The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,—

"It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, 'This is fine!'"

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in her "Notes of a Literary Life." "Is there anything under the sun," she exclaims, "that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?"

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and moved about only with severe pain. "It is not age," she said, "that has thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of one parent, and then of the other. I have only to be intensely thankful that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such exertion was removed."

"I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen," she said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, "and can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The "Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,—"Nobody in England can write the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays."

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," passed her married life. On the way she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart. Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were both disappointed. We listened long, but, although the air was full of birdsongs that evening, the sweet-voiced warbler was not of the choir. She talked much, as we rode along, of Kingsley and Ruskin, both of whom she loved as friends as well as authors. "John Ruskin," she said, "is good and kind, and charming beyond the common lot of mortals, and there are pages of his prose, to my thinking, more eloquent than any thing out of Jeremy Taylor."

Speaking of Humor, she said,—"Between ourselves, I always have a little doubt of genius, when there is none of that quality: certainly, in the very highest poetry, the two go together."

She greatly admired Béranger, and often spoke of him as the beautiful old man, the truest and best type of perfect independence. Hazlitt she ranked highly as an essayist, and she mentioned that she had heard both Charles Lamb and Talfourd praise him as not only the most brilliant, but the soundest of critics.

Among modern romances, those by the author of "The Scarlet Letter" seemed to impress her almost more than any others; and when "The House of the Seven Gables" was translated into Russian, she was filled with delight. Indeed, she was always among the first to cry, "Bravo!" over any good words for American literature.

"Do coax Mr. Hawthorne and Dr. Holmes," she said one day, "into visiting England. I want them to be welcomed as they deserve, and as they are sure to be."

Her interest in the French Emperor's career amounted to enthusiasm, and one day she told us a very pretty story about him which she knew to be true. She said, when he was in England after Strasbourg and before Boulogne, he spent a twelvemonth at Leamington, living in the quietest manner. One of the principal persons in that town, Mr. H., a very liberal and accomplished man, made a point of showing every attention in his power to the Prince; and they very soon became intimate. There was in the town an old officer of the Emperor's Polish Legion, who, compelled to leave France after Waterloo, had taken refuge in England, and, having a natural talent for languages, maintained himself by teaching French, Italian, and German in different families. The old exile and the young one found each other out, and the language-master was soon an habitual guest at the Prince's table, where he was treated with the most affectionate attention. At last Louis Napoleon was obliged to repair to London, but before he went he called on his friend Mr. H. to take leave. After warm thanks to him for all the pleasure he had experienced in his society, the Prince said,—

"I am about to prove to you my entire reliance upon your unfailing kindness by leaving you a legacy. I wish to ask that you would transfer to my poor old friend the goodness you have lavished on me. His health is failing,—his means are small; pray, call upon him sometimes, and see that the lodging-house people do not neglect him. Draw upon me for what may be wanting for his needs or for his comforts."

Mr. H. promised, and faithfully replaced the Prince in his kind attentions to his old friend. The poor old man grew ill at last, and died, Mr. H. defraying all the charges of his illness and of his funeral. "I would willingly have paid them myself," said he, "but I knew that would have offended and grieved the Prince. I found that provision had been made at his banker's to answer my drafts to a much larger amount than the actual debt."

Miss Mitford used to say that she kept this anecdote for non-admirers of the Emperor.

One day she came limping into the room, with her dog Fanchon following in the same lame plight,—she laughing heartily at their similarity of gait, and holding up a letter just in from the post.

"Here," said she, "is an epistle from my dear old friend, Lady M.," (Gibbon's correspondent,) "who at the age of eighty-three is caught by new books, and is as enthusiastic as a girl. She commissions me to inquire of you all about your new authoress, the writer of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' who she is, and all you know of her. So let me hear what you have to say about the lady."

During a brief visit to her cottage not long before she died, the chase was started one evening to find, if possible, the origin of the line quoted by Byron,—

"A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind."

In vain we searched among the poets, and at last all the party gave up in despair. I went up to London soon after, thinking no more of the lost line. In a few days, however, came a brief note, as follows:—

"Hurrah, dear friend! I have found the line without any other person's aid or suggestion! Last night it occurred to me that it was in some prologue or epilogue; and my little book-room being very rich in the drama, I have looked through many hundreds of those bits of rhyme, and at last made a discovery, which, if it have no other good effect, will at least have 'emptied my head of Corsica,' as Johnson said to Boswell; for never was the great biographer more haunted by the thought of Paoli than I by that line. It occurs in an epilogue by Garrick, on quitting the stage, June, 1776, when the performance was for the benefit of sick and aged actors.

"Not finding it quoted in Johnson convinced me that it would probably have been written after the publication of the Dictionary, and ultimately guided me to the right place. It is singular that epilogues were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays, 'Foscari,' and prologues at another, 'Rienzi.'

    "Ever most affectionately yours,
    "M.R. MITFORD.

"P.S. I am still a close prisoner in my room. But when fine weather comes, I will get down in some way or other, and trust myself to that which never hurts anybody, the honest open air. Spring, and even the approach of spring, sets me dreaming. I see leafy hedges in my sleep, and flowery banks, and then I long to make the vision a reality. I remember that my dog Flush, Fanchon's father, who was a famous sporting-dog, used, at the approach of the covering season, to hunt in his sleep, doubtless by the same instinct that works in me. So, as soon as the sun tells the same story with the primroses, I shall make a descent after some fashion, and, no doubt, aided by Sam's stalwart arm, successfully."

* * * * *

After leaving Three-Mile Cross for Swallowfield, her health, never of late years robust, seemed failing. In one of her letters to me she gives this pleasant picture of her home:—

"Ill as I am, my spirits are as good as ever; and just at this moment I am most comfortably seated under the acacia-tree at the corner of the house,—the beautiful acacia literally loaded with its snowy chains. The flowering-trees this summer, the lilacs, laburnums, and rhododendrons, have been one mass of blossoms, but none are so graceful as this waving acacia. On one side is a syringa, smelling and looking like an orange-tree,—a jar of roses on the table before me,—fresh gathered roses,—the pride of my gardener's heart. Little Fanchon is at my feet, too idle to eat the biscuits with which I am trying to tempt her,—biscuits from Boston, sent to me by kind Mrs. S., and which Fanchon ought to like; but you know her laziness of old, and she improves in it every day."

It was about this period that Walter Savage Landor sent to her these exquisite lines:—

"The hay is carried; and the Hours
Snatch, as they pass, the linden-flowers;
And children leap to pluck a spray
Bent earthward, and then run away.
Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves,
About whose frocks the fragrant leaves,
Sticking and fluttering here and there,
No false nor faltering witness bear.

"I never view such scenes as these
In grassy meadow girt with trees,
But comes a thought of her who now
Sits with serenely patient brow
Amid deep sufferings: none hath told
More pleasant tales to young and old.
Fondest was she of Father Thames,
But rambled to Hellenic streams;
Nor even there could any tell
The country's purer charms so well
As Mary Mitford.

"Verse! go forth
And breathe o'er gentle hearts her worth.
Needless the task: but should she see
One hearty wish from you and me,
A moment's pain it may assuage,—
A rose-leaf on the couch of Age."

In the early days of the year 1855 she sent, in her own handwriting, kind greetings to her old friends only a few hours before she died. Sweetness of temper and brightness of mind, her never-failing characteristics, accompanied her to the last; and she passed on in her usual cheerful and affectionate mood, her sympathies uncontracted by age, narrow fortune, and pain.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY

CHAPTER XVII

OLD SOPHY CALLS ON THE REVEREND DOCTOR

The two meeting-houses which faced each other like a pair of fighting-cocks had not flapped their wings or crowed at each other for a considerable time. The Reverend Mr. Fairweather had been dyspeptic and low-spirited of late, and was too languid for controversy. The Reverend Doctor Honeywood had been very busy with his benevolent associations, and had discoursed chiefly on practical matters, to the neglect of special doctrinal subjects. His senior deacon ventured to say to him that some of his people required to be reminded of the great fundamental doctrine of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives. Some of them were altogether too much pleased with the success of the Temperance Society and the Association for the Relief of the Poor. There was a pestilent heresy about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from a good conscience,—as if anybody ever did anything which was not to be hated, loathed, despised, and condemned.

The old minister listened gravely, with an inward smile, and told his deacon that he would attend to his suggestion. After the deacon had gone, he tumbled over his manuscripts, until at length he came upon his first-rate old sermon on "Human Nature." He had read a great deal of hard theology, and had at last reached that curious state which is so common in good ministers,—that, namely, in which they contrive to switch off their logical faculties on the narrow side-track of their technical dogmas, while the great freight-train of their substantial human qualities keeps in the main highway of common-sense, in which kindly souls are always found by all who approach them by their human side.

The Doctor read his sermon with a pleasant, paternal interest: it was well argued from his premises. Here and there he dashed his pen through a harsh expression. Now and then he added an explanation or qualified a broad statement. But his mind was on the logical side-track, and he followed the chain of reasoning without fairly perceiving where it would lead him, if he carried it into real life.

He was just touching up the final proposition, when his granddaughter, Letty, once before referred to, came into the room with her smiling face and lively movement. Miss Letty or Letitia Forrester was a city-bred girl of some fifteen or sixteen years old, who was passing the summer with her grandfather for the sake of country air and quiet. It was a sensible arrangement; for, having the promise of figuring as a belle by-and-by, and being a little given to dancing, and having a voice which drew a pretty dense circle around the piano when she sat down to play and sing, it was hard to keep her from being carried into society before her time, by the mere force of mutual attraction. Fortunately, she had some quiet as well as some social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much better bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places where so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of self-consciousness.

Miss Letty was altogether too wholesome, hearty, and high-strung a young girl to be a model, according to the flat-chested and cachectic pattern which is the classical type of certain excellent young females, often the subjects of biographical memoirs. But the old minister was proud of his granddaughter for all that. She was so full of life, so graceful, so generous, so vivacious, so ready always to do all she could for him and for everybody, so perfectly frank in her avowed delight in the pleasures which this miserable world offered her in the shape of natural beauty, of poetry, of music, of companionship, of books, of cheerful cooperation in the tasks of those about her, that the Reverend Doctor could not find it in his heart to condemn her because she was deficient in those particular graces and that signal other-worldliness he had sometimes noticed in feeble young persons suffering from various chronic diseases which impaired their vivacity and removed them from the range of temptation.