Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was born about 1660, at Sidmonton, Hants, the residence of her father, Sir William Kingsmill. She married Heneage Finch, fourth Earl of Winchilsea, who survived her six years. She died on the 5th of August, 1720, leaving no issue. Her works consist of “The Spleen,” a pindaric ode, 1701; “The Prodigy,” 1706; “Miscellany Poems,” 1713; and “Aristomenes,” a tragedy.

General

  There is one poetess to whose writings I am especially partial, the Countess of Winchelsea. I have perused her poems frequently, and should be happy to name such passages as I think most characteristic of her genius, and most fit to be selected…. Her style in rhyme is often admirable, chaste, tender, and vigorous, and entirely free from sparkle, antithesis, and that overculture, which reminds one, by its broad glare, its stiffness, and heaviness, of the double daisies of the garden, compared with their modest and sensitive kindred of the fields. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think there is a good deal of resemblance in her style and versification to that of Tickell, to whom Dr. Johnson justly assigns a high place among the minor poets, and of whom Goldsmith rightly observes, that there is a strain of ballad thinking through all his poetry, and it is very attractive.

  She was a poetess of singular originality and excellence; her lines “To the Nightingale” have lyrical qualities which were scarcely approached in her own age, and would do credit to the best, while her odes and more weighty pieces have a strength and accomplishment of style which make the least interesting of them worth reading. Lady Winchilsea was one of the last pindaric writers of the school of Cowley. Her odes display that species of writing in the final dissolution out of which it was redeemed by Gray and Collins. Such a poem as her “All is Vanity,” full as it is of ingenious thought, and studded with noble and harmonious lines, fails to impress the attention as a vertebrate composition. Her “Ode to the Spleen,” from which Pope borrowed his famous “aromatic pain,” is still more loose and fragmentary in structure. On the other hand, her less ambitious studies have a singular perfection of form and picturesqueness of manner. She lights upon the right epithet and employs it with precision, and gives a brilliant turn, even to a triviality, by some bright and natural touch. Her “Nocturnal Reverie” is worthy of Wordsworth’s commendation; it is simply phenomenal as the creation of a friend of Prior and of Pope, and some of the couplets, especially those which describe the straying horse, and the cries of the birds, are worthy of the closest observers of nature in a naturalistic age.

  In general feeling an Augustan, with an under-currant of real love for nature. It is in her fondness for country life, her love of out-door beauty, and her accurate descriptions of nature, that she differs from her contemporaries. In these important points, she may certainly be classed as reactionary in tendency. Her octosyllabic ode, “To the Nightingale,” has true lyric quality, and her short poems, “The Tree” and “A Nocturnal Reverie,” are notable expressions of nature-worship.

  It is a pity that her poems have not been reprinted and are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them…. Fortunately for Lady Winchelsea, natural taste and the opportunities of life seem to have inclined her to take natural objects as the source of her imagery. What place suggested the “Nocturnal Reverie” we cannot say, but it is clearly a corrected impression and not merely conventional. It is all seen: the waving moon on the river, the sleepy cowslip, the foxglove, paler than by day, but chequering still with red the dusky brakes, and the wonderful image of the horse, take us almost a century away from the drawing-rooms and the sham shepherdesses of her contemporaries. And she could manage the shortened octosyllable even better than Parnell, could adjust the special epithet (Pope borrowed or stole “aromatic pain” from her, though probably she took it from Dryden’s “aromatic splinters”). Altogether she is a most remarkable phenomenon, too isolated to point much of a moral, but adoring the lull of early eighteenth-century poetry with images even more correct than Thomson’s and put in language far less artificial.