th April 1835. But she
wrote a good deal of verse meanwhile--plays, poems, "songs of the
affections," and what not. Her blameless character (she wrote chiefly to
support her children) and a certain ingenuous tenderness in her verse,
saved its extreme feebleness from severe condemnation in an age which
was still avid of verse rather than discriminating in it; and children
still learn "The boy stood on the burning deck," and other things. It is
impossible, on any really critical scheme, to allow her genius; but she
need not be spoken of with any elaborate disrespect, while it must be
admitted that her latest work is her best--always a notable sign.
"Despondency and Aspiration," dating from her death-year, soars close to
real sublimity; and of her smaller pieces "England's Dead" is no vulgar
thing.

Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of Tennyson and
the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or twilight of poetry, of
which one of its strangest if not least illuminative stars or meteors,
Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncomplimentary picture in a letter:
"owls' light" he calls it, with adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Southey; Scott, Campbell, and Moore, were all living, but the poetic
production of all had on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have
been in time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun
and moon of the time; but they had died before Byron. So the firmament
was occupied by rather wandering stars: some of them elders already
noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years between Keats (1795) and
the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). The chief of these were the pair of
half-serious, half-humorous singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public
estimation come Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor,
the Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Horne, and the first Lord Lytton; while a
third class--of critics' rather than readers' favourites--varying in
merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking higher than any of
the above, may be made up of George Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire
poet Barnes, Beddoes, Charles Whitehead, R. S. Hawker, and Thomas Wade.
To the second class must be added "L. E. L.," the poetess who filled the
interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning.

Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without disrespect as, if
not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. Persons of more
or less distinction (and of less or more cro