To dream once more my early dreams again.

Writing a decade after Felicia Hemans, L.E.L. remains in close contact with her predecessor?however, the relationship is not one of simple admiration. L.E.L. has read Hemans? work, namely her poem The Land of Dreams, and weathered by personal experience, she rejects Hemans? optimism in her own poem A Poet's Love. Hemans writes of a mystical dream-world where all of life?s happiest images and moments merge to form a ?picture-land of sleep.? And although she realizes that this dream world ?will melt away,? she remains optimistic of a ?future" where ?the beautiful not melts away.?

L.E.L. emphatically quashes Hemans? hopefulness when she writes ?they melted to earth my upward wings.? In L.E.L.?s world this melting is irreversible; she has no hopes of rekindling her former love because its power has been so undeniably weakened. Indeed, L.E.L. never mentions the highly anticipated ?future? that Hemans so desperately desires, but rather lives solely for the sake of briefly experiencing her ?early dreams again.? While both women acknowledge the power of the dream-world, only Hemans is able to see past it with a sense of youthful exuberance towards future happiness. Perhaps wiser than her predecessor, perhaps simply more bitter, L.E.L. shows that even in all of its glory, dreams offer no more than a temporary escape from the harsh reality of life.