[In the following essay, Birchenough offers an enthusiastic review of Ingelow's major works, focusing on Ingelow's love of nature and natural landscapes, the simplicity and sensitivity of her writings, and the light-heartedness of her family stories.]

In the summer of 1897, two remarkable women writers slipped away, quietly, and with as little observation as either would have desired, barely noticed indeed during the absorbing excitements of the Jubilee. The public had delighted to honour each in her day, but it had already passed into the stage of half-forgetting, for it has much to do in following after all the new gods of the last few years.

Yet Mrs. Oliphant and Jean Ingelow have never really faded out before all the newer reputations, as is the fate of those who only satisfy a momentary need, or a passing taste of their generation. They both wrote voluminously, and much of their work has already dropped away, because only a small proportion of it reached their high-water mark of achievement. But how good that is, and what a distinction it has! How delightful it is to come back to it when one takes up the old volumes again and snatches a respite from the flood of current fiction and poetry!

They were practically the last of the Victorian old guard, and with them vanished the remains of the older Victorian literary tradition. That tradition is different indeed to some of recent growth—they grow very fast nowadays. How unabashed and outspoken was the fulness of its emotions! What an uproar of domestic sentiments filled the literary world thirty-five or forty years ago! They resound even in its splendid poetry, they were rampant in the novels of the generation. Obvious and perfectly simple sentiments cannot go abroad naked and unashamed nowadays; it would shock us all. We generally take them out in masquerade dress, always suitably disguised. Their day of effulgence has met with the inevitable reaction, and each in turn is doubtless necessary and wholesome.

In many respects Mrs. Oliphant is hardly representative of her own generation, except in her lavishness of material and in her wealth of excellent situations, which continued up to the end. The play of her humour is too incessant for early Victorian days, and it has the sharp edge to it, a genuine touch of that disillusion which has been so strenuously sought and stridently proclaimed of late years. But if disillusioned, she was not rebellious; she believes no more in the breaking of contracts than in the divine nature of human institutions. To complain is silly, and also unbecoming in a gentlewoman, for Mrs. Oliphant, beyond all other novelists of her day, or indeed ours, possessed the secret of making heroines who are perfectly well-bred, who have the grand air without knowing it, as their natural heritage.

Her resignation, their resignation, to things as they find them, consists in accepting the situation with a good grace, but with a charmingly cynical smile and shrug of the shoulders.

The attitude of Jean Ingelow, on the other hand, is far more characteristic of her generation. There is no questioning at all, no trace of mockery in her acceptance of the established order in all things, religious and social, no matter how hardly the institution may press in individual cases. Perhaps the danger of not being allowed its rightful and permanent place, which threatens the small quantity of quite admirable poetry to be found amongst her writings, may partly arise from this wholesale submission; there is a tameness about it not likely to find much favour with the clamorous self-assertion of her successors to-day. Also Calverley's brilliant parodies, bringing into cruel and ludicrous prominence all the exuberant weaknesses of her least artistic moments, went far, no doubt, towards killing her popularity with the rising generation of the literary and critical classes.

With the great uncritical, sentimental democracy, Miss Ingelow is found to be still a favourite—another reproach, of course! Yet it should be remembered that if her volumes are to be seen on best parlour tables here, and especially in America, in company with those who shun reviews, she shares this doubtful position in common with another Lincolnshire poet, who yet remains the greatest poetic artist of our age. By this I do not mean to suggest any follies of comparison, I would only urge that popularity with the masses does not, in itself, constitute sufficient reason for sentence without hearing.

Not to read Jean Ingelow is to miss something from our store, a small quantity it may be, a few grains of gold sifted from a sand-heap, but genuine gold for all that. And what are they? First a poem without blemish, of complete and sustained art within its limits, of poignant pathos, of dramatic intensity, of perfect tunefulness, I mean of course, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire”; then two or three songs of a quality rare amongst modern song-writers, showing a complete understanding of the limits and nature of the medium chosen not often found; and many fragments to be gleaned from many pages, flashes of vivid impressionism, the heart of a summer day, a vision of colour, the sound of the tide on the shore, poetic and melodious to a haunting degree, by no means to be spared from our anthology. Is it possible to discard altogether a poet who may, at any moment, kindle from sheer dulness (but always tuneful dulness) into surprises such as—

And there hung a mist of bluebells on the slope and down the dell.

or this—

                                                                      . … the sultry air
Went out to sea and puffed the sails of ships
With thymy wafts, the breath of trodden grass.

or this, for its imitative sound—

And leisurely the opal murmuring sea
Breaks on her yellow sands.

Not to speak of the better-known, magic-lantern-like flashes of high summer in England, from “Divided”—

An empty sky, a world of heather,
          Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom;
We too among them wading together,
          Shaking out honey, treading perfume.
Crowds of bees are busy with clover,
          Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,
Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,
          Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.

“Seven Times Three” from “Songs of Seven” may be added to the number of her complete lyrics, with its admirable effect of fragrant darkness, and the newly awakened girlish heart, impatient at last to give the answer withheld till now—

I leaned out of window, I smelt the white clover,
          Dark, dark was the garden, I saw not the gate;
“Now if there be footsteps, he comes, my one lover—
          Hush, nightingale, hush! O sweet nightingale, wait
                                                  Till I listen and hear
                                                  If a step draweth near,
                                                  For my love, he is late!”

Whether it is the dying fall of its music, or the charm of its atmosphere, the passionate innocence of a young girl's love, there is much to remind one, and by no means unworthily, of “Maud,” in these verses.

It is with the terribly competent and immensely occupied people who are growing up now, that one would urge Jean Ingelow's cause to-day. That she is sentimental, or rather that the motifs of her poems often belong to the stereotyped order of romance which prevailed in her younger days, and that her artistic perceptions too often failed her, do not constitute reasons for not reading her at her best, for not reading her at all. Very few writers produce much first-rate work; to have produced any is a claim to the remembrance of all who care for literature. Jean Ingelow wrote a handful of poems, which aroused the rare, but always warm and generous appreciation of the greatest artist of her day. Lord Tennyson, indeed, sought her out personally, as did also the other rare singers and writers who have followed one another out of the world so fast of late years.

The present age is not so rich in poets that any can be spared out of that former abundance. With all its effectiveness, its extraordinary sense of power, and the breadth of its interests, perhaps for these very reasons, the end of the century does not at present make for poetry, not, at any rate, for such poetry as came from the Victorian old guard. Their successors are yet to be found; their cries are probably resounding within nursery walls at present, where, for the sake of the new generation, we wish them well with all our hearts.

In speaking of Miss Ingelow's work one feels less than the usual temptation to yield to that common, but I always think misplaced curiosity, to dwell on such irrelevant matters as the private life and domestic history of the writer. For, after all, what do the industry of the biographers, and the audacity of interviewers, profit us with regard to those whose achievements given to all the world alone matter to us? Do we enjoy Shelley's poems any the more because it is difficult now to chew the cud of them without certain intrusive, and generally hateful reminiscences recurring to the mind of his follies and extravagances in daily life, or still worse, of the callous and cruel egotism towards individual women, which was the practical outcome of “having loved Antigone” in some other phase of existence?

Do Wordsworth's most splendid lines gain anything from our knowledge that he was admirable in his domestic relations, and an intolerably egotistical talker? Even with regard to those whom we have actually known—but this is too dangerous ground—well, it is surely no disloyalty to the poets to wish to enjoy the best fruits of their great imaginations undisturbed by the encumbering irrelevances of their daily habits, moods and dyspepsias. Heaven knows they have at least as good a right to them as the rest of us, but between the prophets and the public there should surely be some kindly refraction of light, rather than that fierce glare of Röntgen ray penetrating power which modern biographers, and interviewers, love to apply to the hapless great ones. Thank heaven, Providence has seen fit to hide all that was perishable of Shakespeare so securely from our sight!

These remarks have little enough application to the quiet home-life of unselfish devotion to duty and contented beneficence, led by the poet who was so little anxious to claim the recognised privileges of her order. They accord, however, exactly with her wishes and her practice. She shrank from every sort of publicity with all the traditional horror of it, in which the gentlewomen of a former age were nurtured; it was fostered in her case by temperament as well. It is affirmed that she eluded the enterprising interviewer, even to the end, with a persistence equal to his own. She was always ready to give the soundest and wisest advice to the multitude of young persons with literary ambitions who applied to her, but she drew a determined line between that which she wrought for to the world and her private life, her own personality in fact. Such an attitude is sufficiently unusual nowadays to call for some consideration, even if the value of her work entitled her to less.

But the curious reader can still gather all that it concerns him to know about the personality of this writer in the true and legitimate way, by the unconscious self-revelation of her poems and prose writings. This secondary study, always fascinating to those possessed—as most women are—of the analytical passion, is extremely simple in the present instance.

Almost every page bears the tokens of that wonderful single-heartedness, that joyous simplicity of faith and resignation which her friends knew. The large charity, the complete sympathy, the quiet distinction, and, in her novels, the delightful humour, speak from her writings almost as plainly as they did in life to those who loved her with an affection which it was her secret to call forth.

As a poet, Jean Ingelow is, above all things, the singer of the English landscape. From her earliest childhood and its roamings over the wide Lincolnshire flats, she drank in those impressions of wold and pasture and sea-shore, which she was to flash, with such vivid effect, from her writings in later life. She was steeped in the subtle effects of light and shade over wide green country, in the sounds of sea and wind. She learnt early to watch with delight the faint heralds of changing seasons in the copses, the ways of the bird people, the springing of the unmarked multitude of flowers in meadow grasses. This sheer delight in nature for its own sake, and not merely as background for the human drama, is one of the distinctive characteristics of our race. In no English writer is it more manifest than in Jean Ingelow. Some lovely fleeting effect of springtide, or a summer revel of birds and flowers, will rise to her remembrance with a kind of intoxication at all sorts of unexpected moments, lifting her sometimes to the true lyric level, and sometimes, unfortunately, but kindling that fatal exuberance of word and epithet which Calverley seized and gibbeted. The rambling, and, to tell the truth, not interesting stories in verse, of which she wrote many, are yet wont to be happily enlivened by remembered sights, such as this one of an inland plain:—

Half-drowned in sleepy peace it lay,
          As satiate with the boundless play
Of sunshine in its green array.
. … The grassy sea, where clouds might find
A place to bring their shadows to.

(From “Scholar and Carpenter.”)

And again, this from the same poem:—

Adown the rock small runlets wept,
And reckless ivies leaned and crept,
And little spots of sunshine slept
          On its brown steeps and made them fair;
And broader beams athwart it shot,
Where martins cheeped in many a knot,
For they had ta'en a sandy plot
          And scooped another Petra there.

In “The Four Bridges,” one of those early Victorian romances of very youthful love and woe, so popular in the fifties and sixties, we suddenly light upon a childish reminiscence, a bird-drama full of intimate knowledge and observation. Miss Ingelow's work contains no happier and more effective episodes than those taken from bird-life:—

To yonder copse by moonlight I did go,
          In luxury of mischief, half afraid,
To steal the great owl's brood, her downy snow,
          Her screaming imps to seize, the while she preyed
With yellow cruel eyes, whose radiant glare,
Fell with their mother-rage, I might not dare.
Panting I lay till her great fanning wings,
          Troubled the dreams of rock-doves slumbering nigh,
And she and her fierce mate, like evil things,
          Skimmed the dusk fields; then rising with a cry
Of fear, joy, triumph, darted on my prey
And tore it from the nest, and fled away.

Of yet higher quality is the tragedy of the raven mother robbed of her young, from the “Songs on the Voices of Birds,” which are full of the poetry of the natural world:—

The polished tide with scarce a hint of blue,
          Washed in the bight; above with angry moan
A raven that was robbed, sat up in view,
          Croaking and crying on a ledge alone.
Stand on thy nest, spread out thy fateful wings,
          With sullen hungry love bemoan thy brood!
For boys have wrung their necks, those imp-like things
          Whose beaks dripped crimson daily at their food.
Thou madest many childless for their sake,
          And picked out many eyes that loved the light.
Cry, thou black prophetess! sit up, awake,
          Forebode; and ban them through the desolate night!

Quotation mutilates here a poem which maintains its quality throughout.

Miss Ingelow's success, which was very great, came to her suddenly, and as a happy surprise after long waiting and working. It was in 1863 that she found herself famous, after the publication of a volume of poems containing, amongst others, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire” (the finest and most finished piece of work that she ever achieved), “Divided,” “Songs of Seven,” and that admirable song, “When Sparrows build,” inserted for no apparent reason in a desultory conversation between rustics, called “Supper at the Mill.”

For many years before this, from the days indeed, of those childish roamings over the Lincolnshire fens, she had written constantly both in prose and verse, but had met with no recognition from the public.

In Lord Tennyson's life of his father, a letter written by the poet in 1849, makes mention of a volume of verse by Jean Ingelow, which had been submitted to him by a relative of hers. He evidently discerned much promise, along with “certain things (in the way of rhymes) which I count abominations. … If the book were not so good, I would not care for these specks.”

One gathers, however, from what remains of her earlier efforts, that it needed the insight and the generosity of the greater poet to discover all the latent quality and promise of the younger writer's work at this time. She served a long apprenticeship before attaining to the high level of poetic art reached in the volume which made her reputation.

Many English people, in especial many English women, mature with strange slowness. Their gifts, whether of character or of mind, take long forging before they are fully tempered for service. In this, as in so many other respects, Jean Ingelow was the true daughter of her race. Born in 1820, it was forty-three years before she touched high-water mark and won success; but now it came to her in abundant measure. Two of the most finely discriminating critics of the day, poets themselves, the late Professor F. T. Palgrave, and Mr. Gerald Massey, made haste to give public welcome to the new poet. I have before me now a brown and tattered copy of the Athenæum, dated July 25th, 1863, in which the delightful discovery is made known to the world. Praises so warm and generous coming from those high authorities must have gladdened the heart of the worker who had been patient for so long. Another most happy and valued result of her poetical achievements was that many friendships were formed and retained through life with those whose own work forms part of our national heritage. This cordial seeking-out of the new singer, who claimed so little for herself, by the most honoured of the poets and writers, brought more solid pleasure and lasting satisfaction to a spirit so little endowed with vanity than the immense tide of popularity which soon swept her name and works all over the English-speaking countries.

It is impossible not to linger for a moment over the finest gem of all her literary performance, I mean, of course, “The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire.” How truly the ominous note is struck at once, calling up that vague terror of an unknown danger drawing swiftly near, which the old grandmother recalls as she tells the story of the terrible tidal wave which suddenly swept up the bed of the river Lindis (in 1571), overwhelming the peaceful pasture lands with death and disaster. The warning is carried with the ringing of “The Brides of Enderby” from the belfry-tower of Boston Church, a signal of danger to those scattered about below over the flat land:—

Men said it was a stolen tyde—
          The Lord that sent it, He knows all;
But in mine ears doth still abide
          The message that the bells let fall;
And there was nought of strange, beside
The flights of mews and peewits pied
          By millions crouched on the old sea wall.

Unaware of the peril, her “sonne's faire wife, Elizabeth,” wanders away with their children to call in the cows with her accustomed milking song, and one of most melodious quality it is! But even while some were still tranquilly speculating

                                                                      Why this thing should be,
What danger lowers by land or sea?

that the warning tune should be rung,

I looked without, and lo! my sonne
          Came riding downe with might and main:
He raised a shout as he drew on,
          Till all the welkin rang again,
“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”
(A sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my sonne's wife Elizabeth.)

With what splendid movement the great wave presently sweeps through two or three verses.

And rearing Lindis backward pressed,
          Shook all her trembling bankes amaine;
Then madly at the eygre's breast
          Flung uppe her weltering walls again.
Then bankes came downe with ruin and rout—
Then beaten foam flew round about—
Then all the mighty floods were out.
So farre, so fast the eygre drave,
          The heart had hardly time to beat
Before a shallow seething wave
          Sobbed in the grasses at oure feet:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.

After the stress and terror of that night follows the anguish of loss, then despair finally passes with a gradual most skilful calming of the metre into the gentler sadness of memory. It is no surprise to learn that this poem aroused the special admiration of the late Poet-Laureate.

“Divided,” which has been quoted from, called forth more approval on its first appearance than the taste of to-day would perhaps incline to bestow upon it. It treats of the gradual parting of two lovers by the widening stream of life and circumstances, after a fashion which may appear somewhat too obvious. Fashion in sentiment changes quickly, and carries a curious revulsion in its transformations. But apart from its subject the poem is valuable for some of those vivid pictorial effects which make one realise that Miss Ingelow was a fine impressionist long before that convenient term had kindly emerged for our necessities.

Another volume of poems followed not long after the first, called by the name of a long story in blank verse, concerning Noah's mission and the building of the ark. There are only a few poets ever really able to wield that metre and lift it from the stone anvil, where it sticks like King Arthur's sword until seized by the right hand. It was not the medium suited to Miss Ingelow's temperament, and though her ear was too true to maltreat it, as so often happens, yet it did not attain to any of its proper strength and majesty. This same volume, however, contains a song of extreme grace and finish, called “Sailing beyond Seas,” one which few later writers have equalled for form and symmetry. It loses nothing, rather gains in fact, by being divorced from the music which snatched and wedded it soon after it appeared, and resounded through thousands of drawing-rooms all over the country. The tuneful and charming “Songs on the Voices of Birds” already alluded to are also to be found here, amongst other good things.

It has been truly said of Miss Ingelow that she remained untouched by “the strange disease of modern life.” A perfectly simple and comprehensive faith breathes through all her writings, both in prose and verse, her novels are penetrated by a rare Christianity, as generous and tolerant as it is whole-hearted and unselfconscious. She accepts the social order as it stands with the same confident tranquillity. In all her works one finds no traces of mental stress or storm, of the problems of belief, or of those other problems, the stalking-horses of the “new” novelists, or their scourges used to rouse a public, somewhat unwilling, and for the most part apathetic. Mercifully the “new” novelist is already dropping into the legendary past, along with the millinery of the season before last. Jean Ingelow's theology and social ethics are scarcely more démodés.

But it was impossible for one so keenly alive to all the influences of the natural world not to feel deeply the universal presence of that mystery of things which creeds and dogmas have not yet explained. What creature of sensitive imagination is not almost painfully aware at times of those yearnings of unknown kinship with the dumb green world, of the hauntings of its forgotten language, or of the dread and awe of its irresistible forces moving on their way serenely cruel, wholly indifferent to the human struggle? Such feelings turn to a kind of pantheism with many people, and especially with the poets; not so in the case of Miss Ingelow. Intensely alive to every impression, shaken and awed at moments by the inevitable dread of our weakness, she tends to no identification of force with its manifestations. Her scheme of things, the creator and the created, remains definite, distinct, perfectly anthropomorphic. The “Song of the Middle Watch,” seizes one of these weird moments of half-realisation with admirable effect, many people can testify to the truth of the second line:—

I woke in the night, and the darkness was heavy and deep;
                                                            I had known it was dark in my sleep,
                                                            And I rose and looked out,
And the fathomless vault was all sparkling, set thick round about
With the ancient inhabiters silent, and wheeling too far
For man's heart, like a voyaging frigate, to sail …
I look on you trembling, and think, in the dark with my soul,
“How small is our place 'mid the kingdoms and nations of God!
                                                            These are greater than we every one.”
And there falls a great fear, and a dread cometh over, that cries,
                                                            O my hope! Is there any mistake?
Did He speak? Did I hear? Did I listen aright if He spake?
Did I answer Him duly? For surely I now am awake,
                                                            If never I woke until now.’
And a light baffling wind, that leads nowhither, plays on my brow.

But reassurance follows swiftly on the heels of the dread, a cry for comfort is answered by the “still voice”:—

I had heard it erewhile, but the noises of life are so loud,
That sometimes it dies in the cry of the street and the crowd. …
                                                            O elder than reason, and stronger than will!
                                                            A voice when the dark world is still:
Whence cometh it? Father Immortal, Thou knowest! and we—
We are sure of that witness, that sense which is sent us of Thee:
For it moves and it yearns in its fellowship mighty and dread,. …
                                                            On its tongue are the laws of our life
                                                            And it counts up the times of the dead.

The childlike heart and the simple faith quickly find their own refuge from the pain of contemplating the incomprehensible, and the unimaginable; they discern in them all the personal element again.

I have loved them with love everlasting, the children of men,

answers the consoling voice in the darkness.

Space fails for further quotation from this Story of Doom volume, yet it contains, besides “Sailing beyond Seas,” many fragments imbedded in longer poems which serve but to emphasise the conviction, that no poet has less to lose and more to gain by selection than Jean Ingelow.

Her later poems seldom or never reach the level often touched in these first two volumes, and it is certainly by these that her reputation must abide.

Allusion has been made to the mass of her prose writings, witnesses to her immense industry, and to other qualities more attractive to the reader. These chiefly consist of long leisurely stories of family life, full of pleasantness—it is difficult to find another word equally descriptive—and all possess a certain distinction. They have a freshness of humour and a flow of radiant spirits at times in delightful combination. Take, for instance, the scenes between Valentine and Dorothea, the light-hearted boy and girl friends, in Off the Skelligs. I must confess to a great weakness for that rambling, guileless, disconnected chronicle of the Mortimer family, resumed again with flashes of its former charm, in another book almost equally long, called Fated to be Free. It is true that, after many years of recurrent study, I have never been able to unravel the intricacies of the Mortimer relationships with any clear understanding; and many other matters connected with them, such as the mysterious crime that left a ban on Valentine's inheritance of the family estate in Fated to be Free, still prove wholly beyond my grasp; but these trifles in no way interfere with an enjoyment not too often found in far more artistic products current to-day. How few people read Miss Ingelow's long stories now! Yet there is some touch of originality to be found even in the weakest of them. Don John, for instance, turns upon the time-honoured incident of a child being changed at nurse, but a fresh element is introduced into the situation by the lifelong doubt of distracted parents, as to whether the exchange was not doubled, and so restored to its original elements by one who died with her secret. The angelic conduct of the rich child's parents, through a life of unsolved doubt, is such as could only exist and be taken for granted in Miss Ingelow's golden world, where unfailing magnanimity is the common rule of life.

Sarah de Berenger turns upon another practically impossible situation and is wanting in that wonderful atmosphere of youth and lightheartedness which is so attractive in Off the Skelligs. For after all, one comes back to this book, which leaves above all the others a series of charming impressions on the mind. The waste of excellent material in it is nothing short of appalling in these days when many novelists have learnt a cheeseparing economy with regard to the stuff out of which plots are made. There is the wonderful childhood of the heroine and her brother, for instance, the weird survivors of a short-lived family of infant prodigies. In the case of the brother it leads to nothing whatever; while Dorothea, dearest, sprightliest and most fascinating of maidens, owes little indeed to the child who frightened one tutor away by her awesome stock of knowledge, and led another, a more enterprising young man, to cut her out dolls' clothes in desperation, by the help of a ruler and compasses, in the hope of diverting her infant mind into a more suitable channel.

What, again, can be more charming than the camaraderie later on between Dorothea and Valentine Mortimer? The quips, the sparrings, the quarrels and reconciliations of these two barely grown-up children, are the most charming feature of a picture of English family life from its most attractive aspect. Miss Yonge, the prophetess of the domestic novel, has never really equalled these episodes to my mind; there is a morbidness, an obtrusive overgrowth of conscience always meddling with the May family, and never permitting this pure and perfect play of young wit and laughter. On the other hand, Miss Yonge never perpetrated so terrible a young man as Mr. Brandon, the dreadfully self-conscious mentor of the family, who cannot understand or keep his heavy hand off so simple a relationship as that between his young brother and girl visitor, but must needs meddle with such painful consequences. The worst of it is that Miss Ingelow obviously intends her hero to be a model of all the manly graces and virtues, instead of the coxcomb and the prude he too often appears. Yet even Mr. Brandon has moments of relaxation, during which he also is betrayed into something of that young gaiety which sparkles through the book, and will not be submerged even after Valentine's bride has been abandoned just before her wedding and while the feast is being prepared. As it was Mr. Brandon who was really responsible for this embarrassing climax, so it is Mr. Brandon again who rises to the situation and provides the most suitable atonement for giddy Valentine's desperate behaviour. What could be more delightful than the first scene between the runaway bridegroom and his abandoned fiancée, after his return in disgrace to the house which had been decked for their wedding? Tragedy, dignity, and remorse, all the constituents one would expect to form part of so dramatic a meeting simple vanish away. Two children made a mistake, one of them behaved badly, but they soon get tired of being serious, and Valentine is presently making parodies and asking Dorothea to play his accompaniments again with that inimitable inconsequence which gives this domestic story so much unusual charm and reality.

Of Valentine, indeed, one could write a great deal more for one's own enjoyment, if consideration for the reader's patience permitted. It is seldom, indeed, that the jeune premier of fiction proves so irresistibly attractive to other persons than the one destined by his creator to fall a victim to his charms. And, indeed, it is not a romantic sentiment that Valentine excites—in spite of Mr. Brandon's obstinate conviction—either in Dorothea or the reader; but was his omniscient step-brother so stupid as to think so? This cracked-voiced, long-legged, light-hearted boy, with his bright hits, his inconsequence, his affectionate heart, and his perfect absence of self-consciousness, was calculated to drive his pedantically well-regulated mentor to despair; but Dorothea understood him, and loved him with just that same affectionate and sisterly superiority which it was obviously his nature to inspire. Valentine is adorable, and, of course, he was always in love in his own fashion; but what self-respecting young woman would have attached any importance to his enchanting and ridiculous declarations? Not to love Valentine would have been impossible, but to fall in love with him would have been equally preposterous. Clear-eyed Dorothea was not guilty of this absurdity; she was only pushed into the semblance of it by the indefatigable officiousness of blind Mr. Brandon.

Off the Skelligs is also notable for one of Miss Ingelow's best descriptions of scenery. These, too, are admirable in Fated to be Free. It is in this last book that her wonderful understanding of children is peculiarly apparent. She not only loved them, no uncommon taste fortunately, but she had that rare and complete understanding of them in the light of which there is no such thing as “a naughty child,” an expression which in itself constitutes the commonest and most complete confession of ignorance and incompetence on the part of the grown-up who complacently utters it.

That her stories, in a greater degree even than her poems, are of very varying quality, is undeniable. The best has its tracts of dulness; but even in one much over prosy and irrelevant, one may light upon such a sentence as this, about John Mortimer's children, in Fated to be Free—

The morning was warm, a south wind was fluttering the half-unfolded leaf-buds and spreading abroad the soft scents of violets and primroses, which covered the sunny slopes. John's children, when they came in at Mrs. Walker's drawing-room window, brought some of this delicate fragrance of the Spring upon their hair and clothes. Grown-up people are not in the habit of rolling about or tumbling down over beds of flowers. They must take the consequences and leave the ambrosial scents of the wood behind them.

The italics are not Miss Ingelow's, but they are irresistible. Oh! for an inspired blue pencil to walk up and down the length and breadth of her writings, cutting out much that is of no account, sifting out all the gold which lies buried in the sand!