give them unnatural magnitude and power--conceive the disorder of
passions, the perpetration of crimes, the tortures of remorse, or the
scorn of that human weakness, from which his own gentle bosom and
blameless life are pure and free. He can bring himself, in short, into
an imaginary and momentary sympathy with the wicked, just as his mind
falls of itself into a natural and true sympathy with those whose
character is accordant with his own; and watching the emotions and
workings of his mind in the spontaneous and in the forced sympathy, he
knows and understands for himself what passes in the minds of others.
What is done in the highest degree by the highest genius, is done by all
of ourselves in lesser degree, and unconsciously, at every moment in our
intercourse with one another. To this kind of sympathy, so essential to
our knowledge of the human mind, and without which there can be neither
poetry nor philosophy, are necessary a largeness of heart which
willingly yields itself to conceive the feelings and states of others
whose character is utterly unlike its own, and freedom from any
inordinate overpowering passion which quenches in the mind the feelings
of nature it has already known, and places it in habitual enmity to the
affections and happiness of its kind. To paint bad passions is not to
praise them; they alone can paint them well who hate, fear, or pity
them; and therefore Baillie has done so--nay start not--better than
Byron.

Well may our land be proud of such women. None such ever before adorned
her poetical annals. Glance over that most interesting volume,
"Specimens of British Poetesses," by that amiable, ingenious, and
erudite man, the Reverend Alexander Dyce, and what effulgence begins to
break towards the close of the eighteenth century! For ages on ages the
genius of English women had ever and anon been shining forth in song;
but faint though fair was the lustre, and struggling imprisoned in
clouds. Some of the sweet singers of those days bring tears to our eyes
by their simple pathos--for their poetry breathes of their own sorrows,
and shows that they were but too familiar with grief. But their strains
are mere melodies "sweetly played in tune." The deeper harmonies of
poetry seem to have been beyond their reach. The range of their power
was limited. Anne, Countess of Winchilsea--Catherine Phillips, known by
the name of Orinda--and Mrs Anne Killigrew, who, as Dryden says, was
made an angel, "in the