“I have observed, That many instead of great Actions, make onely a great Noise, and like shallow Fords, or empty Bladders, sound most when there is least in them.”
“I observe, That as it would be a grief to covetous and miserable persons, to be rewarded with Honour, rather than with Wealth, because they love Wealth, before Honour and Fame; so on the other side, Noble, Heroick and Meritorious Persons, prefer Honour and Fame before Wealth.”
“It is not every ambitious and aspiring spirit that can do brave and noble actions.”
The world would not have been very seriously poorer if the Duchess had omitted to ring her bell, and if these sage “conceptions” had “escaped her memory” in the morning.
Her best work, at any rate her most valuable contribution to the history of her times, is the story of her husband’s life, into which we have already dipped, perhaps too often and too deeply. In spite of her pardonably exaggerated praise of Newcastle and all his works, the narrative, if not always accurate, is pretty fairly rendered; and if Nature ever intended that she should scribble at all, it may have been as a war-correspondent to a daily newspaper, in which case she was born a little before her time.
It would be easy to sneer at her poetry; but, at its best, it is not so very bad, although it always contains some weak lines. Let us look at one or two of her most successful efforts.
In her description of the Queen of the Fairies, she writes:—
She on a dewy leaf doth bathe, And as she sits, the leaf doth wave; There like a new-fallen flake of snow, Doth her white limbs in beauty show. Her garments fair her maids put on, Made of the pure light from the sun.
In her poem, “Mirth and Melancholy,” both Mirth and Melancholy try to attract the poetess. Mirth promises her amusement and sneers at her rival, Melancholy, in these lines:—
Her voice is low and gives a hollow sound; She hates the light and is in darkness found Or sits with blinking lamps, or tapers small, Which various shadows make against the wall. She loves nought else but noise which discord makes; As croaking frogs whose dwelling is in lakes; The raven’s hoarse, the mandrake’s hollow groan And shrieking owls which fly i’ the night alone; The tolling bell, which for the dead rings out; A mill, where rushing waters run about; The roaring winds, which shake the cedars tall, Plough up the seas, and beat the rocks withal. She loves to walk in the still moonshine night, And in a thick dark grove she takes delight; In hollow caves, thatched houses, and low cells She loves to live, and there alone she dwells.