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s. Vague and objectless longings--the cold lights of mere fancy, are the characteristics of those writers. Sometimes we discover a regret, or a mournful remembrance, but so obscure as to be nearly lost in a vastly diffused hope of some good which is not realized. We have endeavored to discover if the sentiment of conjugal love were there, but we are disappointed. To us, Europeans, who are overwhelmed with romances, in which this chaste sentiment is analyzed and written of in a manner to produce absolute nausea, it is not, perhaps, known how much discretion there is in this passionless exterior, and how commendable it is that so holy a sentiment should not pass the sacred inclosures of the female heart; that it should not wound the delicacies of its own natural reserve and silence. The talents of these writers are exercised upon permitted subjects, and not, as too often among our own female poets, upon subjects at once easy and unlawful. This modesty and reserve throughout the work become necessarily monotonous--but it is of no great consequence to us. We would not have written if it had not been to acknowledge specimens of real literary excellence. But we have in the work itself what is of considerable value as reflecting in some degree the American character. We can use these elegies, reveries and monodies as a means of discovering the nature of the virtues thus brought out from obscurity, though in coloring too pale and uniform. The life of these women possesses nothing adventurous, passionate, or eccentric. It is composed of three facts: birth, marriage, and death. As to the intervals between these three solemn events, the biographer says little, and we suppose they are filled with exemplary virtues and the accomplishment of duties which human and divine law imposes upon the woman. Three of these, however, are distinguished from the others by their position in society, or by their talents, and constitute the only singularities of the work. We have just remarked, that these _poesies_ are all written by the daughters of rich merchants, lawyers, and doctors of divinity; two, however, are of low condition--a negress, Philis Wheatley Peters; and a domestic, Maria James. The negress belonged to the close of the eighteenth century, and was born at a time to justify the pamphlets of Franklin on slavery, and the demands of philanthropy. This "daughter of the murky Senegal," as one of her critics called her, has been, thank
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