OUR PORTRAIT GALLERY, NO. XLIII. THE LATE MRS. JAMES GRAY. "Fear no more the heat o' the sun, THESE opening lines of the simple dirge in Cymbeline found ready passage from our lips, as we hung up in our GALLERY its last accession-the portrait we this month engrave. Shakspeare, in his mastery of the human heart, here paints feelings which bring their meed of consolation, if not of rejoicing, to the mourners for the Early Dead.. He would have us think of them as, not alone at rest, but in security. No further anxieties; no more unquiet thoughts! Gaze on that gentle face, and call to mind that trouble can come there no more; that the weariness of hope deferred cannot longer torment; that those temples may not pulsate with pain, nor those eyes send down their showers; and then, while with us, you weep for so much promise too soon taken away, you can even say, "It is well!" and think that the haven found is a bright exchange for the storms that rage without, threatening with destruction the barks yet exposed to their fury. Soon after our gifted contributor's decease, we gave our readers a brief memoir of her literary career. * The sketch was slightly done-the work of a single sitting; but was received with some degree of interest, as the first attempt at the poetess' biography. Since then, many valuable contributions have reached us; and we find a kind of duty imposed on us now to give a fuller, if not more faithful account, gathered from the rich materials which have found their way to our hands. MARY ANNE BROWNE, the eldest of three children, was born at her father's house, Maidenhead Thicket, Berks, on the 24th of September, 1812. Paternally she derived descent from Sir Anthony Browne, a Kentish baronet, the lineal ancestor of the Lords Montagu, Her mother, after whom she was named, was the only surviving child of Captain John Simmons, of Liverpool; and her maternal grandmother was the daughter of Thomas Briarly, Esq., the representative of a well-known Lancashire family. The house in which Miss Browne was born has been long since removed; but, in a brief autobiography, written in 1840, we find an interesting recollection of its appearance: "I have a distinct remembrance of my birth-place," she wrote, " though the cottage has been for many years pulled down, and replaced by a very ugly red brick mansion. It was a low, thatched building; the walls and porch were partially covered with roses, honeysuckles, and other creeping plants; before the door was a large green plat, in the centre of which stood an old apple tree, celebrated through the neighbourhood for the excellence and abundance of its produce; and a large garden, full, if I remember rightly, of very beautiful flowers, was attached. There were many trees round the dwelling; and, in my childish mind, I well remember, I used to compare it to a bird's nest." Here, with the exception of a short time passed in Liverpool, when she was two years old, the opening four years of her life were spent-four years, which, in their brief compass, sufficed to show all the leading tendencies of her mind; and to her watchful parents, to indicate the gifts of their child-her heritage of weal or wo. The dawning of the human mind is, to its individual possessor, lost in clouds * Vol. XXV. p. 327. March, 1845. and thick darkness; but to the calm spectator, light is seen to glimmer and struggle through the unformed chaos, "shining more and more unto the perfect day.' The young child's reason awoke almost immediately; an unwonted precocity of thought, united with great quickness of apprehension, and a most retentive memory, speedily developed themselves; and intellect and life might be said almost to have commenced simultaneously. When two years of age, she could read fluently, having acquired the faculty not by the slow, heart-breaking process of mastering first the individual syllables, but by forming an immediate acquaintance with the words themselves. Every word, once declared to her, was remembered as an old friend, and its pronunciation and meaning always kept in mind. Her education was almost wholly imparted at home; and her father, who was well qualified for the duty, was her first preceptor. Mr. Browne is yet living, and we feel some delicacy in alluding, therefore, to his personal fitness for such an office; yet, we are assured that his own intellectual tastes exercised their natural influence on his daughter's expanding mind, and while they made her acquainted with the stores of wealth laid up in her country's literature, prompted also the desire to possess similar acquirements. Mr. Browne had a fine voice; and the winter evenings, when the fireside showed its attractions, were devoted to the perusal of favourite volumes, of which he was generally the reader. The miscellaneous knowledge placed in reach of a whole family, by this happy mode, cannot be over-estimated; while the power of selection, confided to a judicious head, contributes also its own value-a point on which it is unnecessary to enlarge. When Mary Anne was four years old, the family were constrained to leave their house at the Thicket, owing to its too limited accommodation. They reluctantly quitted their lovely little cottage, and moved to the other side of the high road, where Mr. Browne had erected a more spacious residence, called The Elms, from some fine trees near it. Already as we read of Pope-our poetess had, in some measure, taught herself writing, by imitating the printed characters in an old prayer book; and here she began to "to warble her native wood-notes," and give expression to the thoughts that started into being within. Paper, pens, and ink were esteemed treasures, on which alone pocket-money was worthily bestowed; and an itinerant vender, who supplied the neighbourhood with these acquisitions, and with millinery and sweet-meats, found all his stores set aside, untouched, until his "stationary" was uncovered. At the same time books, the "comforters of her childish sorrows, and companions of her happiness," as she calls them, began to increase in number with her; and a love for their possession was excited, which never passed away but with life itself. The beauteous scenery around her Berkshire home made no vain appeal to the young dreamer's senses; but afforded out-of-door delights equalling, if not surpassing, her pleasant studies within. Near at hand was the broad, bright channel of old Father Thames, dividing in twain by a pathway of silver, a district not unworthily named The Garden of England, and inviting to a thousand pleasant wanderings along his sheltered banks. And the neighbouring common was redolent with fragrant gorse and wildflowers, and led away to woods, vocal with birds in the summer season, and protected against the biting colds of winter. Who could else than be a belated wanderer at times with such attractions? "I shall let my reader, at once," she writes in a characteristic passage, "into the whole round of my simple pleasures and pursuits. I need not say how I loved flowers, and birds, and butterflies, and all the population of the fields and woods; how I looked every spring for the first violet or primrose as for a courier announcing the return of a crowd of dearly-loved friends; nor how I loved to wander away from home, forgetting the time and the distance; nor how the sunset was looked forward to, on a fine summer day, as if it were some splendid pageant. Neither need I detail the affectionate lectures on colds, and chilblains, and torn frocks, and wet shoes, and idleness, which I was sure to receive on my return home." On one remarkable occasion, during these wanderings, an incident befel her which created such deep, mental impressions as to constitute an epoch in her spirit's history, which we feel called upon more particularly to allude to. Although none can remember the first enkindling of reason within him, yet there are many, we believe, who, among the records of their early experience, preserve the memory of a time and season when, by a sudden impulse, they "put away childish things;" when a burst of glory seemed to have been poured around them, and they arose, like Saul on his way to Damascus, at first blinded and confused, but straightway enlightened and directed of heaven. Ordinary things may be near; the scene of the occurrence may be familiar as one's own home; and, save by their own bounding hearts, the day may be unchronicled from any other of the seven; but a memorable hour has come for them, and when it has passed away, they are no more what they were. A gift and a power have fallen upon them; new feelings, new aspirations, become their own. In a word, the uncertain thoughts of childhood are exchanged for the decision of character which marks maturer years. Shelley describes, in verse of exquisite beauty, the "sweet May-dawn" that "burst his spirit's sleep," when the Muse found him, in his school-boy attire, alone and sorrowful, and gave him his vocation as her worshipper for ever. We find the subject of this sketch, in one of her latest poems, "The Moorland Child," attempting a similar delineation of her feelings at the time when the change came and translated her into a new world of enlarged existence. In this remarkable poem-remarkable, if for no other reason than for its having been one of the few with a personal referenceshe tells us of a young child who, attracted in her simplicity by the glories of the beautiful world around, loved more than her home, its flowers, and bees, or her own small garden, an "over-cultured spot," the wide common which she had made her chosen playing ground. She paints her delight in straying alone midst the heather and furze, in search of the red strawberry, the hare-bell, and fragrant wild thyme-her simple song carolling forth in reply to the birds, and her light-hearted shout ringing out, when the leveret came leaping from his hiding-place in the fern; and then she tells of a time when the child's spirit became sorrowful with too-early thought |