* * * * *

  “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:—­