HEMANS, FELICIA DOROTHEA Eng lish poetess, was born in Duke street, Liverpool, on Sept. 25, the daughter of George Browne, a Liverpool merchant of Irish extraction. Her mother seems to have been of Austrian origin. In i8o6 the family moved to Gwrych, Denbighshire, and there Felicia grew up by the Welsh mountains and the sea-shore. When she was only 14, her Juvenile Poems were published by subscription, and were harshly criticized in the Monthly Review. Her Domestic Affections and other Poems appeared in 1812, on the eve of her marriage to Capt. Alfred Hemans, adjutant of the Northamptonshire Militia. While they lived at Bronwylfa, a house near St. Asaph, she published The Restoration of Works of Art to Italy (1816), Modern Greece (1817), and Translations from Camoens and other Poets (1818) . Husband and wife sepa rated in 1818, and though letters were interchanged concerning their five children, they never met again. Her next productions were Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse (1819), The Sceptic and Stanzas to the Memory of the late King (182o), a volume of poems containing "The Siege of Valencia," "The Last Constan tine," and "Belshazzar's Feast" (1823), and The Forest Sanctuary and Lays of Many Lands (1825), which were two of her favourite works.
In 1828, Mrs. Hemans moved to Wavertree, near Liverpool. In the following summer she visited the Hamiltons of Chief swood, where she enjoyed "constant, almost daily, intercourse" with Sir Walter Scott, who had .written an epilogue for her play, Tine Vespers of Palermo, produced at Edinburgh in April 1824. It had been acted at Covent Garden on Dec. 12, 1823, but was with drawn after the first performance. In 183o she visited Words worth and the Lake country, and went again to Scotland. Her publications of this period include Songs of the Affections (183o), Hymns for Childhood (1834 ; had appeared in America in 1827), National Lyrics (1834) , Scenes and Hymns of Life (1834) , and a series of sonnets, Thoughts during Sickness. She died in Dub lin on May 16, Mrs. Hemans's poetry is the outcome of a beautiful but singu larly circumscribed life, a life spent in romantic seclusion, without much worldly experience, and warped by domestic unhappiness and physical suffering. Scott complained that it contained "too many flowers" and "too little fruit." Her reputation rests on her short poems, such as "The Treasures of the Deep," "The Better Land," "The Homes of England," "Casabianca," "The Palm Tree," "The Graves of a Household," "The Wreck," "The Dying Improvisatore," "The Lost Pleiad," and the "Landing of the Pil grims," beginning: The breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rock bound coast. Mrs. Hemans's Poetical Works were collected in 1832 (last ed., Oxford, 1914) ; her Memorials, etc., by H. F. Chorley (1836).