ess,
Geraldine,) whose fate somewhat resembled her own, said of her, "She was
a gay and gifted thing"; but Miss Jewsbury knew her only "in the
throng."

In short, I have rarely known a woman so entirely fascinating as Miss
Landon; and this arose mainly from her large sympathy. She was playful
with the young, sedate with the old, and considerate and reflective with
the middle-aged. She could be tender and she could be severe, prosaic or
practical, and essentially of and with whatever party she happened to be
among. I remember this faculty once receiving an illustration. She was
taking lessons in riding, and had so much pleased the riding-master that
at parting he complimented her by saying,--"Well, Madam, we are all born
with a genius for something, and yours is for horsemanship."

One of the many writers who mourned her wrote,--"Apart from her literary
abilities and literary labors, she was, in every domestic relation of
life, honorable, generous, dutiful, self-denying,--zealous,
disinterested, and untiring in her friendship."

Her industry was wonderful. She was perpetually at work, although
often--nay, generally--with little of physical strength, and sometimes
utterly prostrated by illness. Yet the work _must_ be done, as her poems
and prose were usually for periodical publications, and a given day of
the month it was impossible to postpone.

Poetry she wrote with great ease and rapidity. In one of her letters to
Mrs. Hall she says,--"I write poetry with far more ease than I do prose.
In prose, I often stop and hesitate for a word; in poetry, never. Poetry
always carries me out of myself. I forget everything in the world but
the subject that has interested my imagination. It is the most subtile
and insinuating of pleasures; but, like all pleasures, it is dearly
bought. It is always succeeded by extreme depression of spirits, and an
overpowering sense of bodily fatigue." And in one of her letters to me,
she observes,--"Writing poetry is like writing one's own native
language, and writing prose is like writing in a strange tongue." In
fact, she could have improvised admirable verses without hesitation or
difficulty.

She married Mr. Maclean, then Governor of the Gold Coast[B],--a man who
neither knew, felt, nor estimated her value. He wedded her, I am
convinced, only because he was vain of her celebrity; and she married
him only because he enabled her to change her name, and to remove from
that society in which ju