grave the love, the reverence, the regrets, of all who had ever enjoyed
the privilege of her society." The graves of these friends are side by
side in the old churchyard at Hampstead.

The exquisite delicacy and wealth of Mrs. Hemans's nature, her
winning beauty, modesty, and sweetness, drew a circle of dear friends
around her wherever she tarried. In her poems and letters and
memoirs, they numerously appear, in becoming lights, men and women,
lofty and lowly in rank, from Wordsworth and Scott, to whom she paid
visits, giving and receiving the choicest delight, to her own
dependants, who worshipped her. She tells one of her correspondents,
"I wish I could give you the least idea of what kindness is to me,
how much more, how far dearer, than fame." The most interesting of
her many prized friendships is that which she formed with Miss
Jewsbury, who, having long admired her with the whole ardor of her
powerful nature, passed a summer in Wales, near Mrs. Hemans, for the
express purpose of making her acquaintance. The enthusiastic
admiration on one side, the grateful appreciation of it on the other,
the spiritual purity and earnestness and high literary and personal
aspirations on both sides, quickly produced an attachment between
these two gifted women, which yielded them full measures of
encouragement, comfort, and bliss. They had just those resemblances
and those contrasts of person and mind, together with community of
moral aims, which made them delightfully stimulative to each other.
Miss Jewsbury dedicated to her friend her "Lays of Leisure Hours,"
addressed her in the poem "To an Absent One," and described her in
the first of the "Poetical Portraits" contained in the same book.
Also, in her "Three Histories," Mrs. Hemans is the original of
Egeria. "Egeria was totally different from any other woman I had ever
seen, either in Italy or England. She did not dazzle, she subdued,
me. I never saw another woman so exquisitely feminine. Her movements
were features. Her strength and her weakness alike lay in her
affections. Her gladness was like a burst of sunlight; and if, in her
depression, she resembled night, it was night wearing her stars. She
was a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman, the Italy
of human beings." Miss Jewsbury married, and went to India, where she
soon died. Mrs. Hemans paid a heartfelt tribute to her memory, in the
course of which she says, "There was a strong chain of interest
between us,