the Thames Embankment, whom I had never met before and have not seen since. I followed her about for a considerable time, and noticed that every one, no matter of what age or station in life, stared hard at her. Her own apparent indifference gave them a good chance to do this. It was with much disappointment that I at last came to the conclusion that she had nothing to do with me and let her pass out of sight. I was thinking of that woman when I wrote tinues: "The poem called

-."
was written

He con

after hearing a woman, whom I had taken a fancy to, laughing a welcome to another. It was the sweetest laugh that I have ever heard, beginning quite merrily and ending in a sweet sad fall that died away softly." Again: "The poem called was written from the

memory of how a bird at home used to burst out singing when he heard my sister's voice. And yet it was always I that fed him, and in fact troubled myself so much about his life and comfort that my sister was jealous and wished him dead." One writer seems to contradict what Coleridge says by the statement that what he has done best was done under the almost crushing weight of painful memory, and fearful expectation which it described. But the truth probably is that even here the same ripening took place, but with fierce

rapidity, as flower seeds hurry to ripeness in the breath of the fire. Says another: "Love satisfied of itself would, I suppose, be complete and would need no literature; but the heat and burden of desire seek to record something." Having been moved by beautiful things "an instinct rebukes any 'use' of such feelings; but they rise easily, as I write, out of a store of images unconsciously accumulated." And so we are brought round to Keats and Rossetti again.

Chapter Three: Women as Poets

I

T would not be easy to show that women have had any great influence upon English poetry by their own practice of the art. Far too often they have written as if they were only an inferior kind of man. They have written, as they still often write, love-poems upon a masculine model. “The Complaint of a Lover," for example, was written by the gifted and early dead Anne Killigrew (1660-1685) as if from a man :

See'st thou yonder craggy rock,

Whose head o'erlooks the swelling main,
Where never shepherd fed his flock,
Or careful peasant sow'd his grain.

No wholesome herb grows on the same,
Or bird of day will on it rest;
'Tis barren as the hopeless flame

That scorches my tormented breast

yet the image is one of the grandest in poetry. Women are more earthly than men, more directly and practically connected with the circumstances and foundations of life. The earth and this life are nearly good enough for them; not from them has there ever been much whining about their souls and immortality. There are more Marthas to be found than Marys. They do not easily

detach themselves from things as they are here and now, and are less inclined than men to see themselves as a spectacle. Something of the truth at least appears in some lines prefixed by Mary Morpeth to Drummond's poems of 1656:

Then do not sparks with your bright suns compare,
Perfection in a woman's work is rare;

From an untroubled mind should verses flow;
My discontents make mine too muddy show;
And hoarse encumbrances of household care,
Where these remain the Muses ne'er repair.

It might be supposed that it is true of women what every poet says at one time or another of himself, that he thinks "good thoughts, whilst other write good words," that he writes ill because he is so sincere:

Then others for the breath of words respect,
Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.

So Shakespeare puts it. As men have written little poetry upon love for their friends, so women have written very little expressing their affection for lovers or children. It is rare for a woman to write as Aphra Behn (1640-1689) did, giving as good as she receives, after this fashion :

When my Alexis present is,

Then I for Damon sigh and mourn;
But when Alexis I do miss,

Damon gains nothing but my scorn.

But if it chance they both are by,
For both alike I languish, sigh and die.
Cure then, thou mighty wingèd God,
This restless fever in my blood;
One golden pointed dart take back:
But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take?
If Damon, all my hopes are crost;
Or that of my Alexis, I am lost.

This is so much like a man's poem with "Alexis" and "Damon" substituted for "Corinna" and "Chloe" that it may possibly have been written as a deliberate revenge. Perhaps not so much can be said of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's (1690-1762) ballad, "The Lover." She explains why she is not in a hurry to love; not because she is cold, but because she fears to be cheated and will not buy "long years of repentance for moments of joy." She wants a man who is no pedant, yet learned, obliging and free to all her sex, but fond only of her:

When the long hours in public are past,

And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear;
Be banish'd afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude and yet I may forgive.

It is a middle-aged ambition, and suggests the woman who in becoming the equal of