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I am happy in being able to offer this imperfect tribute to the memory of a woman, whose undeserved sufferings have excited my indignation and pity; and whose virtues, both of heart and mind, my warmest esteem.

This will not be deemed a parasitical profession, when I avow a complete dissent from Mrs. Godwin with regard to almost all her moral speculations.

Her posthumous works, so far from convincing me that “the misery and oppression peculiar to women arise out of the partial laws and institutions of society,” appear little less throughout than an indirect panegyric on the institutions she wishes to abolish. She (with all other great

minds) owed her degree of intellectualization to the very restraints on the passions which she was aiming to annihilate; and the source of the miseries she complained of must rather be sought for in the brute turbulencies of human nature, than in the operation of any laws, conventional or positive.

However, the heart and upright dignity of this excellent woman have much interested me. I never quarrel with opinions; and I fervently wish that the expression of my admiration were more worthy of its object.

“On examining my heart, I find that it is so constituted, I cannot live without some particular affection. I am afraid, not without a passion; and I feel the want of it more in society than in solitude.” Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's Letters, vol. i. p. 178.

1798.

Mary, I've trod the turf beneath whose damp
And dark green coverture thou liest! 'Twas strange!
And somewhat most like madness shot athwart
The incredulous mind, when I bethought myself
That there so many earnest hopes and fears,

So many warm desires, and lofty thoughts,
Affections imitating, in their wide
And boundless aim, heaven's universal love,
Lay cold and silent! Listening to the breeze,
That scarcely murmur'd thro' the misty air,
And looking on the white and solemn clouds,
(The only things whose motion spake of life)
I almost counted to have heard thy voice,
And seen thy shadowy shape; for my full heart
(Tho' to my mortal sense thou ne'er wert known)
Had bodied all thy mental attributes
In th' unintelligent and vacant space.

Mary, thou sleep'st not there!—'Twas but a trance,
An idle trance, that led my wayward thought
To seek a more especial intercourse
With thy pure spirit on the senseless sod,
Where what was thine, not thou, lies sepulchred.
Life is a dream! and death a dream to those
Who gaze upon the dead: to those who die
'Tis the withdrawing of a lower scene
For one more real, pure, and infinite!

Amid the trials of this difficult world,
Surely none press so sorely on the heart

As disappointed loves, and impulses
(Mingling the lonely insulated soul
With all surrounding and external things)
Sever'd from nature's destined sympathies!
This was thy lot on earth!—Yet think not thou,
Man of the world, to triumph here o'er those,
Whose separate and immortalized spirits
Spoil them for life's pernicious intercourse.
This is the school of minds; and every wish,
Drawn from the earthly part, shall raise the being,
And fit it for a wider range, whene'er
The twofold ministry of flesh and spirit
Hath done its troubled business. Therefore thou,
Though here tormented, shalt in better worlds
Be greatly comforted!

I laugh at those
Who blame that upright singleness of soul,
Which ever shap'd the accents of thy tongue!
Look to yourselves, pedantic censurers!
Examine well within; for much, I fear,
Ye would but ill endure the scrutiny
That only gives to her a nobler rank
'Mid beings compos'd of heart and intellect.
In this fantastic scene each one assumes

A borrow'd character, and all agree
To seem a something, which in his secret thought
Each knows he is not; which the God of nature
Ne'er made, or meant a child of his to be!
And if a Man of Truth make no pretence
To some unhuman virtue, the brute crowd
Pluck off his hair, and plant with bitterness
Thorns of reproach on his devoted head!
Heaven knows that we have passions, and have hearts
To love; and they alone embrute or soil
The divine lustre of the better part,
Who love nor intellectual preference seek,
Eradicating from each sympathy
The holiness of reason, and that pure,
And high imagination, which would lose
The bodily in the spiritual.

I revere
That simpleness which gave to her pure lips
A ready utterance to each inward thought.
And I revere that obstinate regard
Which hung upon its object, e'en till all
The tender semblances, which lingering hope

Loves with such earnestness, were fully gone!
For passion, sanctified, will centre all
Its warm hopes in a chosen one! Not dead,
Nor e'er abolish'd, as some idly talk;
Impostors, or base earles, who never knew
Man's dearest charities. And passions ever
Shake with most potent stirrings the sublime
And pregnant minds, which wield with mightiest skill
The multitudinous elements of life.
But if that one forsake the soul which twin'd
So many warm endearments round its choice,
The world will seem a very wilderness!

See Posthumous Works, vol. ii. p. 166.

My earthly by his heavenly overpowered.—Milton.