Remarks by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

“I feel that I am not in the least improved since the days when I used to run wild about the mountains.”

Fondly recognising the persistence of her childhood love of freedom and landscape · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“I cannot help sometimes feeling as if it were my true task to enlarge the sphere of Sacred Poetry, and extend its influence.”

Stating the religious and literary vocation she increasingly felt in later life · Late letter on Scenes and Hymns of Life, c. 1834

“Deep affections and deep sorrows seem to have solemnized my whole being, and I now feel as if bound to higher and holier tasks.”

Describing how love and suffering redirected her towards a more spiritual purpose · Late letter on art and faith, c. 1834

“I have now passed through the feverish and somewhat visionary state of mind often connected with the passionate study of art in early life.”

Looking back on youthful artistic intensity from a more settled stage of life · Late letter on art and faith, c. 1834

Art
Time

“Do not you think one's first interview with the sunshine, after a long separation, is, like the meetings from which one has expected much, rather oppressive than delightful?”

Comparing renewed sunlight with the emotional intensity of a long-awaited reunion · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“Some passages seem to give me back my own thoughts and feelings, my whole inner being, with a mirror, more true than ever friend could hold up.”

Describing the startling experience of recognising oneself in another writer's work · Letter fragment on Corinne

“It is very dismal to live in a world without flowers.”

A characteristically direct expression of her dependence on natural beauty · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“I am sure there is a moon, for she looks in at my window every night, and keeps me awake with her cold bright eyes, which, I scarcely know why, always seem to speak of the past.”

Turning moonlight into an evocative presence associated with memory · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“I bear being long shut up in the house about as ill as a gipsy or an Arab would.”

Expressing her strong need for movement, open air and the natural world · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“Most of them were written before I consider my mind and feelings quite to have awakened — had they slept on, perhaps it would have been happier for me.”

Looking back on artistic awakening as a source of both insight and pain · Letter fragment on her early writings

“It is impossible to be much alone during illness, without thinking often of all that is hidden from us by the veil of life.”

Connecting solitude and physical frailty with thoughts of the unseen and eternal · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“The bitterest and most enduring animosities would be likely to spring up from the ruins of old affection.”

Observing how damaged love can harden into lasting resentment · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“The more I can throw my mind into any undertaking which interests my friends, the more I make to myself a place of refuge from personal suffering.”

Finding relief from private sorrow through purposeful work for friends · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“It is their perpetual bitterness, and jealousy, and strife, from which I turn with so much dislike.”

Rejecting the hostility and rivalry she encountered in literary reviewing · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“It is, in my opinion, full of beauty, and of truth, developing itself clearly and sorrowfully, like almost all truth, I believe, through the colouring mists of imagination.”

Linking artistic imagination with the gradual revelation of difficult truths · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“Those who go through life with the fewest affections, thus exposing the fewest vulnerable points to sorrow, ought to be, and may well be, the happiest.”

Considering the painful vulnerability that accompanies deep attachment · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“I do not think I can bear the burden of my life without music, for more than two or three days.”

Showing how essential music was to her emotional life · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

Art
Music

“If my sister were near me now, I should lay my head down upon her shoulder and cry like a tired child.”

A strikingly unguarded expression of weariness and longing for comfort · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“This time of the year makes one so long for the far away — do not you think so?”

Connecting the changing season with longing for distant places and people · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

“O this waveless horizon — how it wearies the eye accustomed to the sweeping outline of mountain scenery!”

Revealing how deeply the Welsh mountains had shaped her sense of landscape · Letter to Mary Howitt, 11 December 1828

“I thought within myself, I will not write what I know would only sadden so kind a heart; I will wait till the sunshine breaks in.”

Choosing to delay writing until grief had given way to greater hope · Letter to Mary Howitt, 11 December 1828

“I have put my heart and individual feelings into it more than anything else I have written.”

Acknowledging the unusually personal emotional investment in her writing · Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 23 March 1828

“Fame can only afford reflected delight to a woman.”

Expressing her belief that literary fame mattered chiefly when shared with those she loved · Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 23 March 1828

Fame
Love

“How seldom are our expectations, on which one has loved to dwell, fully realized!”

Reflecting on the distance between cherished expectations and reality · Letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 16 July 1827

Hope
Time

Pronunciation

Also Known As

Definition

Detailed Definition

Example

Additional Notes

Related Terms