[Illustration: Residence at Rhyllon] FELICIA HEMANS. If the lives of our poets had been written with the same attention to the placing of their abodes as clearly before you as that of Mrs. Hemans has been, both by Mr. Chorley and by her own sister, it might have saved me some thousand of miles of travel to visit and see them for myself. Felicia Dorothea Browne, the future poetess, bearing the familiar name of Mrs. Hemans, was born in Duke-street, Liverpool, on the 25th of September, 1793. The house is still pointed out to strangers, but has nothing beside this event to give it a distinction from other town-houses. Her father was a considerable merchant, a native of Ireland. There seems to have been a particular connection with the state of Venice, for her mother was descended from an old Italian family. Her father was the Imperial and Tuscan Consul at Liverpool. The old name of Mrs. Hemans's maternal ancestry is said to have been Veniero, but had got corrupted to the German name of Wagner. Mrs. Hemans was the fifth of seven children, one of whom died in infancy. Before she was seven years old, her father, having suffered losses in trade, retired from business, and settled at Gwrych, near Abergele, in Denbighshire, close to the sea, in a large, old, solitary mansion, shut in by a range of rocky mountains. Here the family resided nine years, so that the greater and more sensitive part of her girlhood was passed here. She was sixteen when they removed. Here, then, the intense love of nature and of poetry, which distinguished her, grew and took its full possession of her. How strong this attachment to the beauty and fresh liberty of nature had become by her eleventh year, was shown by the restraint which she felt in passing a winter in London at that age, with her father and mother, and her intense longing to be back. Her rambles on the shore, and among the hills; her wide range through that old house, with a good library, and the companionship of her brothers and sisters, were all deeply calculated to call forth the spirit of poetry in any heart in which it lay. Her elder sister died; and she turned for companionship to her younger sister, since her biographer, and her younger brother, Claude Scott Browne, who also died young. Her two elder brothers, who with her younger sister only remain, became officers in the army; and this added a strong martial tendency to the spirit of her genius. Her mother, who was a very noble-minded and accomplished woman, bestowed great care on her education, and her access to books filled her mind with all the food that the young and poetical heart craves for. The Bible and Shakspeare were her two great books; and the traces of their influence are conspicuous enough in the genuine piety and the lofty imagery of her writing. She used to read Shakspeare among the branches of an old apple-tree. In this secret retreat, and in the nut-wood, the old arbor and its swing, the post-office tree--a hollow tree, where