O city of pleasure, what did I see
   When passing through or staying in thee. 
   Bright shone the sun above, blue was the sky,
   Everywhere music heard, none seemed to sigh. 
   Beautiful carriages in Champs Elysee
   Filled with fair maidens on cushions easy. 
   Such was the outer side; what was within? 
   Most I was often told revelled in sin. 
   Sad its fate since I left, sadder ’twill be
   If they go on in sin as seen by me. 
   Let us hope, ere too late, warned by the past,
   They may seek pleasures more likely to last,
   Or, like to Babylon, it must decline,
   And o’er its ruins its lovers repine.

But London hardly fares much better, in spite of Mrs. Farrer’s own residence, at Campden Hill, if I may hazard the locality:—­

   To the tomb they must go,
   Rich and poor all in woe,
   Strange motley throng. 
   Wealth in its splendour weeps,
   Poverty silence keeps;
   None last here long. . . . 
   So much for thee, London.

Except in a spiritual sense, her existence was not an eventful one.  It was, I think, the loss of some neighbour’s child which suggested:—­

   Nellarina, forced exotic,
   Born to bloom in region fair,
   Thou wert to me a narcotic,
   Hope I did thy lot to share.

Any near personal sorrow she does not seem to have experienced, I am glad to say, else she might have regarded it as a grievance the consequences of which one dares not contemplate; you feel that Some One would have heard of it in no measured terms.  Certainty and content are, indeed, the dominating notes of her poetry rather than mere commonplace hope:—­

   I am bound for the land of Beulah,
   There all the guests sing Hallelujah. 
   No longer time here let us squander,
   But on the good things promised ponder.

It would be futile to discuss the exact position on Parnassus of a lady whose throne was secured on a more celestial mountain, even more difficult of access.  But I think we may claim for her an honourable place in that new Oxford school of poetry of which Professor Mackail officially knows little, and of which Dr. Warren (the President of Magdalen) is the distinguished living protagonist.  With all her acrid Evangelicalism she was a good soul, for she was fond of animals and children, and kind to them both in her own way; so I am sure some of her dreams have been realised, even if there has reached her nostrils just a whiff of those tolerating purgatorial fires which, spelt differently, she believed to be permanently prepared for the vast majority of her contemporaries.

To MRS. CAREW.

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