Averse, as we have declared ourselves, to any severe criticisms upon the
productions of female poets, we are constrained, in the case before us,
to speak with a plainness, savoring less of gallantry than truth. If
only “_some_ female errors” fell to the lot of Mrs. Katharine Augusta
Ware, we might, perhaps, “look in her face” and “forget them all;” but
so many are the faults of which she is guilty, that she must have a face
as beautiful as Raphael’s Fornarina, to cause us to forget or forgive a
tithe of the number. The lady, however, is neither beautiful nor
juvenile; she goes so far in her preface as to confess that she cannot
plead “_youthful_ diffidence” for her indiscretion in writing and
publishing a volume of verses. That she is not beautiful, we state on
positive intelligence. On this score, therefore, her sins of metrical
commission cannot be pardoned any more than because of her
juvenility—an excuse which she so magnanimously disclaims.
On the second leaf of Mrs. Ware’s book, which is not really as well as
figuratively _blank_, we perceive, paraded in capital letters, the words
“Copyright secured in America.” Now, if the copyright has in fact been
secured in America; if it has been entered at the office of the District
Clerk of New York or of any other State, as the law directs, it strikes
us that the dollar, charged as a fee in such cases, has been absurdly
and ridiculously thrown away. The proceeding was altogether
supererogatory. Booksellers are not particularly partial to publishing
collections of poetry at the best; but that any one of them should be so
insane as to re-publish a farrago like this, to enter into rivalry and
competition for such a cause, is an hypothesis which never could have
been engendered, except in the brain of a rhymster, dizzy with
self-conceit. From the fact, however, of a copyright having been secured
in America, we are well assured that the author is an American; even
this was unnecessary, because Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware has, in times
past, written her name to so many patches of poetry, that it is not
unfamiliar to pains-taking readers, at least on our side of the water.
She first made herself known to the literary world here as the Editor of
a monthly magazine, exquisitely christened “The Bower of Taste.” That
any work, with so Rosa-Matildaish a title, could have existed for a year
was marvellous; still more marvellous was it, that it survived the
merciless visitings of the Muse of Mrs. Ware. With the failure of this
undertaking, her literary biography, brief as the posy of a ring, would
terminate, were it not for the fact that, during some four years past,
she has resided in England, and manufactured, to order, occasional
lyrics for the Liverpool Newspapers. By some fatuity, which she has
provokingly left unexplained, in a preface written in the worst possible
taste, she has been impelled to the perpetration of the volume before
us. But, previous to exemplifications of its component properties, let
us give the preface entire, by way of showing how very unlike ladies,
and how very foolishly, feminine bards can behave on paper. If our
readers of both sexes do not laugh at the following outbreak of egotism
and vanity, they are less easily amused than we conjecture.
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[1] Power of the Passions and other Poems. By Mrs. Katharine Augusta
Ware. London: William Pickering, 1842. 1 vol. 12mo. pp. 148