MRS. WARE’S POEMS.[1]

MRS. WARE’S POEMS.^[1]

Averse, as we have declared ourselves, to any severe criticisms upon the productions of female poets, we are constrained, in the case before us, to speak with a plainness, savoring less of gallantry than truth. If only “some female errors” fell to the lot of Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware, we might, perhaps, “look in her face” and “forget them all;” but so many are the faults of which she is guilty, that she must have a face as beautiful as Raphael’s Fornarina, to cause us to forget or forgive a tithe of the number. The lady, however, is neither beautiful nor juvenile; she goes so far in her preface as to confess that she cannot plead “youthful diffidence” for her indiscretion in writing and publishing a volume of verses. That she is not beautiful, we state on positive intelligence. On this score, therefore, her sins of metrical commission cannot be pardoned any more than because of her juvenility—an excuse which she so magnanimously disclaims.

On the second leaf of Mrs. Ware’s book, which is not really as well as figuratively blank, we perceive, paraded in capital letters, the words “Copyright secured in America.” Now, if the copyright has in fact been secured in America; if it has been entered at the office of the District Clerk of New York or of any other State, as the law directs, it strikes us that the dollar, charged as a fee in such cases, has been absurdly and ridiculously thrown away. The proceeding was altogether supererogatory. Booksellers are not particularly partial to publishing collections of poetry at the best; but that any one of them should be so insane as to re-publish a farrago like this, to enter into rivalry and competition for such a cause, is an hypothesis which never could have been engendered, except in the brain of a rhymster, dizzy with self-conceit. From the fact, however, of a copyright having been secured in America, we are well assured that the author is an American; even this was unnecessary, because Mrs. Katharine Augusta Ware has, in times past, written her name to so many patches of poetry, that it is not unfamiliar to pains-taking readers, at least on our side of the water. She first made herself known to the literary world here as the Editor of a monthly magazine, exquisitely christened “The Bower of Taste.” That any work, with so Rosa-Matildaish a title, could have existed for a year was marvellous; still more marvellous was it, that it survived the merciless visitings of the Muse of Mrs. Ware. With the failure of this undertaking, her literary biography, brief as the posy of a ring, would terminate, were it not for the fact that, during some four years past, she has resided in England, and manufactured, to order, occasional lyrics for the Liverpool Newspapers. By some fatuity, which she has provokingly left unexplained, in a preface written in the worst possible taste, she has been impelled to the perpetration of the volume before us. But, previous to exemplifications of its component properties, let us give the preface entire, by way of showing how very unlike ladies, and how very foolishly, feminine bards can behave on paper. If our readers of both sexes do not laugh at the following outbreak of egotism and vanity, they are less easily amused than we conjecture.