VII.

REMOVAL FROM WALES.

The place of Mrs. Hemans in the literary world was established.  As might be expected, friendships were formed with those who had tastes in common.  Amongst the number were Miss Baillie, Miss Mitford, Mrs. Howitt, Miss Jewsbury, and Dean Milman.  From her friends she sought sympathy rather than praise.  Always appreciative of words of encouragement, she gave back good exchange in the artless way into which she entered into the pursuits of her correspondents.

Her health continued to give great anxiety to her friends, and matters were not improved by the unconquerable dislike of the patient to the adoption of the necessary precautions and remedies.  But in the midst of all her suffering her imagination was busy.  Compositions were dictated to friends who sat by her bedside.  Her amanuensis record—­how the little song “Where is the Sea” came to her like a strain of music whilst lying in the twilight under the infliction of a blister.

In 1828 she published the Records of Woman, the work into which she said she had put her heart and individual feelings more than in anything else she had written.  One verse amongst many others indicates the pressure put upon her feeble frame by the intensity of her activity of mind.

         “Yet I have known it long;
          Too restless and too strong
      Within this clay hath been the o’ermastering flame;
          Swift thought that came and went,
          Like torrents o’er me sent,
      Have shaken as a reed my thrilling frame.”

A severe trial was at hand.  The home must again be changed and the beloved Wales left.  The marriage of her sister and the appointment of her brother to an official post were the immediate cause.  In which direction should she turn her steps with most advantage?  The choice was determined by the consideration that at Wavertree near Liverpool she had several attached friends, that there she would meet with advantages for the education of her boys and also with more literary communion for herself.

The wrench from the “land of her childhood, her home, and her dead,” was a hard one.  She wrote, telling her friends how she literally covered her face all the way from Bronwylfa until her boys told her they had passed the Clwyd range of hills.  Then she felt that something of the bitterness was over.

     “The sound of thy streams in my spirit I bear;
        Farewell, and a blessing be with thee, green land! 
      On thy hearths, on thy halls, on thy pure mountain air,
        On the chords of the harp, and the minstrel’s free hand,
      From the love of my soul, with my tears it is shed,
      As I leave thee, green land of my home and my dead.”

Her love for the people of Wales was not an unreciprocated love.  Many of them rushed forward to touch the posts of the gate through which the poetess had passed; and when, three years later, she paid a visit to St. Asaph, came and wept over her, and entreated her to make her home among them again.