hearts cannot be divided.
Years went by, and I was at last to see the author of the poems I had
loved in girlhood. I had wondered how she looked, what was her manner,
and what were her surroundings.
In Kensington, a suburb of London, in a two-story-and-a-half stone
house, cream-colored, lives Jean Ingelow. Tasteful grounds are in
front of the home, and in the rear a large lawn bordered with many
flowers, and conservatories; a real English garden, soft as velvet,
and fragrant as new-mown hay. The house is fit for a poet; roomy,
cheerful, and filled with flowers. One end of the large, double
parlors seemed a bank of azalias and honeysuckles, while great bunches
of yellow primrose and blue forget-me-not were on the tables and in
the bay-windows.
But most interesting of all was the poet herself, in middle life, with
fine, womanly face, friendly manner, and cultivated mind. For an hour
we talked of many things in both countries. Miss Ingelow showed great
familiarity with American literature and with our national questions.
While everything about her indicated deep love for poetry, and a keen
sense of the beautiful, her conversation, fluent and admirable,
showed her to be eminently practical and sensible, without a touch of
sentimentality. Her first work in life seems to be the making of her
two brothers happy in the home. She usually spends her forenoons
in writing. She does her literary work thoroughly, keeping her
productions a long time before they are put into print. As she is
never in robust health, she gives little time to society, and passes
her winters in the South of France or Italy. A letter dated Feb. 25,
from the Alps Maritime, at Cannes, says, "This lovely spot is full of
flowers, birds, and butterflies." Who that recalls her _Songs on
the Voices of Birds_, the blackbird, and the nightingale, will not
appreciate her happiness with such surroundings?
With great fondness for, and pride in, her own country, she has the
most kindly feelings toward America and her people. She says in the
preface of her novel, _Fated to be Free_, concerning this work and
_Off the Skelligs_, "I am told that they are peculiar; and I feel that
they must be so, for most stories of human life are, or at least aim
at being, works of art--selections of interesting portions of life,
and fitting incidents put together and presented as a picture is; and
I have not aimed at producing a work of art at all, but a piece of
nature." And then she goes on to explain her position to "her American
friends," for, she says, "I am sure you more than deserve of me some
efforts to please you. I seldom have an opportunity of saying how
truly I think so."
Jean Ingelow's life has been a quiet but busy and earnest one. She was
born in the quaint old city of Boston, England, in 1830. Her father
was a well-to-do banker; her mother a cultivated woman of Scotch
descent, from Aberdeenshire. Jean grew to womanhood in the midst of
eleven brothers and sisters, without the fate of struggle and poverty,
so common among the great.
She writes to a friend concerning her childhood:--
"As a child, I was very happy at times, and generally wondering at
something.... I was uncommonly like other children.... I remember seeing
a star, and that my mother told me of God who lived up there and made
the star. This was on a summer evening. It was my first hearing of
God, and made a great impression on my mind. I remember better than
anything that certain ecstatic sensations of joy used to get hold of
me, and that I used to creep into corners to think out my thoughts by
myself. I was, however, extremely timid, and easily overawed by fear.
We had a lofty nursery with a bow-window that overlooked the river. My
brother and I were constantly wondering at this river. The coming up
of the tides, and the ships, and the jolly gangs of towers ragging
them on with a monotonous song made a daily delight for us. The
washing of the water, the sunshine upon it, and the reflections of the
waves on our nursery ceiling supplied hours of talk to us, and days
of pleasure. At this time, being three years old, ... I learned my
letters.... I used to think a good deal, especially about the origin
of things. People said often that they had been in this world, that
house, that nursery, before I came. I thought everything must have
begun when I did.... No doubt other children have such thoughts,
but few remember them. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable among
intelligent people than the recollections they retain of their early
childhood. A few, as I do, remember it all. Many remember nothing
whatever which occurred before they were five years old.... I have
suffered much from a feeling of shyness and reserve, and I have not
been able to do things by trying to do them. What comes to me comes of
its own accord, and almost in spite of me; and I have hardly any power
when verses are once written to make them any better.... There were no
hardships in my youth, but care was bestowed on me and my brothers and
sisters by a father and mother who were both cultivated people."
To another friend she writes: "I suppose I may take for granted that
mine was the poetic temperament, and since there are no thrilling
incidents to relate, you may think you should like to have my views
as to what that means. I cannot tell you in an hour, or even in a day,
for it means so much. I suppose it, of its absence or presence, to
make far more difference between one person and another than any
contrast of circumstances can do. The possessor does not have it for
nothing. It isolates, particularly in childhood; it takes away some
common blessings, but then it consoles for them all."
With this poetic temperament, that saw beauty in flower, and sky, and
bird, that felt keenly all the sorrow and all the happiness of the
world about her, that wrote of life rather than art, because to live
rightly was the whole problem of human existence, with this poetic
temperament, the girl grew to womanhood in the city bordering on the
sea.
Boston, at the mouth of the Witham, was once a famous seaport, the
rival of London in commercial prosperity, in the thirteenth century.
It was the site of the famous monastery of St. Botolph, built by
a pious monk in 657. The town which grew up around it was called
Botolph's town, contracted finally to Boston. From this town Reverend
John Cotton came to America, and gave the name to the capital of
Massachusetts, in which he settled. The present famous old church of
St. Botolph was founded in 1309, having a bell-tower three hundred
feet high, which supports a lantern visible at sea for forty miles.
The surrounding country is made up largely of marshes reclaimed from
the sea, which are called fens, and slightly elevated tracts of land
called moors. Here Jean Ingelow studied the green meadows and the
ever-changing ocean.
Her first book, _A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings_, was
published in 1850, when she was twenty, and a novel, _Allerton and
Dreux_, in 1851; nine years later her _Tales of Orris_. But her
fame came at thirty-three, when her first full book of _Poems_ was
published in 1863. This was dedicated to a much loved brother, George
K. Ingelow:--
"YOUR LOVING SISTER
OFFERS YOU THESE POEMS, PARTLY AS
AN EXPRESSION OF HER AFFECTION, PARTLY FOR THE
PLEASURE OF CONNECTING HER EFFORT
WITH YOUR NAME."
The press everywhere gave flattering notices. A new singer had come;
not one whose life had been spent in the study of Greek roots, simply,
but one who had studied nature and humanity. She had a message to give
the world, and she gave it well. It was a message of good cheer, of
earnest purpose, of contentment and hope.
"What though unmarked the happy workman toil,
And break unthanked of man the stubborn clod?
It is enough, for sacred is the soil,
Dear are the hills of God.
"Far better in its place the lowliest bird
Should sing aright to him the lowliest song,
Than that a seraph strayed should take the word
And sing his glory wrong."
"But like a river, blest where'er it flows,
Be still receiving while it still bestows."
"That life
Goes best with those who take it best.
--it is well
For us to be as happy as we can!"
"Work is its own best earthly meed,
Else have we none more than the sea-born throng
Who wrought those marvellous isles that bloom afar."
The London press said: "Miss Ingelow's new volume exhibits abundant
evidence that time, study, and devotion to her vocation have both
elevated and welcomed the powers of the most gifted poetess we
possess, now that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Adelaide Proctor sing
no more on earth. Lincolnshire has claims to be considered the Arcadia
of England at present, having given birth to Mr. Tennyson and our
present Lady Laureate."
The press of America was not less cordial. "Except Mrs. Browning, Jean
Ingelow is first among the women whom the world calls poets," said the
_Independent_.
The songs touched the popular heart, and some, set to music, were sung
at numberless firesides. Who has not heard the _Sailing beyond Seas?_
"Methought the stars were blinking bright,
And the old brig's sails unfurled;
I said, 'I will sail to my love this night
At the other side of the world.'
I stepped aboard,--we sailed so fast,--
The sun shot up from the bourne;
But a dove that perched upon the mast
Did mourn, and mourn, and mourn.
O fair dove! O fond dove!
And dove with the white breast,
Let me alone, the dream is my own,
And my heart is full of rest.
"My love! He stood at my right hand,
His eyes were grave and sweet.
Methought he said, 'In this fair land,
O, is it thus we meet?
Ah, maid most dear, I am not here;
I have no place,--no part,--
No dwelling more by sea or shore!
But only in thy heart!'
O fair dove! O fond dove!
Till night rose over the bourne,
The dove on the mast as we sailed past,
Did mourn, and mourn, and mourn."
Edmund Clarence Stedman, one of the ablest and fairest among American
critics, says: "As the voice of Mrs. Browning grew silent, the songs
of Miss Ingelow began, and had instant and merited popularity. They
sprang up suddenly and tunefully as skylarks from the daisy-spangled,
hawthorn-bordered meadows of old England, with a blitheness long
unknown, and in their idyllic underflights moved with the tenderest
currents of human life. Miss Ingelow may be termed an idyllic lyrist,
her lyrical pieces having always much idyllic beauty. _High Tide,
Winstanley, Songs of Seven, and the Long White Seam_ are lyrical
treasures, and the author especially may be said to evince that
sincerity which is poetry's most enduring warrant."
_Winstanley_ is especially full of pathos and action. We watch this
heroic man as he builds the lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks:--
"Then he and the sea began their strife,
And worked with power and might:
Whatever the man reared up by day
The sea broke down by night.
* * * * *
"A Scottish schooner made the port
The thirteenth day at e'en:
'As I am a man,' the captain cried,
'A strange sight I have seen;
"'And a strange sound heard, my masters all,
At sea, in the fog and the rain,
Like shipwrights' hammers tapping low,
Then loud, then low again.
"'And a stately house one instant showed,
Through a rift, on the vessel's lea;
What manner of creatures may be those
That build upon the sea?'"
After the lighthouse was built, Winstanley went out again to see his
precious tower. A fearful storm came up, and the tower and its builder
went down together.
Several books have come from Miss Ingelow's pen since 1863. The
following year, Studies for Stories was published, of which the
Athenaeum said, "They are prose poems, carefully meditated, and
exquisitely touched in by a teacher ready to sympathize with every joy
and sorrow." The five stories are told in simple and clear language,
and without slang, to which she heartily objects. For one so rich
in imagination as Miss Ingelow, her prose is singularly free from
obscurity and florid language.
_Stories told to a Child_ was published in 1865, and _A Story of Doom,
and Other Poems_, in 1868, the principal poem being drawn from the
time of the Deluge. _Mopsa the Fairy_, an exquisite story, followed a
year later, with _A Sister's Bye-hours_, and since that time, _Off the
Skelligs_ in 1872, _Fated to be Free_ in 1875, _Sarah de Berenger_
in 1879, _Don John_ in 1881, and _Poems of the Old Days and the New_,
recently issued. Of the latter, the poet Stoddard says: "Beyond all
the women of the Victorian era, she is the most of an Elizabethan....
She has tracked the ocean journeyings of Drake, Raleigh, and
Frobisher, and others to whom the Spanish main was a second home,
the _El Dorado_ of which Columbus and his followers dreamed in their
stormy slumbers.... The first of her poems in this volume, _Rosamund_,
is a masterly battle idyl."
Her books have had large sale, both here and in Europe. It is stated
that in this country one hundred thousand of her _Poems_ have been
sold, and half that number of her prose works.
Miss Ingelow has not been elated by her deserved success. She has
told the world very little of herself in her books. She once wrote a
friend: "I am far from agreeing with you 'that it is rather too bad
when we read people's works, if they won't let us know anything about
themselves.' I consider that an author should, during life, be as much
as possible, impersonal. I never import myself into my writings, and
am much better pleased that others should feel an interest in me,
and wish to know something of me, than that they should complain of
egotism."
It is said that the last of her _Songs with Preludes_ refers to a
brother who lies buried in Australia:--
"I stand on the bridge where last we stood
When delicate leaves were young;
The children called us from yonder wood,
While a mated blackbird sung.
* * * * *
"But if all loved, as the few can love,
This world would seldom be well;
And who need wish, if he dwells above,
For a deep, a long death-knell?
"There are four or five, who, passing this place,
While they live will name me yet;
And when I am gone will think on my face,
And feel a kind of regret."
With all her literary work, she does not forget to do good personally.
At one time she instituted a "copyright dinner," at her own expense,
which she thus described to a friend: "I have set up a dinner-table
for the sick poor, or rather, for such persons as are just out of the
hospitals, and are hungry, and yet not strong enough to work. We have
about twelve to dinner three times a week, and hope to continue the
plan. It is such a comfort to see the good it does. I find it one of
the great pleasures of writing, that it gives me more command of money
for such purposes than falls to the lot of most women." Again, she
writes to an American friend: "I should be much obliged to you if you
would give in my name twenty-five dollars to some charity in Boston.
I should prefer such a one as does not belong to any party in
particular, such as a city infirmary or orphan school. I do not like
to draw money from your country, and give none in charity."
Miss Ingelow is very fond of children, and herein is, perhaps, one
secret of her success. In Off the Skelligs she says: "Some people
appear to feel that they are much wiser, much nearer to the truth and
to realities, than they were when they were children. They think of
childhood as immeasurably beneath and behind them. I have never been
able to join in such a notion. It often seems to me that we lose quite
as much as we gain by our lengthened sojourn here. I should not at all
wonder if the thoughts of our childhood, when we look back on it after
the rending of this vail of our humanity, should prove less unlike
what we were intended to derive from the teaching of life, nature, and
revelation, than the thoughts of our more sophisticated days."
Best of all, this true woman and true poet as well, like Emerson, sees
and believes in the progress of the race.
"Still humanity grows dearer,
Being learned the more,"
she says, in that tender poem, _A Mother showing the Portrait of her
Child._ Blessed optimism! that amid all the shortcomings of human
nature sees the best, lifts souls upward, and helps to make the world
sunny by its singing.
* * * * *
Jean Ingelow died at her home in Kensington, London, July 19, 1897, at
the age of sixty-seven, having been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in
1830. Her long illness ended in simple exhaustion, and she welcomed
death gladly.