I hope it will not be esteemed impertinent, if I take upon myself to say that I think highly of many of these poems. Not only are they, in my opinion, sometimes faulty in form, and still more frequently wanting in finish—two qualities she professed not to take very highly—but, what is singular, they likewise occasionally lack melodiousness, upon which she laid great stress in estimating the work of others. But they have all the essentials of poetry. Poetry is thought completely fused in the crucible of feeling, and by one and the same operation wrought into metrical form. Now, what was most remarkable even in the ordinary conversation of Isa Blagden, and, I may add, what was exceedingly tantalising to the merely positive order of mind, was that she appeared incapable of thought apart from feeling. To me, as I believe to most of her acquaintances, it was her characteristic charm. Anybody less sentimental, in the depreciatory sense of that epithet, never existed; but she poured around the commonest matter an atmosphere of sentiment, or, more strictly speaking, of feeling, which appeared to set it in a fuller light, and to give it completeness, robbing it always of its naked hardness, and not unfrequently of its blunt injustice. It was a faculty which the judicious always envied her, even though it sometimes made her appear inconsistent, or, at least, inconsequent; a result at which we need not wonder, seeing how the reconciliation of things equally true, as of persons equally good, is in this world now and then an impossible task, even to that catholic
