The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

3 8 / ANN A LETITI A BARBAUL D Some snug recess impervious: shouldst thou try 40 The 'customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight Of coarse checked apron,�with impatient hand Twitched off when showers impend: or crossing lines 45 Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim On such a day the hospitable rites! Looks, blank at best, and stinted courtesy, 50 Shall he receive. Vainly he feeds his hopes With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie, Or tart or pudding:�pudding he nor tart That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try, Mending what can't be helped, to kindle mirth 55 From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow Clear up propitious:�the unlucky guest In silence dines, and early slinks away. I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, 60 I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams, Relic of costly suppers, and set by For me, their petted one; or buttered toast, 65 When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost or witch, or murder�so I went And sheltered me beside the parlour fire: There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm, 70 Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured One less indulgent.� At intervals my mother's voice was heard, 75 Urging dispatch: briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, To fold, and starch, and clap,0 and iron, and plait. flatten Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were. Sometimes through hollow bowl so Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles; little dreaming then To see, Mongolfier,3 thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds�so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. 85 Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles,4 And verse is one of them�this most of all. 1797

3. Brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne 4. Cf. Shakespeare's Macbeth 1.3.77: "The earth Mongolfier successfully launched the first hot-air hath bubbles, as the water has." balloon, at Annonay, France, in 1783.

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CHARLOTTE SMITH 1749-1806

The melancholy of Charlotte Smith's poems was no mere literary posture. After her father married for the second time, she herself was married off, at the age of fifteen, and bore a dozen children (three of whom died in infancy or childhood), before permanently separating from her husband, Benjamin Smith, because of his abusive temper, infidelities, and financial irresponsibility. She began writing to make money when her husband was imprisoned for debt in 1783. Her first book, Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Smith ofBignor Park, in Sussex, came out in 1785 and went through nine expanding editions in the following sixteen years.

Beginning with the 1788 publication of Emmeline, Smith also enjoyed considerable success as a novelist, rapidly producing nine more novels within the decade, including Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), The Banished Man (1794), and The Young Philosopher (1798). The liberal political views espoused in these fictions made the books key contributions to the Revolution Controversy in Britain. This was also the case with her eight-hundred-line blank verse poem The Emigrants (1793), which both evokes the suffering endured by political refugees from France and links their plight to that of the poet herself, who as a woman has discovered the emptiness of her native land's "boast / Of equal law." Such views earned Smith a place of dishonor, alongside Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Letitia Barbauld, in Richard Polwhele's conservative satire The Unsex'd Females (1797), which scolds her for having suffered "her mind to be infected with the Gallic mania." We are more likely now to follow Stuart Curran, Smith's modern editor, and hail The Emigrants as "the finest piece of extended blank verse in English between Cowper's The Task (1785) and Wordsworth's unpublished initial version of The Prelude (1799)."