There is no doubt that Mrs. Hemans exerted a distinct influence and made a distinct impression on the national character.  She left the world unmistakably better for her having lived in it.  Many do not realise what great abiding results flowed from her work.  And one chief way in which she was productive of so much good to her race was this:  she raised the standard of popular poetry, raised it at a time when it sadly needed raising, to a higher level and tone.  “Though she wrote so much and in an age when Byron was the favourite poet of Englishmen, not a line left her pen that indicated anything but a spotless and habitually lofty mind.”  It was no mean achievement to establish the popularity of a poetry which was by its purity a rebuke to much that had hitherto passed current and received applause.

How well she succeeded in accomplishing the ends which, as we learn in that beautiful piece of hers, “A Poet’s Dying Hymn,” she had set before herself and others who gave expression to their thoughts in verse!

“And if Thy Spirit on Thy child hath shed
The gift, the vision of the unsealed eye,
To pierce the mist o’er life’s deep meanings spread,
To reach the hidden fountain-urns that lie
Far in man’s heart—­if I have kept it free
And pure, a consecration unto Thee,
I bless Thee, O my God!

* * * * *

Not for the brightness of a mortal wreath,
Not for a place ’midst kingly minstrels dead,
But that, perchance, a faint gale of Thy breath,
A still small whisper, in my song hath led
One struggling spirit upwards to Thy throne,
Or but one hope, one prayer—­for this alone
I bless Thee, O my God!”

Many a straggler in life’s perplexities found sympathy and help in the sweet verses of this poetess.  They felt that there was one struggling by their side, one who could rest on God’s promises, and could almost insensibly “weave links for intercourse with God.”

I.

EARLY DAYS.

Felicia Dorothea Browne was born in Duke Street, Liverpool, on the 25th of September, 1793.  She was the second daughter and the fourth child of a family of three sons and three daughters.  Her father, who was a native of Ireland, was a merchant of good position.  Her mother, whose maiden name was Wagner, was the daughter of the Venetian consul in Liverpool.  The original name was Veniero, but as the result of German alliances it had assumed this German form.  Three members of the family had risen to the dignity of Doge.  The first six years of Felicia’s life were spent in Liverpool.  Then commercial losses compelled her father to break up his establishment in that city and remove to Wales.  The next nine years of her life were spent at Gwyrch, near Abergele, in North Wales.  The house was a spacious old mansion, close to the seashore, and shut in on the land side by lofty hills.  Surely a fit place for