a wisp of fancies fleet,  Life's fair, life's unfulfilled, impassioned prophecies.   Her central thought full well  Thou hast the wit to tell,  To take the sense o' the dark and to yield it so;  The moral of moonlight  To set in a cadence bright,  And sing our loftiest dream that we thought none did know."

Now is it a fair criticism to call those lines untrue in sentiment?  Passing over their quite unnecessary obscurity, I accuse them of a far greater fault―namely, untruth to the spirit of nature in ascribing to the nightingale thoughts belonging only to the human soul, instead of describing the human soul producing those thoughts under the influence of nature, or, if you will, drawing out the thoughts inherent in nature and expressed to the soul of the listener in the nightingale's song.  For surely the great and eternal truths of God lie hid in the heart of nature, as heat lies imprisoned in the black heart of the coal, and only the God-given fire of human thought has power to draw them forth into life.  Not that a poet is necessarily untrue when he puts into the mouth of nature human thought, so long as that thought is in harmony with nature.  But there is an incongruity (or so at least it seems to me) in a nightingale having "the wit to tell life's central thought," and "sing our loftiest dream that we thought none did know."

    The chief fault of Jean Ingelow's poetry is, surely, that it is often too fanciful to be true.  One is reminded in reading it of a deep saying of that great and beautiful thinker whom I have already quoted—"Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy; but Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth, and her home is in heaven."  She fails most when she tries to go deepest.  Her writing is essentially feminine; her strength lies in delicacy of imagination, power of description, warm human sympathies, deep religious sentiments and emotions.  Whenever she becomes metaphysical, whenever she begins to reason deeply, she becomes obscure and often laboured.  Take, for instance, the poem called "Honours", especially the second part.  The Subject is not an original; it deals with the old problems and difficulties of life; but there is a vagueness and want of consecutive argument, clearness, and comprehension in its treatment, so that the reader is apt to get tired and impatient with the effort to follow the tangled thread of the poet's thought.  Near the end of the poem she rises to a far more congenial sphere of religious feeling, and instantly becomes beautify and interesting. It is the Same with "Scholar and Carpenter"; a poem of a far higher order, I venture to think, and the fault is even more pronounced in some of the "Songs on the Voices of Birds," and in the "Song of the Uncommunicated Ideal," a poem as vaguer and obscure as its title.

    It is as a ballad-writer, a story-teller in verse, that Miss Ingelow is at her best.  She has a great power of telling a story, especially a pathetic story.  I think that "Laurance," "Brothers and a Sermon," and "The Dreams that came True," are good specimens of her stories in verse, as "Persephone" and the "High Tide" are the most striking of her ballads properly so called.  The sermon in "Brothers and a Sermon" is perhaps the best poem she has ever written.  It is full of deep religious feeling—not merely religious sentiment, but real, living, practical faith in a personal God—faith which finds expression in deep, passionate sympathy with human suffering.  No one can read it without being elevated, or at least impressed, by its sublime earnestness, without being touched by its heartrending pictures of human misery in the stories of "The Drunkard's Wife," and of "The Outcast Woman," by the exquisite contrast between human cruelty and hardness and the Divine tenderness and compassion.

    I cannot forbear to quote a few lines which to my mind are especially beautiful.  The preacher is describing a wife listening to her husband's drunken song, as he comes home across the snow:

"O thou poor soul, it is the night—the night;  Against thy door drifts up the silent snow,  Blocking thy threshold: 'Fall,' thou sayest, 'fall, fall,  Cold snow, and lie and be trod underfoot.  Am not I fallen?   Wake up, and pipe, O wind,  Dull wind, and beat and bluster at my door;  Merciful wind, sing me a hoarse rough song,  For there is other music made to-night  That I would fain not hear.   Wake, thou still sea,  Heavily plunge.   Shoot on, white waterfall.  O, I could long, like thy cold icicles,  Freeze, freeze, and hang upon the frosty cliff.  And not complain, so I might melt at last.  In the warm summer sun, as thou wilt do! "'But woe is me!   I think there is no sun;  My sun is sunken, and the night grows dark;  None care for me.   The children cry for bread,  And I have none, and nought can comfort me;  Even if the heavens were free to such as I,  It were not much, for death is long to wait,  And heaven is far to go!'                                   "And speakest thou thus,  Despairing of the sun that sets to thee,  And of the earthly love that wanes to thee,  And of the heaven that lieth far from theirs?  Peace, peace, fond fool!   One draweth near thy door  Whose footsteps leave no print across the snow;  Thy sun has risen with comfort in His face,  The smile of heaven, to warm thy frozen heart,  And bless with saintly hand.  What! is it long  To wait and far to go?   Thou shalt not go;  Behold, across the snow to thee he comes,  Thy heaven desends, and is it long to wait?  Thou shalt not wait:  'This night, this ,night,' He saith,'  I stand at the door and knock.'"

    Jean Ingelow is probably more widely read as a novelist than as a poet.  It is the taste of the age to prefer prose to poetry, and the fashion just now with many writers to extol prose-poetry at the expense of verse.  Miss Ingelow herself, poet as she is, speaks slightingly of versifying in one of her latest stories, "John Jerome."  True, a poet is not only, or necessarily, a writer of verses.  There been plenty of "glorious poets that never have written a line," and plenty more, like Macdonald, who have written excellent prose-poems.  "He who forgives not is not forgiven, and the prayer of the Pharisee is as the weary beating of the surf of hell, while the cry of a soul out of its fire sets the heart-strings of love trebling."  None but a poet could have written that, and no setting of rhyme and metre could make the poem more perfect.  And yet the poet—not the versemaker—has a higher claim to our gratitude in verse than in prose, for many reasons, of which three will suffice:

    (1) Verse is more difficult than prose.  It costs more labour, and therefore deserves to be rated higher.

    (2) Verse is essence of thought, concentrated, condensed, and therefore more forcible than prose, which, however beautiful in form, must of necessity be more prolix and diffuse.

    (3) Verse is, generally speaking, a more beautiful setting than prose.  I grant that the passage from George Macdonald just quoted is an exception to this rule.  But is it not so just because it is so rhythmic, so melodious, that it seems prose trembling on the very verge of averse?

    The ordinary prose-poet hews his thought, like gold, from the mine of his mind, and offers it to the world in the rough; the verse-poet, after that he has hewn it from the mine, melts it in the crucible of emotion, stamps it with the impress of his soul's labour, and sends it forth to the world in a form that will ring on when the equally golden thought of the prose-poet has, from its inferiority of form, been lost and forgotten.

K. E. COLEMAN.

――――♦――――

 
DON JOHN.
[by JEAN INGELOW: Roberts 1885.]

    "The motif stems to be hackneyed; but it is not so, for here we have the time-honored expedient of changing children at nurse treated in an entirely unprecedented, and yet perfectly plausible fashion.  The irresponsible young wet-nurse whose imagination has been fired, and her head head turned, by an immense consumption of the fiction furnished by a cheap circulating library, makes, in the first instance instance, in mere wantonness, the experiment of substituting her child for the one which had been confided — somewhat too unquestioningly — to her care, while a severe epidemic of scarlatina took its long course through the nursery of her employers.  Again a chain of curious and very creditably-devised chances favor — almost necessitate — the maintenance of the deception; and at length it comes about, through the sudden death, by accident, of her accomplice in the dangerous game she had been playing, that the nurse herself is not entirely certain whether it is the Johnstone baby or hers which the family reclaim, while she is herself prostrated by severe illness.  The frightened woman keeps her guilty and yet rather absurd secret for a little while, but then the miserable confession will out, and the unhappy parents who have been the victims of this enraging trick find that they can do no better than pack the unprincipled nurse off to Australia, adopts this other child, and bring up the twin boys exactly alike.  The history of the growth of their characters, and the development of their fates, is a singular and affecting one.  It is the best told of Miss Ingelow's tales, — the most direct and dramatic and symmetrical; and, in short, Don John is, to our mind, a beautiful little story; a finished and charming specimen of that minor English fiction which is often as good, from a literary point of view, as the best produced elsewhere." [Atlantic.

――――♦――――

 
AN UNCONVENTIONAL NOVEL.

JOHN JEROME. HIS THOUGHTS AND WAYS.  A Book without a
                    Beginning. By JEAN INGELOW, Boston: ROBERTS BROTHERS.

If Jean Ingelow were of the masculine gender we might describe the author of "John Jerome" as making romance in shirt sleeves, so free and easy are the methods.  You know from the subtitle that it is a story without a beginning, which means, we suppose, that a romance may commence anywhere.  Precise readers, accustomed to the cut and dried ways of romance, may not appreciate the introduction to "John Jerome," for it is rather intangible at best and uncertain.  John Jerome hunts the larvæ of lepidopterous insects, teaches little village boys to distinguish the differences between ordinary caterpillars and silkworms, and takes a decided interest in the ailanthus.  John Jerome has a limp.  Some years before in England, where the story takes place, two little girls had broken through the ice, and John Jerome had saved them but had been hurt in the rescue, and rheumatism had set in, and he had been slightly crippled.  Katharina and Anna, his cousins, were the young women he had saved.  Grateful?  Of course they were.  The girls loved their savior, but Alma had married later a very queer man, Godfrey, and Katharina had engaged herself to another.  With Katharina John Jerome's relationship is of the happiest kind, and it is at her instigation that he writers the book.

    "John Jerome" is endowed with many original ideas.  Occasionally he has a bad fit of spleen, and is wont to argue his conditions of mind with himself in dialogues where "I" and "myself" interchange ideas.  If a man is dissatisfied with everything the following is presented as an infallible receipt for a cure: You choose two Japanese fans with magenta sunsets, a half pint of raw green gooseberries, and three cats, and you establish yourself near a tallow chandler's, and you "eat the gooseberries, beat the cats, and look hard at the screens, considering remorsefully all the time how we have ruined the taste of the Japanese for art and given them nothing to make up for the loss.  When you have set your teeth on edge with the gooseberries, and are chilled to the bone with the east wind, and have breathed the odors of tallow and listened to the discord of the cats, release them and return home."  Jean Ingelow indulges in many whimsicalities, and is as discursive as Southey in his "Doctor."  Here are disquisitions on female beauty where it is conclusively shown that the ideal Greek woman had a small head and big feet and that the beauty of mediæval times had a vivacious look and not a languid one.  Miss Ingelow is not a Vernon Lee, but her art criticisms are sharp and clever.  This may be a slur on the Rossettians, who admire "a hungry and despairing face, with a lean, lanky figure, and what our grandmothers called gooseberry eyes."  We idealize "the wrong way."   Flattery has made women Juno-eyed, with feet that won't support her.  In the current of the story Jean Ingelow has her talk about women and women's rights.  John Jerome sees a troop ship depart, and philosophizes on the "girls we left behind us."  What are women's faults?  First, she loves luxury, but principally she never will rise to the height of her aspirations, because she is wanting in the power of organization, and her greatest defect is that "she does not love her own, she loves the more selfish sex."  In man there is human nature, in woman a vast deal of human art; and finally Jean Ingelow sums it up when Katharina remarks, "Women are not angels."

    The whimsicalest of all men is Godfrey, who has married Anna.  Godfrey lives in a travelling van, associates with tinkers, he has a Borrowish flavor.  Godfrey is a bit crazy, and so is his wife, but his method of living in the heather gives Jean Ingelow the opportunity to write delightfully of nature, and her fine poetical faculties have in prose their full swing.  Katharina is not happy, although John Jerome is her best friend.  Another, which other is Tudor Smutt, treats the pretty Kathrina as would a cad.  Kathrina's grandmother, from whom she has expected money, her nieces being her prospective heiresses, suddenly loses her means.  Tudor Smutt, who is a snob, marries Lavinia Cohen, who is greasy but opulent.  George Jerome, with the limp, goes to the United States, where he finds a bone-setter.  A bone-setter is a humbug, and always was one, but there is a dark closet in the brightest mind.  We do not mean to say that the author believes in the bone-setter, but it looks as if she did.  Anyhow, the bone-setter does his work for the man with the limp, and Jerome hobbles no more.  He comes home, and Katharina, who has loved him, only believing that she once did care for the prig Smutt, eventually marries John Jerome, who really after all never had anything more "than a limp not worth mentioning."  Miss Ingelow's book, when you have done a little plodding at the beginning, opens up briskly and pleasantly, and the jaunt through the story is a delightful one.

――――♦――――

 
ATLANTIC MONTHLY

Vol LXXIII., 1894.

A MOTTO CHANGED, by Jean Ingelow. (Harpers.)  The changed motto is; “A little less than kin, and more than kind,” and presumably has reference to the fact that the young hero is really only the adopted child of his reputed father, he having been one of those infants, not uncommon in fiction, who are found on wrecked vessels, the sole survivors.  The not very interesting love-story of this youth forms the main motive of the tale, though the heroine’s precocious little brother, — who, when first introduced to us, is discussing the question “whether we owe any duties towards vermin,” — unlike his delightful predecessors, the clever and original children in the author’s earliest novel, is sometimes distinctly tiresome.  This condemnation the story itself could not escape, — being as it is slight in texture, commonplace in incident, and weak in characterization, — if it were not so brief in the telling.

_______________

 
HARPER'S MAGAZINE

Vol. LXXXVIII., 1894.

THE young people of twenty-five or thirty years ago used to read, with no little interest and pleasure, certain pretty, healthful stories written for them by Miss Jean Ingelow, then a comparatively young person herself.  They were all about girls and boys, and a suspicious jackdaw, and minnows with silver tails, and wild-duck-shooters, and such things, and they did nobody any harm, although they are now almost forgotten.  “Off the Skelligs” came much later from the same writer, and attracted marked attention from a more mature class of readers.  It was an unusual tale, of undoubted but unequal merit.  Since then Miss Ingelow has rarely been heard of and it is with a feeling almost of surprise that her name is found upon the cover of a new novel.  A Motto Changed is not a child’s story altogether, although its heroine and its hero are very youthful.  The lover is just of age, and young for his years, and the girl he loves is not very high up in her teens; but fathers and mothers will be touched by their joys and their sorrows, and sons and daughters will follow them eagerly to the end of their career, as Miss Ingelow has set it down.  There is a funny little chap of eight or nine who makes remarkable statements about the duty which mankind owes to vermin; and there is a funnier half-Malay, half-English, white and brown baby—both of whom will appeal to a very juvenile set of readers indeed.  The book, therefore, is destined to meet with general popularity, which, without being in any way a great or an unusual book, it certainly deserves.

_______________

 
NEW YORK TIMES
19 December, 1893.

A Novel by Jean Ingelow.

A MOTTO CHANGED; OR, A LITTLE LESS THAN KIN AND MORE THAN
         KIND. A Novel.  By Jean Ingelow.  New-York: Harper & Brothers.

    Jean Ingelow retains her old faculty for story telling.  She interests you without seeming to make an effort to be interesting, and with scarcely any apparent artifice.  She wastes no time on elaborate descriptions of places or people.  From the opening of this new novel, a simple love story with plenty of variety of character and incident, the reader's attention is held closely.  She lets her personages speak for themselves, and they speak well.

    Sometimes her English is a little odd for a poet whose songs are so simple and charming.  But "onto" is in the dictionary, and "presented with" has passed into common speech, even if Mr. Pater and Mr. James and Mr. Aldrich and others whom we esteem as teachers of modern English avoid that word and that phrase.

    Rhodes Mainwaring is a big, burly, blonde youth of twenty-one, simple, sound-hearted, unsophisticated, idle, because he has never had any real inducement to choose a calling, but not lazy and a real hero.  Isabel, whom he loves, is a pretty, ordinary, well-bred, middle-class girl.  The course of their love does not run smoothly, at first, but its story is very pretty and touching, and the book is full of delightful humor that belongs to is as a component part of the fabric.

    The characters are all well drawn, especially grave, elderly Mr. Larkin, who writes "leaders" on important topics, and his little boy, the son of his second wife, who is the most pleasing example of the precocious child we have lately met with in fiction.  The study of his infantile mind grappling with scientific problems of its own invention is most amusing and most natural too.  Rowland was probably taken directly from real life.

――――♦――――
 
NEW YORK TIMES
August 7, 1897.

Of Jean Ingelow.

ANECDOTES ABOUT HER AND FACTS
ABOUT HER BOOKS.

The late Jean Ingelow (giving the "g" in the surname a softened sound) was born in 1820 in Boston, Lincolnshire.  Her father, who was a banker, moved to Ipswich, and The Academy says that "banking and Evangelicalism have conspicuously run together in certain families, and they did in hers.  Almost Quakerlike some of her likings and aversions might he called."  Something that she seems to have always held in horror was human strife, and so in Jean Ingelow's verse there never is any allusion to war.  The call of the bugle, the cry to arms were distressing sounds to her.  She carried this so far that it is said when she had written in "Kismet" the story of a lad's love for liberty and his delight in the sea, some critic told her that boys in reading the book might be fired with the idea of entering the navy.  That so disturbed Jean Ingelow that she took the work and revised it carefully, changing some of the parts.

    Jean Ingelow's early life, her first ambitions, are by no means easy to follow.  Exceedingly modesty, she was particularly reticent about herself.  To those who knew her intimately she would sometimes express astonishment at her own success.  Perfectly quiet in her manner, she was deliberate in all she did, and she was forty-three before she published her first acknowledged book of verse.

    It is to our credit that appreciation of Jean Ingelow first came from the United States, and it is possible that she is even better liked here than in England.  Counting the number of volumes purchased as evidence of merit, it is computed that over 200,000 volumes of Jean Ingelow's works have found purchasers in this country.  Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell were among her earliest admirers, and praise from either of these was praise indeed.  "Tennyson was generous in his encomiums," and above all Ruskin, "whose praise has always been precious to women, was at her feet."

    Jean Ingelow's first collected edition of poems was published by Messrs. Longman & Co.  It was taken up by the public in rather a deliberate manner.  Anyhow, in good time this first edition was exhausted.  Then Miss Ingelow went to London to treat with her publishers for a second edition.  But the Messrs. Longman, so it is said, rather declined venturing on a second edition.  There might have been risks, so it was intimated, which the house did not deem it prudent to take then.  Miss Ingelow, somewhat disappointed, was leaving the establishment when she passed a man hurrying up to the office of the Messrs. Longman, and presently she was asked to return, a messenger having been sent her.  It seems somebody had just asked for 500 copies of "Jean Ingelow's Poems," and at once the necessity of a second edition became imperative.  It had taken some year or more for the appreciation of her poems to come, but from that time on her merits were confirmed, and so we have to-day the twenty-third English edition of her first series of "Poems."  "Imagine my feelings of envy and humiliation," Christina Rossetti is reported to have said when she received only a volume of the eighteenth edition of "Jean Ingelow's Poems."  The first edition of "Poems by Jean Ingelow" appeared in 1863.  Her first volume was "A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings," issued anonymously in 1850.

    With fairly comfortable means, though Miss Ingelow received handsome compensation for her works, it is believed that the money she derived from her copyrights was for the major part dispensed in charity.  She was the most generous of women.

    There is an amusing story told relating to nightingales, which sweet songsters she often Introduces in her verses.  But nightingales were mere hearsays to her, for up to 1868 she had never heard one.  Paying a special visit to some friends who boasted of a grove in which nightingales warbled, Miss Ingelow went out one May evening to listen to the bird orchestra.  To greet so distinguished an audience the nightingales were singing their sweetest, and all else were silent.  Then Miss Ingelow said: "Are they singing?  I don't hear anything."  The lady was by no means deaf, but the fact is she had forgotten to remove some cotton from hers ears, for, the evening being damp and raw, she had been afraid of catching a possible cold.

    To pose as a poet was something Jean Ingelow despised.  She liked best to talk plain prose.  She carried this so far that when invited to some dinner as a celebrity, and expected to show off, she was invariably disappointing.  She talked well enough, but discussed invariably commonplace topics.

    To write such fine verse as did Jean Ingelow means that she had strong powers of concentration.  The idea comes, but to make it grow, to give it leafage and flowers, to endow the blooms with perfume, is a longer, a slower process.  Some one who knew her well says that in the time when she was writing she did not read much, and she was "singularly ignorant of contemporaneous literature."  Once she said, "It is a great price to pay for writing successfully, but I dare not read what others are writing in the same vein.  I have such a dread of unconsciously borrowing their ideas."

    Poems that are fully twenty years old must have a vital force of their own so as to be read to-day.  Poets come and poets go, and their verses reflect the incidents, the feelings of the present moment, and this is but natural.  The flicker of one sunrise is the prelude of the sombreness of a night which follows, but the sweetness, the freshness, the naturalness of the true poet are not evanescent.

    It is Jean Ingelow's pitying tenderness which leaves its Impress.  How often has not Elizabeth's call to her cows been repeated?

    What a sweet, sad refrain is here!  True grief never found a more poignant utterance than in these six lines:

    The remains of Miss Ingelow were interred in the family grave at West Brompton Cemetery.  Besides relatives and friends present, there were a number of Americans, chiefly ladies.  The Bishop of Wakefield and the Rev. G. R. Thornton of St. Barnabas's performed the funeral service.  The coffin, which was of polished oak, with brass mountings, bore upon the breastplate the words, "Jean Ingelow. Born March 17, 1820; died July 20, 1897."  Above this was fastened a cross of roses, and on the card were the words, "Mr. Ruskin.  In sorrow and affectionate memory."  A bouquet of sweet mignonette was inscribed, "Antoinette Sterling.  With dear love.  There is no death; there is no beginning or end to life."  Maxwell Gray sent a wreath of laurel leaves, intertwined with gold braid, and the words, "Ave, atque vale!"  After the Bishop of Wakefield had pronounced the benediction, Mme. Antoinette Sterling by the open grave sang "The Lord Is My Shepherd."

____________________________
 
Lives
of
Girls Who Became Famous.
by
Sarah K. Bolton,

Author of Poor Boys Who Became Famous, Social Studies in England, etc.

1914.

JEAN INGELOW.

THE same friend who had given me Mrs. Browning's five volumes in blue and gold, came one day with a dainty volume just published by Roberts Brothers, of Boston.  They had found a new poet, and one possessing a beautiful name.  Possibly it was a nom de plume, for who had heard any real name so musical as that of Jean Ingelow?

    I took the volume down by the quiet stream that flows below Amherst College, and day after day, under a grand old tree, read some of the most musical words, wedded to as pure thought as our century has produced.

    The world was just beginning to know The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.  Eyes were dimming as they read,—

    And then the waters laid her body at his very door, and the sweet voice that called, "Cusha! Cusha! Cusha!" was stilled forever.

    The Songs of Seven soon became as household words, because they were a reflection of real life.  Nobody ever pictured a child more exquisitely than the little seven-year-old, who, rich with the little knowledge that seems much to a child, looks down from superior heights upon—

    So happy is she that she makes boon companions of the flowers:—

    At "seven times two," who of us has not waited for the great heavy curtains of the future to be drawn aside?

    At twenty-one the girl's heart flutters with expectancy:—

    At twenty-eight, the happy mother lives in a simple home, made beautiful by her children:—

    At thirty-five a widow; at forty-two giving up her children to brighten other homes; at forty-nine, "Longing for Home."

    The Songs of Seven will be read and treasured as long as there are women in the world to be loved, and men in the world to love them.

    My especial favorite in the volume was the poem Divided.  Never have I seen more exquisite kinship with nature, or more delicate and tender feeling.  Where is there so beautiful a picture as this?

    In what choice but simple language we are thus told that two loving hearts cannot be divided.

    Years went by, and I was at last to see the author of the poems I had loved in girlhood. I had wondered how she looked, what was her manner, and what were her surroundings.

    In Kensington, a suburb of London, in a two-story-and-a-half stone house, cream-colored, lives Jean Ingelow.  Tasteful grounds are in front of the home, and in the rear a large lawn bordered with many flowers, and conservatories; a real English garden, soft as velvet, and fragrant as new-mown hay.  The house is fit for a poet; roomy, cheerful, and filled with flowers.  One end of the large, double parlors seemed a bank of azalias and honeysuckles, while great bunches of yellow primrose and blue forget-me-not were on the tables and in the bay-windows.

    But most interesting of all was the poet herself, in middle life, with fine, womanly face, friendly manner, and cultivated mind.  For an hour we talked of many things in both countries.  Miss Ingelow showed great familiarity with American literature and with our national questions.

    While everything about her indicated deep love for poetry, and a keen sense of the beautiful, her conversation, fluent and admirable, showed her to be eminently practical and sensible, without a touch of sentimentality.  Her first work in life seems to be the making of her two brothers happy in the home.  She usually spends her forenoons in writing.  She does her literary work thoroughly, keeping her productions a long time before they are put into print. As she is never in robust health, she gives little time to society, and passes her winters in the South of France or Italy.  A letter dated Feb. 25, from the Alps Maritime, at Cannes, says, "This lovely spot is full of flowers, birds, and butterflies."  Who that recalls her Songs on the Voices of Birds, the blackbird, and the nightingale, will not appreciate her happiness with such surroundings?

    With great fondness for, and pride in, her own country, she has the most kindly feelings toward America and her people.  She says in the preface of her novel, Fated to be Free, concerning this work and Off the Skelligs, "I am told that they are peculiar; and I feel that they must be so, for most stories of human life are, or at least aim at being, works of art—selections of interesting portions of life, and fitting incidents put together and presented as a picture is; and I have not aimed at producing a work of art at all, but a piece of nature."  And then she goes on to explain her position to "her American friends," for, she says, "I am sure you more than deserve of me some efforts to please you.  I seldom have an opportunity of saying how truly I think so."

    Jean Ingelow's life has been a quiet but busy and earnest one.  She was born in the quaint old city of Boston, England, in 1830 [ED.—in fact 1820].  Her father was a well-to-do banker; her mother a cultivated woman of Scotch descent, from Aberdeenshire.  Jean grew to womanhood in the midst of eleven brothers and sisters, without the fate of struggle and poverty, so common among the great.

She writes to a friend concerning her childhood:—

    "As a child, I was very happy at times, and generally wondering at something.... I was uncommonly like other children.... I remember seeing a star, and that my mother told me of God who lived up there and made the star.  This was on a summer evening.  It was my first hearing of God, and made a great impression on my mind.  I remember better than anything that certain ecstatic sensations of joy used to get hold of me, and that I used to creep into corners to think out my thoughts by myself.  I was, however, extremely timid, and easily overawed by fear.  We had a lofty nursery with a bow-window that overlooked the river.  My brother and I were constantly wondering at this river.  The coming up of the tides, and the ships, and the jolly gangs of towers ragging them on with a monotonous song made a daily delight for us.  The washing of the water, the sunshine upon it, and the reflections of the waves on our nursery ceiling supplied hours of talk to us, and days of pleasure.  At this time, being three years old, ... I learned my letters.... I used to think a good deal, especially about the origin of things.  People said often that they had been in this world, that house, that nursery, before I came.  I thought everything must have begun when I did....  No doubt other children have such thoughts, but few remember them.  Indeed, nothing is more remarkable among intelligent people than the recollections they retain of their early childhood.  A few, as I do, remember it all.  Many remember nothing whatever which occurred before they were five years old.... I have suffered much from a feeling of shyness and reserve, and I have not been able to do things by trying to do them.  What comes to me comes of its own accord, and almost in spite of me; and I have hardly any power when verses are once written to make them any better....  There were no hardships in my youth, but care was bestowed on me and my brothers and sisters by a father and mother who were both cultivated people."

    To another friend she writes:

    "I suppose I may take for granted that mine was the poetic temperament, and since there are no thrilling incidents to relate, you may think you should like to have my views as to what that means.  I cannot tell you in an hour, or even in a day, for it means so much.  I suppose it, of its absence or presence, to make far more difference between one person and another than any contrast of circumstances can do.  The possessor does not have it for nothing.  It isolates, particularly in childhood; it takes away some common blessings, but then it consoles for them all."

    With this poetic temperament, that saw beauty in flower, and sky, and bird, that felt keenly all the sorrow and all the happiness of the world about her, that wrote of life rather than art, because to live rightly was the whole problem of human existence, with this poetic temperament, the girl grew to womanhood in the city bordering on the sea.

    Boston, at the mouth of the Witham, was once a famous seaport, the rival of London in commercial prosperity, in the thirteenth century.  It was the site of the famous monastery of St. Botolph, built by a pious monk in 657.  The town which grew up around it was called Botolph's town, contracted finally to Boston.  From this town Reverend John Cotton came to America, and gave the name to the capital of Massachusetts, in which he settled.  The present famous old church of St. Botolph was founded in 1309, having a bell-tower three hundred feet high, which supports a lantern visible at sea for forty miles.

    The surrounding country is made up largely of marshes reclaimed from the sea, which are called fens, and slightly elevated tracts of land called moors.  Here Jean Ingelow studied the green meadows and the ever-changing ocean.

    Her first book, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings, was published in 1850, when she was twenty, and a novel, Allerton and Dreux, in 1851; nine years later her Tales of Orris.  But her fame came at thirty-three, when her first full book of Poems was published in 1863.  This was dedicated to a much loved brother, George K. Ingelow:—

"YOUR LOVING SISTER
OFFERS YOU THESE POEMS, PARTLY AS
AN EXPRESSION OF HER AFFECTION, PARTLY FOR THE
PLEASURE OF CONNECTING HER EFFORT
WITH YOUR NAME."

    The press everywhere gave flattering notices.  A new singer had come; not one whose life had been spent in the study of Greek roots, simply, but one who had studied nature and humanity.  She had a message to give the world, and she gave it well.  It was a message of good cheer, of earnest purpose, of contentment and hope.

    The London press said:

"Miss Ingelow's new volume exhibits abundant evidence that time, study, and devotion to her vocation have both elevated and welcomed the powers of the most gifted poetess we possess, now that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Adelaide Proctor sing no more on earth. Lincolnshire has claims to be considered the Arcadia of England at present, having given birth to Mr. Tennyson and our present Lady Laureate."

    The press of America was not less cordial.  "Except Mrs. Browning, Jean Ingelow is first among the women whom the world calls poets," said the Independent.

    The songs touched the popular heart, and some, set to music, were sung at numberless firesides.  Who has not heard the Sailing beyond Seas?

    Edmund Clarence Stedman, one of the ablest and fairest among American critics, says:—

    "As the voice of Mrs. Browning grew silent, the songs of Miss Ingelow began, and had instant and merited popularity.  They sprang up suddenly and tunefully as skylarks from the daisy-spangled, hawthorn-bordered meadows of old England, with a blitheness long unknown, and in their idyllic underflights moved with the tenderest currents of human life.  Miss Ingelow may be termed an idyllic lyrist, her lyrical pieces having always much idyllic beauty.  High Tide, Winstanley, Songs of Seven, and the Long White Seam are lyrical treasures, and the author especially may be said to evince that sincerity which is poetry's most enduring warrant."

    Winstanley is especially full of pathos and action.  We watch this heroic man as he builds the lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks:—

    After the lighthouse was built, Winstanley went out again to see his precious tower.  A fearful storm came up, and the tower and its builder went down together.

    Several books have come from Miss Ingelow's pen since 1863.  The following year, Studies for Stories was published, of which the Athenæum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy and sorrow."  The five stories are told in simple and clear language, and without slang, to which she heartily objects.  For one so rich in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free from obscurity and florid language.

    Stories told to a Child was published in 1865, and A Story of Doom, and Other Poems, in 1868, the principal poem being drawn from the time of the Deluge.  Mopsa the Fairy, an exquisite story, followed a year later, with A Sister's Bye-hours, and since that time, Off the Skelligs in 1872, Fated to be Free in 1875, Sarah de Berenger in 1879, Don John in 1881, and Poems of the Old Days and the New, recently issued.  Of the latter, the poet Stoddard says: "Beyond all the women of the Victorian era, she is the most of an Elizabethan . . . . She has tracked the ocean journeyings of Drake, Raleigh, and Frobisher, and others to whom the Spanish main was a second home, the El Dorado of which Columbus and his followers dreamed in their stormy slumbers . . . . The first of her poems in this volume, Rosamund, is a masterly battle idyl."

    Her books have had large sale, both here and in Europe.  It is stated that in this country one hundred thousand of her Poems have been sold, and half that number of her prose works.

    Miss Ingelow has not been elated by her deserved success.  She has told the world very little of herself in her books.  She once wrote a friend:—

    "I am far from agreeing with you 'that it is rather too bad when we read people's works, if they won't let us know anything about themselves.'  I consider that an author should, during life, be as much as possible, impersonal.  I never import myself into my writings, and am much better pleased that others should feel an interest in me, and wish to know something of me, than that they should complain of egotism."

    It is said that the last of her Songs with Preludes refers to a brother who lies buried in Australia:—

    With all her literary work, she does not forget to do good personally.  At one time she instituted a "copyright dinner," at her own expense, which she thus described to a friend: "I have set up a dinner-table for the sick poor, or rather, for such persons as are just out of the hospitals, and are hungry, and yet not strong enough to work.  We have about twelve to dinner three times a week, and hope to continue the plan.  It is such a comfort to see the good it does.  I find it one of the great pleasures of writing, that it gives me more command of money for such purposes than falls to the lot of most women."  Again, she writes to an American friend: "I should be much obliged to you if you would give in my name twenty-five dollars to some charity in Boston.  I should prefer such a one as does not belong to any party in particular, such as a city infirmary or orphan school.  I do not like to draw money from your country, and give none in charity."

    Miss Ingelow is very fond of children, and herein is, perhaps, one secret of her success.  In Off the Skelligs she says:—

    "Some people appear to feel that they are much wiser, much nearer to the truth and to realities, than they were when they were children.  They think of childhood as immeasurably beneath and behind them.  I have never been able to join in such a notion.  It often seems to me that we lose quite as much as we gain by our lengthened sojourn here.  I should not at all wonder if the thoughts of our childhood, when we look back on it after the rending of this vail of our humanity, should prove less unlike what we were intended to derive from the teaching of life, nature, and revelation, than the thoughts of our more sophisticated days."

    Best of all, this true woman and true poet as well, like Emerson, sees and believes in the progress of the race . . . .

. . . . she says, in that tender poem, A Mother showing the Portrait of her Child.  Blessèd optimism! that amid all the shortcomings of human nature sees the best, lifts souls upward, and helps to make the world sunny by its singing.

____________________________

 
JEAN INGELOW

from

"Recollections of Fifty Years"

by

ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO
("Edward Garrett").

I met my girlhood's correspondent, Jean Ingelow, at the Halls' house [Ed.―Mrs. S. C. Hall, née Anna Maria Fielding], when they were her neighbours in Holland Street.  She was a kind-looking, pleasant, middle-aged lady, with a fresh complexion and brown hair, who cannot be better described than by saying that she was very like her own writings.  She looked a thoroughly wholesome, practical person.  Dr. Japp [Ed. ―Alexander Japp] said to me long afterwards that she had always seemed to him the very type of a country banker's maiden sister.  In the course of our conversation she said to me, with an air of solicitude, that she hoped I took care that my publishers were doing me justice.  She was a woman who hated personal publicity.  In advanced age, not very long before her death, she showed some impatience towards a publisher who was anxious to secure a new photograph of her.  Something of this reserve she must have carried into her private life, for one of her biographers has told us that nothing was ever known of the end of her one shadowy love-affair with a young naval officer.  Long before I heard this I had written that, whether or not it be true that every author's work is for ever haunted by one dominant idea, we might certainly say that the paramount note of Jean Ingelow's writing was of clinging love mysteriously severed.  Think of "Divided," of the creepy "House in the Dell," and of the thread underlying so many of the plots of her stories.

    Yet not even all Jean Ingelow's dignity and reserve could save her from intrusive gossip.  Some may remember that once it was freely whispered that she was likely to become the second wife of Robert Browning.  There were absolutely no grounds for this rumour, which, if it reached her, doubtless gave her pain, and is conceivably the reason why, as her biographer puts it, "the acquaintance between the two poets never ripened into intimacy."  While the rumour was current Mrs. S. C. Hall told me that Gerald Massey, who had felt as much admiration for the poet as for her poems, had offered her his hand, he being then a widower with a young family.  He confided to Mrs. Hall that Jean Ingelow had replied most kindly, but had assured him that her acceptance of his offer was "absolutely impossible."  "Now, nothing could make my offer impossible," said he naively, "save the existence of an already-accepted lover.  Who is visiting the Ingelow' house just now?  Why, Robert Browning has been seen there!  It must be he."  And so the rumour rose—an inference transformed into an assertion.

    Dean Kitchin, who knew the Ingelow family in their youth, says that he thinks "Jean" Ingelow was then but plain "Jane."

    *                           *                           *                           *                           *                           *

On the day when Queen Victoria went to St. Paul's to return thanks for the Prince of Wales's recovery from dangerous illness, we were invited to witness the procession from 56, Ludgate Hill, the offices of Good Words and the Sunday Magazine. . . . So we arrived in Ludgate Hill soon after St. Paul's clock struck 6 a.m.  We were not at all too soon; the street was already full, and we heard afterwards that some of the people had taken up their positions the night before, and had come well provided with food! . . . . With Pinwell, the artist, and his sweet young wife we had some very pleasant talk during those hours of waiting for the procession.  Mr. Pinwell had illustrated one or two of my stories, and some of his drawings had delighted me by their evidence of his comprehension of my "characters," often a very sore point as between writer and artist.  He was a pleasant-looking, genial man, well-built, with a healthy country complexion—the last man whom one would have thought destined to an early grave.

    Jean Ingelow was there, keenly interested to watch the crowd, and she actually persuaded two gentlemen (Dr. Donald MacLeod was one of them) to take her out into it, so thoroughly did she enjoy contact with happy, homely humanity.  She expressed herself as pained to see that Dr. George Macdonald's young daughters had brought play-books with them, which they read, instead of throwing themselves heart and soul into the humours of the animated scene before them.

____________________________

 

So far as I can tell, Jean's note reads as follows . . .