In 1818 Captain Hemans went to Rome, leaving his wife, shortly before the birth of their fifth child, with her mother at Bronwylfa. There seems to have been a tacit agreement, perhaps on account of their limited means, that they should separate. Letters were interchanged, and Captain Hemans was often consulted about his children; but the husband and wife never met again. Many friends--among them the bishop of St Asaph and Bishop Heber--gathered round Mrs Hemans and her children. In 1819 she published _Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse_, and gained a prize of £50 offered for the best poem on _The Meeting of Wallace and Bruce on the Banks of the Carron_. In 1820 appeared _The Sceptic and Stanzas to the Memory of the late King_. In June 1821 she won the prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature for the best poem on the subject of _Dartmoor_, and began her play, _The Vespers of Palermo_. She now applied herself to a course of German reading. Körner was her favourite German poet, and her lines on the grave of Körner were one of the first English tributes to the genius of the young soldier-poet. In the summer of 1823 a volume of her poems was published by Murray, containing "The Siege of Valencia," "The Last Constantine" and "Belshazzar's Feast." _The Vespers of Palermo_ was acted at Covent Garden, December 12, 1823, and Mrs Hemans received £200 for the copyright; but, though the leading parts were taken by Young and Charles Kemble, the play was a failure, and was withdrawn after the first performance. It was acted again in Edinburgh in the following April with greater success, when an epilogue, written for it by Sir Walter Scott at Joanna Baillie's request, was spoken by Harriet Siddons. This was the beginning of a cordial friendship between Mrs Hemans and Scott. In the same year she wrote _De Chatillon, or the Crusaders_; but the manuscript was lost, and the poem was published after her death, from a rough copy. In 1824 she began "The Forest Sanctuary," which appeared a year later with the "Lays of Many Lands" and miscellaneous pieces collected from the _New Monthly Magazine_ and other periodicals.
In the spring of 1825 Mrs Hemans removed from Bronwylfa, which had been purchased by her brother, to Rhyllon, a house on an opposite height across the river Clwyd. The contrast between the two houses suggested her _Dramatic Scene between Bronwylfa and Rhyllon_. The house itself was bare and unpicturesque, but the beauty of its surroundings has been celebrated in "The Hour of Romance," "To the River Clwyd in North Wales," "Our Lady's Well" and "To a Distant Scene." This time seems to have been the most tranquil in Mrs Hemans's life. But the death of her mother in January 1827 was a second great breaking-point in her life. Her heart was affected, and she was from this time an acknowledged invalid. In the summer of 1828 the _Records of Woman_ was published by Blackwood, and in the same year the home in Wales was finally broken up by the marriage of Mrs Hemans's sister and the departure of her two elder boys to their father in Rome. Mrs Hemans removed to Wavertree, near Liverpool. But, although she had a few intimate friends there--among them her two subsequent biographers, Henry F. Chorley and Mrs Lawrence of Wavertree Hall--she was disappointed in her new home. She thought the people of Liverpool stupid and provincial; and they, on the other hand, found her uncommunicative and eccentric. In the following summer she travelled by sea to Scotland with two of her boys, to visit the Hamiltons of Chiefswood.