ABSTRACT
Being "a genuine woman, and, therefore, a true Christian," Hemans is commended for dispensing religious and moral sentiments. According to William Michael Rossetti, she had "that love of good and horror of evil which characterize a scrupulous female mind." Her favorite poem, The Forest Sanctuary, concerns a sixteenth-century Spaniard who flees to North America in search of religious freedom. The Skeptic, a poem arguing for the necessity of deism, infuriated Byron ("too stiltified & atmospheric-& quite wrong"), but most readers saw it as appropriate for women to act as "natural guardians of morality and faith."
