y diabolic miracles, she
having publicly preached heresy, shown herself a witch, and even tried hard
to corrupt the principles of six church pillars." In the mean time, all
this deistical confession of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the
interest of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon _both_ trials.
The very best witness called from first to last deposes that Joanna
attended these rites of her Church even too often; was taxed with doing so;
and, by blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though certainly not as a
fault. Joanna was a girl of natural piety, that saw God in forests,
and hills, and fountains; but did not the less seek him in chapels and
consecrated oratories.

This peasant girl was self-educated through her own natural meditativeness.
If the reader turns to that divine passage in _Paradise Regained_, which
Milton has put into the mouth of our Saviour when first entering the
wilderness, and musing upon the tendency of those great impulses growing
within himself--

"Oh, what a multitude of thoughts arise!" &c.

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which brooded over the heart
of Joanna in early girlhood, when the wings were budding that should carry
her from Orleans to Rheims; when the golden chariot was dimly revealing
itself that should carry her from the kingdom of _France Delivered_ to the
eternal kingdom.

It is not requisite, for the honor of Joanna, nor is there, in this place,
room to pursue her brief career of _action_. That, though wonderful, forms
the earthly part of her story: the intellectual part is, the saintly
passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution. It is unfortunate,
therefore, for Southey's "Joan of Arc," (which however should always be
regarded as a _juvenile_ effort,) that, precisely when her real glory
begins, the poem ends. But this limitation of the interest grew, no doubt,
from the constraint inseparably attached to the law of epic unity. Joanna's
history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, and both could not have been
presented to the eye in one poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme,
or else by involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, in the
latter;--this might have been done--it might have been communicated to a
fellow-prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself, in the same way that
Virgil has contrived to acquaint the reader, through the hero's mouth, with
earlier adventures that, if told by the poet speaking in his own p