"Then he and the sea began their strife, And worked with power and might: Whatever the man reared up by day The sea broke down by night.
"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 princ.i.p.al 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:--
"I stand on the bridge where last we stood When delicate leaves were young; The children called us from yonder wood, While a mated blackbird sung.
"But if all loved, as the few can love, This world would seldom be well; And who need wish, if he dwells above, For a deep, a long death-knell?
"There are four or five, who, pa.s.sing this place, While they live will name me yet; And when I am gone will think on my face, And feel a kind of regret."
With all her literary work, she does not forget to do good personally.
At one time she inst.i.tuted a "copyright dinner," at her own expense, which she thus described to a friend: "I have set up a dinner-table for the sick poor, or rather, for such persons as are just out of the hospitals, and are hungry, and yet not strong enough to work. We have about twelve to dinner three times a week, and hope to continue the plan. It is such a comfort to see the good it does. I find it one of the great pleasures of writing, that it gives me more command of money for such purposes than falls to the lot of most women." Again, she writes to an American friend: "I should be much obliged to you if you would give in my name twenty-five dollars to some charity in Boston.
I should prefer such a one as does not belong to any party in particular, such as a city infirmary or orphan school. I do not like to draw money from your country, and give none in charity."
Miss Ingelow is very fond of children, and herein is, perhaps, one secret of her success. In Off the Skelligs she says: "Some people appear to feel that they are much wiser, much nearer to the truth and to realities, than they were when they were children. They think of childhood as immeasurably beneath and behind them. I have never been able to join in such a notion. It often seems to me that we lose quite as much as we gain by our lengthened sojourn here. I should not at all wonder if the thoughts of our childhood, when we look back on it after the rending of this vail of our humanity, should prove less unlike what we were intended to derive from the teaching of life, nature, and revelation, than the thoughts of our more sophisticated days."
Best of all, this true woman and true poet as well, like Emerson, sees and believes in the progress of the race.
"Still humanity grows dearer, Being learned the more,"
she says, in that tender poem, _A Mother showing the Portrait of her Child._ Blessed optimism! that amid all the shortcomings of human nature sees the best, lifts souls upward, and helps to make the world sunny by its singing.
Jean Ingelow died at her home in Kensington, London, July 19, 1897, at the age of sixty-seven, having been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, in 1830. Her long illness ended in simple exhaustion, and she welcomed death gladly.