When she was twenty-nine, she published The Seraphim and Other Poems.  The Seraphim was a reverential description of two angels watching the Crucifixion.  Though the critics saw much that was strikingly original, they condemned the frequent obscurity of meaning and irregularity of rhyme.  The next year, The Romaunt of the Page and other ballads appeared, and in 1844, when she was thirty-five, a complete edition of her poems, opening with the Drama of Exile.  This was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, the first scene representing “the outer side of the gate of Eden shut fast with cloud, from the depth of which revolves a sword of fire self-moved.  Adam and Eve are seen in the distance flying along the glare.”

In one of her prefaces she said:  “Poetry has been to me as serious a thing as life itself,—­and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either.  I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet.  I have done my work, so far, as work,—­not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain,—­and as work I offer it to the public, feeling its shortcomings more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration; but feeling also that the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done should give it some protection from the reverent and sincere.”

While the Drama of Exile received some adverse criticism, the shorter poems became the delight of thousands.  Who has not held his breath in reading the Rhyme of the Duchess May?—­

  “And her head was on his breast, where she smiled as one at rest,—­
                        Toll slowly. 
  ‘Ring,’ she cried, ‘O vesper-bell, in the beech-wood’s old chapelle!’
      But the passing-bell rings best!

  “They have caught out at the rein, which Sir Guy threw loose—­in vain,—­
                         Toll slowly. 
  For the horse in stark despair, with his front hoofs poised in air,
  On the last verge rears amain.

  “Now he hangs, he rocks between, and his nostrils curdle in!—­
                         Toll slowly. 
  Now he shivers head and hoof, and the flakes of foam fall off,
      And his face grows fierce and thin!

  “And a look of human woe from his staring eyes did go,
                         Toll slowly. 
  And a sharp cry uttered he, in a foretold agony of the headlong death below.”

Who can ever forget that immortal Cry of the Children, which awoke all England to the horrors of child-labor?  That, and Hood’s Song of the Shirt, will never die.

Who has not read and loved one of the most tender poems in any language, Bertha in the Lane?—­