which appeared a year later with the “Lays of Many Lands” and miscellaneous pieces collected from the New Monthly Magazine and other periodicals.
In the spring of 1825 Mrs Hemans removed from Bronwylfa, which had been purchased by her brother, to Rhyllon, a house on an opposite height across the river Clwyd. The contrast between the two houses suggested her Dramatic Scene between Bronwylfa and Rhyllon. The house itself was bare and unpicturesque, but the beauty of its surroundings has been celebrated in “The Hour of Romance,” “To the River Clwyd in North Wales,” “Our Lady’s Well” and “To a Distant Scene.” This time seems to have been the most tranquil in Mrs Hemans’s life. But the death of her mother in January 1827 was a second great breaking-point in her life. Her heart was affected, and she was from this time an acknowledged invalid. In the summer of 1828 the Records of Woman was published by Blackwood, and in the same year the home in Wales was finally broken up by the marriage of Mrs Hemans’s sister and the departure of her two elder boys to their father in Rome. Mrs Hemans removed to Wavertree, near Liverpool. But, although she had a few intimate friends there—among them her two subsequent biographers, Henry F. Chorley and Mrs Lawrence of Wavertree Hall—she was disappointed in her new home. She thought the people of Liverpool stupid and provincial; and they, on the other hand, found her uncommunicative and eccentric. In the following summer she travelled by sea to Scotland with two of her boys, to visit the Hamiltons of Chiefswood.
Here she enjoyed “constant, almost daily, intercourse” with Sir Walter Scott, with whom she and her boys afterwards stayed some time at Abbotsford. “There are some whom we meet, and should like ever after to claim as kith and kin; and you are one of those,” was Scott’s compliment to her at parting. One of the results of her Edinburgh visit was an article, full of praise, judiciously tempered with criticism, by Jeffrey himself for the Edinburgh Review. Mrs Hemans returned to Wavertree to write her Songs of the Affections, which were published early in 1830. In the following June, however, she again left home, this time to visit Wordsworth and the Lake country; and in August she paid a second visit to Scotland. In 1831 she removed to Dublin. Her poetry of this date is chiefly religious. Early in 1834 her Hymns for Childhood, which had appeared some years before in America, were published in Dublin. At the same time appeared her collection of National Lyrics, and shortly afterwards Scenes and Hymns of Life. She was planning also a series of German studies, one of which, on Goethe’s Tasso, was completed and published in the New Monthly Magazine for January 1834. In intervals of acute suffering she wrote the lyric Despondency and Aspiration, and dictated a series of sonnets called Thoughts during Sickness, the last of which, “Recovery,” was written when she fancied she was getting well. After three months spent at Redesdale, Archbishop Whately’s country seat, she was again brought into Dublin, where she lingered till spring. Her last poem, the Sabbath Sonnet, was dedicated to her brother on Sunday April 26th, and she died in Dublin on the 16th of May 1835 at the age of forty-one.
Mrs Hemans’s poetry is the production of a fine imaginative and enthusiastic temperament, but not of a commanding intellect or very complex or subtle nature. It is the outcome of a beautiful but singularly circumscribed life, a life spent in romantic seclusion, without much worldly experience, and warped and saddened by domestic unhappiness and physical suffering. An undue preponderance of the emotional is its prevailing characteristic. Scott complained that it was “too poetical,” that it contained “too many flowers” and “too little fruit.” Many of her short poems, such as “The Treasures of the Deep,” “The Better Land,” “The Homes of England,” “Casabianca,” “The Palm Tree,” “The Graves of a Household,” “The Wreck,” “The Dying Improvisatore,” and “The Lost Pleiad,” have become standard English lyrics. It is on the strength of these that her reputation must rest.
Mrs Hemans’s Poetical Works were collected in 1832; her Memorials &c., by H. F. Chorley (1836).
HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, a market-town and municipal borough in the Watford parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England, 25 m. N.W. from London, with a station on a branch of the Midland railway from Harpenden, and near Boxmoor station on the London and North Western main line. Pop. (1891) 9678; (1901) 11,264. It is pleasantly situated in the steep-sided valley of the river Gade, immediately above its junction with the Bulbourne, near the Grand Junction canal. The church of St Mary is a very fine Norman building with Decorated additions. Industries include the manufacture of paper, iron founding, brewing and tanning. Boxmoor, within the parish, is a considerable township of modern growth. Hemel Hempstead is governed by a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 7184 acres.
Settlements in the neighbourhood of Hemel Hempstead (Hamalamstede, Hemel Hampsted) date from pre-Roman times, and a Roman villa has been discovered at Boxmoor. The manor, royal demesne in 1086, was granted by Edmund Plantagenet in 1285 to the house of Ashridge, and the town developed under monastic protection. In 1539 a charter incorporated the bailiff and inhabitants. A mayor, aldermen and councillors received governing power by a charter of 1898. The town has never had parliamentary representation. A market on Thursday and a fair on the feast of Corpus Christi were conferred in 1539. A statute fair, for long a hiring fair, originated in 1803.
HEMEROBAPTISTS, an ancient Jewish sect, so named from their observing a practice of daily ablution as an essential part of religion. Epiphanius (Panarion, i. 17), who mentions their doctrine as the fourth heresy among the Jews, classes the Hemerobaptists doctrinally with the Pharisees (q.v.) from whom they differed only in, like the Sadducees, denying the resurrection of the dead. The name has been sometimes given to the Mandaeans on account of their frequent ablutions; and in the Clementine Homilies (ii. 23) St John the Baptist is spoken of as a Hemerobaptist. Mention of the sect is made by Hegesippus (see Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iv. 22) and by Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Trypho, § 80. They were probably a division of the Essenes.
HEMICHORDA, or Hemichordata, a zoological term introduced by W. Bateson in 1884, without special definition, as equivalent to Enteropneusta, which then included the single genus Balanoglossus, and now generally employed to cover a group of marine worm-like animals believed by many zoologists to be related to the lower vertebrates and so to represent the invertebrate stock from which Vertebrates have been derived. Vertebrates, or as they are sometimes termed Chordates, are distinguished from other animals by several important features. The chief of these is the presence of an elastic rod, the notochord, which forms the longitudinal axis of the body, and which persists throughout life in some of the lowest forms, but which appears only in the embryo of the higher forms, being replaced by the jointed backbone or vertebral column. A second feature is the development of outgrowths of the pharynx which unite with the skin of the neck and form a series of perforations leading to the exterior. These structures are the gill-slits, which in fishes are lined with vascular tufts, but which in terrestrial breathing animals appear only in the embryo. The third feature of importance is the position of structure of the central nervous system, which in all the Chordates lies dorsally to the alimentary canal and is formed by the sinking in of a longitudinal media dorsal groove. Of these structures the Vertebrata or Craniata possess all three in a typical form; the Cephalochordata (see Amphioxus) also possess them, but the notochord extends throughout the whole length of the body to the extreme tip of the snout; the Urochordata (see Tunicata) possess them in a larval condition, but the notochord is present only in the tail, whilst in the adult the notochord disappears and the nervous system becomes profoundly modified; in the Hemichorda, the respiratory organs very closely resemble gill-slits, and structures comparable with the notochord and the tubular dorsal nervous system are present.
The Hemichorda include three orders, the Phoronidea (q.v.), the Pterobranchia (q.v.) and the Enteropneusta (see Balanoglossus),
