Our great poetess, or rather the sensible, amiable old lady that _was_ a great poetess thirty years ago, is still in full preservation as to health. Never did the flame of genius more thoroughly expire than in her case.... She is, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, when quoting her non-feeling for Lycidas, “dry and Scotchy”; learning she never possessed, and some of her poetry, which I think was far above that of any other woman, is the worse for a few specks of bad English; then her criticisms are so surprisingly narrow and jejune, and show so slight an acquaintance with fine literature in general. [Sidenote: A gracious winter.] Yet if the authoress of ‘Plays on the Passions’ does not now write or talk like a poetess, she _looks_ like one, and _is_ a piece of poetry in herself. Never was old age more lovely and interesting; the face, the dress, the quiet, subdued motions, the silver hair, the calm _in-looking_ eye, the pale, yet not unhealthy skin, all are in harmony; this is winter with its own peculiar loveliness of snows and paler sunshine. SARA COLERIDGE: _Letter to Miss E. Trevenen_, 1833, in the former’s ‘Memoir and Letters,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1874. * * * * * [Sidenote: Meeting with Harriet Martineau.] She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare--if second; and then she had seen her works drop out of notice so that, of the generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line of her plays--yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry humor in the least dimmed. I have never lost the impression of the trying circumstances of my first interview with her, nor of the grace, simplicity and sweetness with which she bore them. She was old; and she declined dinner-parties; but she wished to meet me, ... and therefore she came to Miss Berry’s to tea, one day when I was dining there. Miss Berry, her contemporary, put her feelings, it seemed to me, to a most unwarrantable trial, by describing to me, as we three sat together, the celebrity of the ‘Plays on the Passions’ in their day. She told me how she found on her table, on her return from a ball, a volume of plays; and how she kneeled on a chair to look at it, and how she read on till the servant opened the shutters, and let in the daylight of a winter morning. She told me how all the world raved about the plays; and she held on so long that I was in pain for the noble creature to whom it must have been irksome on the one hand to hear her own praises and fame so dwelt upon, and, on the other, to feel that we all knew how long that had been quite over. But, when I looked up at her sweet face, with its composed smile amidst the becoming mob-cap, I saw that she was above pain of either kind. HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.