labor, is the high gift of the home demonstration agent to the farm woman. It is the currency with which the laborer can purchase life itself, health, recreation, financial independence; the health, education and comradeship of her children, the respect of her husband, the esteem of her friends, the power to enjoy the splendors of nature which are a special bequest to the country worker, a compensation for the greater conveniences and more frequent diversions of town life, and one which most of them hold high in value.

Farm women love the country. What they desire is not the city, but normal conditions on the farm. The home demonstration agent is supplying the material out of which with a constantly increasing rapidity, normal conditions are developing. Her gifts are directly to the farm population but they permeate all our institutions, inasmuch as there is no barrier between the two civilizations, country and city, but a healthy metabolism, building up the living tissue of national life. HELEN JOHNSON KEYES.

LESSER LITERARY LIGHTS

BY MRS. W. S. COURTNEY

WHILST much has been written about the women novelists of the early nineteenth century, comparatively slight attention has been paid to its poetesses. It is true that most of their reputations died deservedly almost as soon as they were born and that not one of them can be mentioned in the same breath as their contemporaries, Miss Austen and Miss Burney. Who now, except the Dictionary of National Biography, remembers Maria Jane Jewsbury, or Caroline Bowles except that late in life she became Mrs. Southey? And even the Dictionary has forgotten Miss S. Evance (was she Sarah, Susanna, or Selina?), whose "earliest productions" were given to an indifferent world by her friend, Mr. James Clarke of Organford in Dorset. Charlotte Smith, whose "mournful Sonnets" he quotes as affording some sanction for Miss Evance's predilection for "indulging the petrifying gloom of lonely wretchedness, or the deep horror of wild despair," is less obscure, and her reasons for indulging in gloom, as far as we know, are better founded. But probably not one in twenty modern readers has so much as heard of her, though she is included in Mrs. Ellwood's Literary Ladies (1843) and the Dictionary gives her four columns.

One versifier there was, however, even in the days of George IV, deserving of more than a passing mention in any chronicle of women poets. She pales before the greater lights of the middle of the century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and-brightest of all-Christina Rossetti, a poet worthy to take her place amongst poets without tacking any feminine termination to the word. But Felicia Hemans-and for that matter Caroline Bowles and Charlotte Smith at their best-had the poet's sensibility, if they lacked the true poet's power of giving it expression.

Their failure was due in a great measure to absence of the critical spirit. They were at no trouble to select. Once recognized as professional poets, they seem to have felt bound to be always committing effusions to paper. They could let no event occur, and no guest arrive or depart, without addressing to it, him, or her, the appropriate copy of

verses.

This is especially true of Mrs. Hemans, whose forty years of life yielded poetic material to fill seven volumes, all promptly and for the most part justly forgotten except a few ballads and lyrics, which show what she might have done, had she developed the selective instinct of the true artist. To do her justice, she knew this, and late in life she regretted the facility, " amounting almost to improvisation," which poured out those Songs of the Domestic Affections, as well as the domestic necessities which impelled her to publish. But if only she had known the difference between the opening of the Pilgrim Fathers':

The breaking waves dashed high

On a stern and rock-bound coast

And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches tossed.

and the beginning of The Land of Dreams:
O spirit-land! thou land of dreams!

A world thou art of mysterious gleams.

she had been a truer poet.

She lived in an age reticent as regards its women. Such biographies of her as were written by her sister, Mrs. Hughes, and her friend, Henry F. Chorley, tells us little that is intimate. We know only that she was the fourth child of a Liverpool merchant named Browne, of good Irish lineage he could claim kinship with the Marquesses of Sligo and a mother half Italian and half German, whose old Venetian surname of Veniero had been teutonized into Wagner. It was a promising racial mixture. There was nothing British about Felicia Dorothea Browne except her earliest environment, and even that soon changed to the romantic northern shores of Wales, whither her father moved his family when she was but five years old. The most susceptible years of her childhood were spent at Grwych, not far from Abergele in Denbighshire, in an old

solitary, rambling house close to the sea and shut off from the land by a chain of rocky hills.

She seems to have been a remarkable child, remarkable not only for her talents but for her radiant beauty. About that there were no two opinions. All who remember her in her youth speak of her loveliness both as a child and as a young girl, and her portraits show that she retained much of this beauty even when ill-health had taken the gold from her hair and the color from her cheeks. She was also remarkable for her memory. "Why, Felice, you cannot have read that," a friend once exclaimed to the child of eight. Oh, yes I have and I will repeat it to you," and proof positive followed. followed. Her sister says that often when she seemed to be merely fluttering the leaves of the book, it would be found that she had not only read its contents but had committed them to memory. A devoted mother, herself an accomplished woman and particularly fond of reading aloud, brought the child up in an atmosphere of literature. Felicia had a natural gift for languages and learned readily French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and in later life German, and amongst her poems are to be found translations in verse from all these literatures. She was also not ignorant of Latin. And she was both musical and skilled with her pencil. No wonder that in the first freshness of her beauty, and fired by enthusiasm for martial deeds, she captivated her brother's friend, Capt. Hemans, when she was only sixteen, and married him three years later.

Before that time she was already winning recognition as a poet. Her first volume of verse appeared at fourteen. It was unkindly noticed in some review, and she was much upset; but she soon recovered and took to writing again, this time a poem on England and Spain. It was the period of the Peninsular War. Both her brother and her future husband were fighting in Spain; but her main interests were nearer home, and her second volume of poems was entitled The Domestic Affections, and other Poems.

Affectionate and devoted as Felicia was in all other relations of life, for some unexplained reason she was unhappy in her marriage. She herself never drew back the veil which hid from the world the reason why, after some years of wedded life and the birth of five sons, she and her husband practically separated and lived the rest of their lives apart. They had begun life together at Daventry near

Northampton. After a year they came to live with Felicia's mother at Bromwylfa in Flintshire. Five years later Captain Hemans went to Italy " for the sake of his health," impaired by fever during his military service. He settled in Rome and he never returned, and his wife, whose fifth son was born shortly afterwards, was apparently content to have it so, for she seems to have made no effort to rejoin him, though she continued to correspond with him and to consult him about his boys, two of whom went to him later on.

It is impossible not to speculate as to the reasons for this separation. It might have been the proverbial mother-inlaw; but Felicia's mother, to whom she was tenderly devoted, is described as a woman of uncommon sense and deep piety, not, one would imagine, likely to be a disturber of domestic peace, or inclined to think lightly of wifely duties. Moreover, joint establishments of two generations were common enough in England then, as common as they are still in France. Perhaps it was a spirit of detachment born of the war. Something of the kind is in the air now. Women have perforce learned during the last five years to manage their own lives and to bring up their children without masculine assistance. They had the same experience during the Napoleonic wars; they may have learned the same lesson that men, though no doubt desirable, are by no means indispensable. Any way, whatever grief the separation may have caused her, it did not embitter an essentially sunny nature. She herself was fond of quoting Mlle. de L'Espinasse's saying, " Un grand chagrin tue tout le reste," and she lived up to it in so far as she never allowed herself to be vexed by unkind criticism, or pernicious gossip.

For the rest her life was uneventful. She went once to London as a child of eleven but never again. After she had achieved reputation as a poet she paid visits to Scotland, where she made friends with Sir Walter Scott, and to the Lake country, where she met Wordsworth and addressed a poem to him. She maintained an affectionate correspondence with Miss Mitford, Mary Howitt, Maria Jewsbury, Joanna Baillie and others, and towards the end of her life she went to live in Ireland, where she died.

In America her poems had considerable success, as befitted the writer of The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. Dr. Bancroft, author of the History of the United States, was one of her correspondents; but the tribute she most