l her feelings lest
they should mislead her. Of love, as a passion, she is afraid, no doubt
from a conscious inability to soften it down into friendship. I have
often applied two lines of her drama (p. 318) to her affections:

'Love's soft bands,
His gentle cords of hyacinths and roses,
Wove in the dewy Spring when storms are silent.'

By the by, in the next page are two impassioned lines spoken to a person
fainting:

'Then let me hug and press thee into life,
And lend thee motion from my beating heart.'

From the style and versification of this, so much her longest work, I
conjecture that Lady Winchelsea had but a slender acquaintance with the
drama of the earlier part of the preceding century. Yet her style in
rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely
free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture, which reminds one,
by its broad glare, its stiffness, and heaviness, of the double daisies
of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the
fields. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think there is a good deal of
resemblance in her style and versification to that of Tickell, to whom
Dr. Johnson justly assigns a high place among the minor poets, and of
whom Goldsmith rightly observes, that there is a strain of
ballad-thinking through all his poetry, and it is very attractive. Pope,
in that production of his boyhood, the 'Ode to Solitude,' and in his
'Essay on Criticism,' has furnished proofs that at one period of his
life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards
abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and
ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced.

If a second edition of your 'Specimens' should be called for, you might
add from Helen Maria Williams the 'Sonnet to the Moon,' and that to
'Twilight;' and a few more from Charlotte Smith, particularly,

'I love thee, mournful, sober-suited Night.'

At the close of a sonnet of Miss Seward are two fine verses:

'Come, that I may not hear the winds of night.
Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall.'

You have well characterised the poetic powers of this lady; but, after
all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of
Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a
poetess by being a dissenter, and concerned with a dissenting academy.
One of the most pleasing passa