prepared by great industry her volume of poems in less than four
months, and had not taken time to reconsider them. They were not
narrative pieces, in which the interest of the story carries you along
in reading, whether the diction is perfected or not, but mostly short
lyrical poems, and contemplative pieces, which are always much more
effective when found amongst other descriptions of poetry or in a
magazine, than when collected together in a volume. They were generally
sad, a common fault with poetesses; but poor Elsie had more excuse for
taking that tone than many others who have done so.

She had to mourn the loss of fortune and the coldness of friends; the
conduct of William Dalzell to her sister had made a deeper impression
on her mind than on that of Jane. She had more capacity of suffering
than Jane had, and when she took the pen in her hand, she felt that her
life--and all life--was full of sorrow. Jane had induced Elsie to
accompany her to the chapel, where she herself had learned her first
lesson of submission and of Christian hope; but even in religion Elsie
inclined to the contemplative and the tender rather than to the active
and the cheerful side of it. She looked with far more intense longing
to the Heaven beyond the earth than Jane did, and had not the interest
in the things about her to make the dreariness of her daily life
endurable. Her poetry had been her one resource; and that appeared to
be very weak and contemptible in the opinion of those who ought to know.

Whether the literary taster for the publisher last applied to was less
engrossed with business than the others, or whether he thought it would
do the aspiring poetess good to show her her faults, I cannot tell, but
he wrote a long letter of critical remarks. There was one ballad--an
idealization of the incident in Jane's life which had so much impressed
Elsie, in which William Dalzell was made more fascinating and more
faithless, and Jane much more attached to him than in reality--which
this correspondent said was good, though the subject was hackneyed, but
on all the others the sweeping scythe of censure fell unsparingly. "Her
poems," he said, "were very tolerable, and not to be endured;"
mediocrity was insufferable in poetry. The tone of them was unhealthy,
and would feed the sentimentalism of the age, which was only another
name for discontent. If poetesses went on as they were doing
now-a-days, and only extracted a wail from life, the