Or on the heath, by moonlight lingering, pore On air-drawn phantoms! While in Fancy's ear, Or wake wild frenzy from her hideous cell." In her 5th Sonnet she addresses the South Downs, with her usual pathos, "Ah! hills belov'd, where once an happy child, Your beechen shades, your turf, your flowers among, I wove your blue-bells into garlands wild, And woke your echoes with my artless song; And teach a breaking heart to throb no more ?" Mrs. Smith also discovered from a very early age, like all minds of active and expanded curiosity, an insatiable thirst for reading, which yet was checked by her aunt, who had the care of her education; for she had lost her mother almost in her infancy. She did not read as a task; nor according to any regular system, which may be more proper for common faculties, but devoured with eager eyes, every book, which fell in her way; an indulgence that enlarged the sphere of her observation, and extended her powers. It did not tend to make her, in the pedantic sense, a learned woman; but surely it tended to make her something much better; it gave impulse to her powers of in quiry and of thinking; and mingled itself with the original operations of a vigorous and penetrating understanding. From her twelfth to her fifteenth year her father resided occasionally in London, and she was introduced into frequent and various society. It would be curious to have a picture of her feelings and her remarks at that critical period. With that liveliness of perception,. and that eloquent simplicity of language, which women of sensibility and talent possess, more especially at an early age, in a degree so superior to the other sex, she must not only have been highly attractive, but have exhibited such a brilliancy of imagination, and of sentiment, yet unsubdued by sorrows, as cannot have vanished unrecorded without justifying the severest regret. But as our faculties can only be ascertained by comparison, she probably did not yet know the strength or value of her own. It is said that before she was sixteen, she married Mr. Smith, a partner in his father's house, who was a West-India merchant, and also an East-India Director; an ill-assorted match, the prime source of all her future misfortunes. Thus early engaged in the cares of a family, and shut up in one of the narrow streets of the great city, away from the fields and woods which she loved, and among a set of people, whose habits and opinions could be little congenial with those of one who had indulged in all the visions of a poetical fancy on the banks of rivers, and in the solitude of heaths and downs, and hills, and vallies, a temporary damp must have been given to the expanse of her mind. After some time, when the irksomeness of this situation was aggravated aggravated by the loss of her second son, Mr. Smith: indulged her with a small house, in the neighbourhood of London, where she soothed her retirement by culti vating her early propensity to books, in the intervals which the anxious attention to her children afforded. At length Mr. Smith's father, who could never persuade his son to give his time or care sufficiently to the business in which he was engaged, allowed him to retire deeper into the country, and purchased for him Lyss farm, in Hampshire. In this situation, Mrs. Smith, who had now eight children, passed several anxious and important years. Her husband was imprudent, kept a larger establishment than suited his fortune, and engaged in injudicious and wild speculations in agriculture. She foresaw the storm that was gathering over her; but she had no power to prevent it; and she endeavoured to console her uneasiness by, recurring to the Muse, whose first visitings had added force to the pleasures of her childhood. "When in the Beech Woods of Hampshire," she says, "I first struck the chords of the melancholy lyre, its notes were never intended for the public ear: it was unaffected sorrow drew them forth: I wrote mournfully, because I was unhappy!" In 1776 Mr. Smith's father died; in four or five years afterwards Mr. S. served the office of Sheriff of Hants; and immediately subsequent, his affairs were brought to a crisis. That dreadful receptacle, the King's Bench, opened her melancholy gates to him; as she daily does to the victims of innocent misfortune, as well as of imprudence, and dishonesty, "Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis," and and his wife had the virtue and the fortitude to accompany him, and spend the greater part of the seven months he was confined there, with him. But during this trying period she was not idle, nor passed her time in unavailing grief. By her exertions principally Mr. S. at length procured his liberation. In this awful interval, those talents, which had hitherto been only cultivated for her own private gratification, seemed to offer a resource for the day of adversity. She collected together therefore a few of those poems, which had hitherto been confined to the sight of one or two friends, and offered them to Dodsley. This man, who was now grown old and rich, and who had probably been originally exalted into the station of an eminent publisher, rather by accident, or his brother's merits, than by any powers of his own, received the offer with coldness, cast a hasty and casual glance on the MSS. and returned them with a stupid indifference. Mrs. Smith, with the sensibility of real genius, felt oppressed and overcome with this brutal discouragement; and but for the impulse of imperious necessity, would probably have sunk into future silence, unconscious of that exquisite superiority of genius, which for two and twenty years has charmed the world. Mr. Turner, her brother, now tried his powers of persuasion with Dilly, but with equal want of success. The sonnets were therefore printed at Chichester, at the expense of the author, with a dedication, dated May 10, 1784, to Mr. Hayley; and Dodsley, on this recommendation, undertook to be the publisher. A second edition was rapidly called for in the same year.* The title was, "Elegiae Sonnets and other Essays. By Charlotte Smith, of Bignor Park, Sussex. The Second Edition. Chichester. Printed The manner, in which Mrs. Smith has described in a private letter, already given to the public, the event of her husband's liberation is so eminently interesting, as to call for a repetition of it in this place. "It was on the 2d day of July, that we commenced our journey. For more than a month I had shared the restraint of my husband, in a prison, amidst scenes of misery, of vice, and even of terror. Two attempts had, since my last residence among them, been made by the prisoners to procure their liberation, by blowing up the walls of the house. Throughout the night appointed for this enterprize, I remained dressed, watching at the window, and expecting every moment to witness contention and bloodshed, or perhaps be overwhelmed by the projected explosion. After such scenes, and such apprehensions, how deliciously soothing to my wearied spirits was the soft, pure air, of the summer's morning, breathing over the dewy grass, as (having slept one night on the road) we passed over the heaths of Surrey! My native hills at length burst upon. my view! I beheld once more the fields, where I had passed my happiest days, and amidst the perfumed turf with which one of those fields was strown, perceived with delight the beloved group, from whom I had been so long divided, and for whose fate my affections were ever anxious. The transports of this meeting were too much for my exhausted spirits. After all my sufferings, I began to hope I might taste content, or experience at least a respite from my calamities!" But this state of happiness was of very short con by Dannett Jayes, and sold by Dodsley, Gardner, Baldwin, and Bew, Lon don. 1784. 410. tinuance. |