to the writer! Felicia Browne was fourteen
years old when a collection of her poems was published. The earliest of
these early compositions was written when she was only eight years
of age.

The volume of poems appeared in 1808. Perhaps it would have been a more
judicious course on the part of her friends if they had prevented them
from appearing. The young girl of fourteen years was by her youth
ill-fitted to face the criticisms of the literary world.

At this time there came across her path the person whose name she was
afterwards to bear--Captain Hemans, of the King's Own Regiment. He was
on a visit in the neighbourhood of Gwyrch, and soon became an intimate
friend in the family which contained Felicia amongst its members. Before
he was called upon to embark with his regiment for Spain, an impression
had been created which three years' absence did not efface on either
side. The friends of both parties hoped that it might be otherwise, and
that nothing would come of this attachment. But their hopes were not to
be realised.

III.

MARRIAGE.

In 1809 the Browne family removed to Bronwylfa, near St. Asaph. Her
self-education and her literary work went on side by side.

Captain Hemans returned to Wales in 1811, and in the following year he
was married to Miss Browne. His appointment as adjutant to the
Northamptonshire Militia caused them to take up their residence at
Daventry, a neighbourhood by its tameness strangely contrasting with her
"own mountain-land." But she was not to be long away from her old home.
The next year, on the reduction of the corps, a return was made to
Bronwylfa. Mrs. Hemans was never again, until death parted them, to
leave her mother, "by whose unwearied spirit of love and hope she was
encouraged to bear on through all the obstacles which beset her path." A
period of domestic privacy in association with literary occupation and
study followed. Five children, all sons, were given to her. One can
easily understand how many calls there were now on her, as, her marriage
being not altogether a happy one, she had to arrange the education of
her children. How well she trained them, not only in temporal wisdom,
but in the highest of all wisdom, many evidences show. We may anticipate
and insert an anecdote of one of her boys at the age of eleven. She had
been reading to him Lord Byron's magnificent address to the sea:--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue ocean, roll."

He listened with breat