Hemans' Passion (Felicia Hemans) (Critical Essay‪)‬

SENTIMENTAL SHE MAY HAVE BEEN, BUT FELICIA HEMANS' VICTORIAN CRITICS seemed most struck, and most impressed, by her consistent lack of passion. "She is no sibyl, tossed to and fro in the tempest of furious excitement," writes George Gilfillan in 1849, "but ever a 'deep, majestical, and high-souled woman'--the calm mistress of the highest and stormiest of her emotions." (1) William Michael Rossetti draws attention in 1878 to Hemans' keen sense of restraint, her "[a]ptitude and delicacy in versification, and a harmonious balance in the treatment of [her] subject." (2) And in his 1848 Female Poets of Great Britain, Frederic Rowton offers much the same: Hemans' contemporaries similarly noted the poet's reserve, as in Francis Jeffrey's important review of 1829: