II.

FIRST POEMS.

The first appearance in print!  What an event in life is this!  What a new world it seems to open out to the writer!  Felicia Browne was fourteen years old when a collection of her poems was published.  The earliest of these early compositions was written when she was only eight years of age.

The volume of poems appeared in 1808.  Perhaps it would have been a more judicious course on the part of her friends if they had prevented them from appearing.  The young girl of fourteen years was by her youth ill-fitted to face the criticisms of the literary world.

At this time there came across her path the person whose name she was afterwards to bear—­Captain Hemans, of the King’s Own Regiment.  He was on a visit in the neighbourhood of Gwyrch, and soon became an intimate friend in the family which contained Felicia amongst its members.  Before he was called upon to embark with his regiment for Spain, an impression had been created which three years’ absence did not efface on either side.  The friends of both parties hoped that it might be otherwise, and that nothing would come of this attachment.  But their hopes were not to be realised.

III.

MARRIAGE.

In 1809 the Browne family removed to Bronwylfa, near St. Asaph.  Her self-education and her literary work went on side by side.

Captain Hemans returned to Wales in 1811, and in the following year he was married to Miss Browne.  His appointment as adjutant to the Northamptonshire Militia caused them to take up their residence at Daventry, a neighbourhood by its tameness strangely contrasting with her “own mountain-land.”  But she was not to be long away from her old home.  The next year, on the reduction of the corps, a return was made to Bronwylfa.  Mrs. Hemans was never again, until death parted them, to leave her mother, “by whose unwearied spirit of love and hope she was encouraged to bear on through all the obstacles which beset her path.”  A period of domestic privacy in association with literary occupation and study followed.  Five children, all sons, were given to her.  One can easily understand how many calls there were now on her, as, her marriage being not altogether a happy one, she had to arrange the education of her children.  How well she trained them, not only in temporal wisdom, but in the highest of all wisdom, many evidences show.  We may anticipate and insert an anecdote of one of her boys at the age of eleven.  She had been reading to him Lord Byron’s magnificent address to the sea:—­

“Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue ocean, roll.”

He listened with breathless attention, and at the close broke out with these words—­“It is very grand indeed!—­but how much finer it would have been, mamma, if he had said at the close, that God had measured out all those waters with the hollow of His hand!” On another occasion she was explaining to her eight-year-old boy the meaning of the title of a story he was reading, “The Atheist.”  His argument was real and ready:  “Not believe in a God, mamma?  Who does he expect made the world and his own body?”