_In vain to chase thee every art I try, In vain all remedies apply, In vain the Indian leaf infuse, Or the parched eastern berry bruise, Or pass, in vain, those bounds, and nobler liquors use_. Her neurasthenia threw a cloud over her waking hours, and took sleep from her eyelids at night: _How shall I woo thee, gentle Rest, To a sad mind, with cares oppress'd? By what soft means shall I invite Thy powers into my soul to-night? Yet, gentle Sleep, if thou wilt come, Such darkness shall prepare the room As thy own palace overspreads,-- Thy palace stored with peaceful beds,-- And Silence, too, shall on thee wait Deep, as in the Turkish State; Whilst, still as death, I will be found, My arms by one another bound, And my dull limbs so clos'd shall be As if already seal'd by thee_. She tried a course of the waters at Tunbridge Wells, but without avail. When the abhorred fit came on, the world was darkened to her. Only two things could relieve her--the soothing influence of solitude with nature and the Muses, or the sympathetic presence of her husband. She disdained the little feminine arts of her age: _Nor will in fading silks compose Faintly the inimitable rose, Fill up an ill-drawn bird, or paint on glass The Sovereign's blurr'd and indistinguished face, The threatening angel and the speaking ass_. But she will wander at sundown through the exquisite woods of Eastwell, and will watch the owlets in their downy nest or the nightingale silhouetted against the fading sky. Then her constitutional depression passes, and she is able once more to be happy: _Our sighs are then but vernal air, But April-drops our tears_, as she says in delicious numbers that might be Wordsworth's own. In these delightful moments, released from the burden of her tyrant malady, her eyes seem to have been touched with the herb euphrasy, and she has the gift, denied to the rest of her generation, of seeing nature and describing what she sees. In these moods, this contemporary of Dryden and Congreve gives us such accurate transcripts of country life as the following: _When the loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing face and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear; When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud: When curlews cry beneath the village-walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls_. In Eastwell Park there was a hill, called Parnassus, to which she was particularly partial, and to this she commonly turned her footsteps. Melancholy as she was, however, and devoted to reverie, she could be gay enough upon occasion, and her sprightly poems have a genuine sparkle. Here is an anacreontic--written "for my brother Leslie Finch"--which has never before been printed: