Born [Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett], at Coxhoe, co. Durham, 6 March 1806. [Date disputed, but this probably correct]. Early life at Hope End, Herefordshire. Delicate health owing to accident to spine while at Hope End. Poem, “Battle of Marathon,” printed for her by her father, 1820. First publication, 1826. At Sidmouth, 1831–33. First contrib. to “Athenæum,” 1 July 1837. “Contrib. to Finden’s Tableaux,” same year. To Torquay for health, 1838; brother drowned there, 11 July 1840. Returned to London, summer of 1841. Married to Robert Browning, 12 Sept. 1846. To Paris and Italy. Settled in Florence, winter of 1847. Son born, 9 March 1849. Visit to Rome, 1850; to England, 1851; winter and spring in Paris; to London summer of 1852; return to Florence in autumn. Winter of 1853–54 in Rome. Visit to Normandy, July 1858. To Rome, winter of 1859–60, and 1860–61. Died, at Florence, 29 June 1861. Works: “An Essay on Mind” (anon.), 1826; “Prometheus Bound,” 1833; “The Seraphim,” 1838; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1844 (reprinted at New York as “A Drama of Exile, etc.,” 1845); “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” 1849; “Casa Guidi Windows,” 1851; “Two Poems: by E. Barrett and R. Browning,” 1854; “Aurora Leigh,” 1857 [1856]; “Poems before Congress,” 1860. Posthumous: “Last Poems,” 1862; “The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets,” 1863; “Selected Poems,” ed. by Robert Browning (2nd series), 1866, 1880; “Letters to R. H. Horne” (2 vols.), 1877 [1876]; “Earlier Poems, 1826–33,” 1877 [1878]; “The Battle of Marathon” (in type-facsimile, privately printed), 1891. She edited: Chaucer’s Works (with R. H. Horne and others), 1841. Collected Works: (2 vols.), New York, 1871; London, 1890. Life: by J. H. Ingram (“Eminent Women” series), 1888.

Personal

  We are ignorant of her lineage, her education, her tastes, and (last not least, where a lady is concerned) her personal attractions. We know nothing more of her, than can be gathered from her poetry, except the solitary fact, which we have heard on good authority, that her first volume was published when the writer was but seventeen years old; and, as that bears the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five upon the title-page, a shrewd guess may be given as to her age at the present time.

  I read without principle. I have a sort of unity indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting—do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldee—and the Greek poets, and Plato, right through from end to end—I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas. It is only useful knowledge and the multiplication table I never tried hard at. And now—what now? Is this matter of exultation? Alas, no! Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from the romances? Certainly no!—never, except in joke. It’s against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we all generally err by reading too much, and out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much—should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation. The fact is, that the ne plus ultra of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call “whittling.”

  Probably no living individual has a more extensive and diffuse acquaintance with literature—that of the present day inclusive—than Miss Barrett. Although she has read Plato, in the original, from beginning to end, and the Hebrew Bible from Genesis to Malachi (nor suffered her course to be stopped by the Chaldean), yet there is not probably a single good romance of the most romantic kind in whose marvellous and impossible scenes she has not delighted, over the fortunes of whose immaculate or incredible heroes and heroines she has not wept; nor a clever novel or fanciful sketch of our own day, over the brightest pages of which she has not smiled inwardly, or laughed outright, just as their authors themselves would have desired.

  My true initials are E. B. M. B.—my long name, as opposed to my short one, being Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett!—there’s a full length to take away one’s breath!—Christian name … Elizabeth Barrett:—surname, Moulton Barrett. So long it is, that to make it portable, I fell into the habit of doubling it up and packing it closely,… and of forgetting that I was a Moulton, altogether. One might as well write the alphabet as all four initials. Yet our family name is Moulton Barrett, and my brothers reproach me sometimes for sacrificing the governorship of an old town in Norfolk with a little honourable verdigris from the Herald’s Office.

  I have also here a poet and a poetess—two celebrities who have run away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world. I think it possible I may go on to Italy with them.

  She is little, hard-featured, with long, dark ringlets, a pale face, and plaintive voice—something very impressive in her dark eyes and her brow. Her general aspect puts me in mind of Mignon—what Mignon might be in maturity and maternity.

  My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago [1836]. She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the “Prometheus” of Æschylus, the authoress of the “Essays on Mind,” was old enough to be in company, in technical language was out. Through the kindness of another invaluable friend,… I saw much of her during my stay in town. We met so constantly and so familiarly that in spite of the difference of age, intimacy ripened into friendship, and after my return into the country, we corresponded freely and frequently, her letters being just what they ought to be—her own talk put upon paper.

  Dined at home, and at eight dressed to go to Kenyon. With him I found an interesting person I had never seen before, Mrs. Browning, late Miss Barrett,—not the invalid I expected; she has a handsome oval face, a fine eye, and altogether a pleasing person. She had no opportunity of display, and apparently no desire.

  Mrs. Browning is in many respects the correlative of her husband. As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. She has been a great sufferer from ill health, and the marks of pain are stamped upon her person and manner. Her figure is slight, her countenance expressive of genius and sensibility, shaded by a veil of long, brown locks; and her tremulous voice often flutters over her words, like the flame of a dying candle over the wick. I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl. Her rare and fine genius needs no setting forth at my hands. She is also, what is not so generally known, a woman of uncommon, nay, profound learning…. Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning, than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings singly and separately, but to see their powers quickened, and their happiness rounded, by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude. A union so complete as theirs—in which the mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh for—is cordial to behold and soothing to remember.

  Oh! she is indeed a precious gem! With all her varied and profound learning and high poetic gift, she is as simple and unassuming in manner as a child. What a visit of joy it was to me, in their love-sanctified and art-beautified home. Their union seems perfect in happiness, the mind as well as the heart having met its own affinity. When we parted, after some hours of delightful conversation, wherein the bright and tender nature of Elizabeth Browning shone like soft beams of light, I felt as though years of pleasant acquaintance had passed between us.

  The Brownings are long gone back now, and with them one of my delights,—an evening resort where I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage, and hardly needing a double bed at the inn.

  Mr. Milnes introduced me to Mrs. Browning, and assigned her to me to conduct into the breakfast-room. She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like…. She is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency.

  Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the same elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheeks, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London at Lord Houghton’s breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing room; and, besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me that there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness.

  This noble woman, confined to her sick-chamber for years, for the most part confined to her bed by actual illness, nevertheless devoted herself to the unwearied pursuit of truth and excellence, making of her couch of pain the very seed-ground for the highest and noblest thoughts.

  The main comfort is that she suffered very little pain, none besides that ordinarily attending the simple attacks of cold and cough she was subject to—had no presentiment of the result whatever, and was consequently spared the misery of knowing she was about to leave us: she was smilingly assuring me she was “better,” “quite comfortable—if I would but come to bed,” to within a few minutes of the last…. Through the night she slept heavily and brokenly—that was the bad sign; but then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me, and sleep again. At four o’clock there were symptoms that alarmed me; I called the maid and sent for the doctor. She smiled as I proposed to bathe her feet, “Well, you are determined to make an exaggerated case of it!” Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer—the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl’s, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek. These incidents so sustain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their right; there was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God took her to Himself, as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark, uneasy bed into your arms and the light. Thank God! Annunziata thought, by her earnest ways with me, happy and smiling as they were, that she must have been aware of our parting’s approach, but she was quite conscious, had words at command, and yet did not even speak of Peni, who was in the next room. Her last word was, when I asked, “How do you feel?” “Beautiful.”

  This day week, at half-past four o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning died…. Probably there never was a greater instance of the power of genius over the weakness of the flesh…. For nearly fifteen years Florence and the Brownings have been one in the thoughts of many English and Americans; and Casa Guidi, which has been immortalized by Mrs. Browning’s genius, will be as dear to the Anglo-Saxon traveller as Milton’s Florentine residence has been heretofore. Those who now pass by Casa Guidi fancy an additional gloom has settled upon the dark face of the old palace, and grieve to think that those windows from which a spirit-face witnessed two Italian revolutions, and those large mysterious rooms where a spirit-hand translated the great Italian Cause into burning verse, and pleaded the rights of humanity in “Aurora Leigh,” are hereafter to be the passing homes of the thoughtless or the unsympathizing. Those who have known Casa Guidi as it was could hardly enter the loved rooms now and speak above a whisper. They who have been so favored can never forget the square anteroom, with its great picture and piano-forte, at which the boy Browning passed many an hour,—the little dining-room covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and Robert Browning,—the long room filled with plaster casts and studies, which was Mr. Browning’s retreat,—and, dearest of all, the large drawing-room, where she always sat. It opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of Santa Felice. There was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures of saints that looked out sadly from their carved frames of black wood.

  A life of suffering ended in peace. A frail body, bearing the burden of too great a brain, broke at last under the weight. After six days’ illness, the shadows of night fell upon her eyes for the last time, and half an hour after daybreak she beheld the Eternal Vision. Like the pilgrim in the dream, she saw the heavenly glory before passing through the gate. “It is beautiful,” she exclaimed, and died; sealing these last words upon her lips as the fittest inscription that could ever be written upon her life, her genius, and her memory. In the English burial-ground at Florence lie her ashes.

  She was slight and fragile in appearance, with a pale, wasted face, shaded by masses of soft chestnut curls which fell on her cheeks, and serious eyes of bluish-gray. Her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul. This, at least, was the first impression: her personality, frail as it appeared, soon exercised its power and it seemed a natural thing that she should have written the “Cry of the Children” or the “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” I also understood how these two poets, so different both intellectually and physically, should have found their complements in each other. The fortunate balance of their reciprocal qualities makes them an exception to the rule that the intermarriage of authors is unadvisable.

  A more timid nature was never joined to a bolder spirit than in Elizabeth Browning. She fairly shrunk from observation, and could not endure mixed company, though in her heart kind and sympathetic with all. Her timidity was both instinctive and acquired; having been an invalid and student from her youth up, she had lived almost the life of a recluse; thus it shocked her to be brought face to face with inquisitive strangers, or the world in general.

  I have never seen one more nobly simple, more entirely guiltless of the feminine propensity of talking for effect, more earnest in assertion, more gentle yet pertinacious in difference, than she was. Like all whose early nurture has chiefly been from books, she had a child’s curiosity regarding the life beyond her books, co-existing with opinions accepted as certainties concerning things of which (even with the intuition of genius) she could know little. She was at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument; without any more practical knowledge of social life than a nun might have, when after long years, she emerged from her cloister and her shroud.

  The monument of Mrs. Browning, though beautiful in design, is painfully suggestive of an unstable equilibrium. It consists of a sarcophagus of white marble of mediæval form, supported by six composite columns resting upon an ornamental base, the whole protected by a stone border surmounted by an iron rail. One end of the sarcophagus is decorated with a lyre in bass-relief, while on one side is a medallion of the poetess, with the simple inscription,

  It curiously happens that I first met Mrs. Browning at Rome in 1859, where and when Hawthorne also first made her acquaintance, I believe. I remember going through the Vatican with him, and the then ex-President Pierce, during my sojourn in Rome, in the spring of that year. Though we both saw Mrs. Browning last in that year, my impressions are very distinct that her hair was a dark-chestnut. It did not curl naturally; but, by one of those artifices of the toilet which all of her sex and some of mine understand, it was worn, as it has usually been painted, in side ringlets. Hawthorne’s constitutional propensity to take sombre views of things may account for the liberty he seems to have taken with Mrs. Browning’s hair.

  Those among us who only know Mrs. Browning as a wife and as a mother have found it difficult to realise her life under any other conditions, so vivid and complete is the image of her peaceful home, of its fireside where the logs are burning, and the mistress established on her sofa, with her little boy curled up by her side, the door opening and shutting meanwhile to the quick step of the master of the house, and to the life of the world without, coming to find her in her quiet corner. We can recall the slight figure in its black silk dress, the writing apparatus by the sofa, the tiny inkstand, the quill-nibbed pen-holder, the unpretentious implements of her work. “She was a little woman; she liked little things.” Her miniature editions of the classics are still carefully preserved, with her name written in each in her sensitive fine handwriting, and always her husband’s name added above her own, for she dedicated all her books to him: it was a fancy that she had.

  The date and place of Mrs. Browning’s birth have been variously stated. For some years biographers wavered between London and Hope End, Herefordshire, as her natal place. Quite recently Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, authorized by Mr. Browning, declared Burn Hall, Durham, the place, and March 6, 1809, the date of Mrs. Browning’s birth. My researches have enabled me to disprove these statements. In “The Tyne Mercury,” for March 14, 1809, is announced for March 4, “In London, the wife of Edward M. Barrett, Esq., of a daughter.” Having published my data, their accuracy was challenged by Mr. Browning, who now asserted that his wife was “born on March 6, 1806, at Carlton Hall, Durham, the residence of her father’s brother.” Carlton Hall was not in Durham, but in Yorkshire, and, I am authoritatively informed, did not become the residence of Mr. S. Moulton Barrett until some time after 1810. Mr. Browning’s latest suggestions cannot, therefore, be accepted.

  I saw the flat stone which covers the grave of Landor; I passed the monument of Arthur Hugh Clough; I read the names of Hiram Powers and Theodore Parker; and finally I came to the tomb of Mrs. Browning. Handfuls of lilies of the valley had been strewed between the low columns that support the sarcophagus, either early that hot morning or late the day before, for they were wilted with the sun. On seeing these evidences of affection to the poetess I wondered to myself whether it were possible nowadays to read her poetry; and, with this in my mind, stopped at a bookshop and bought a volume of selections from her poems. Yes, they could indeed be read, often with pleasure and sometimes with surprise.

  That my visits to Casa Guidi were valued by me as choice morsels of my existence, is to say not half enough. I was conscious even then of coming away from those visits a better man, with higher views and aims. And pray, reader, understand that any such effect was not produced by any talk or look or word of the nature of preaching, or anything approaching to it, but simply by the perception and appreciation of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was; of the immaculate purity of every thought that passed through her pellucid mind, and the indefeasible nobility of her every idea, sentiment, and opinion.

  No intelligible, certainly no reasonably consistent, account of the early life of the writer of these books has yet reached us. Delicate from her birth, and always an invalid, she is represented as suffering from a mysterious malady, which may or may not have been caused by a fall from her horse, which she herself appears to have forgotten, or from a cough which she remembered. Some declare that she was confined to her room for years, unable in fact, to leave her bed for months at a time. Others state that during this period she was occasionally met in society. She was always lying at death’s door, and always writing letters and poems.

  Of Mrs. Browning I never saw much. Sundry visits we paid to each other missed, and when I did find her at home in Casa Guidi we did not fall on congenial themes. I was bubbling over with enthusiasm for her poetry, but had not the audacity to express my admiration (which, in truth, had been my special reason for visiting Florence), and she entangled me in erudite discussions about Tuscan and Bolognese schools of painting, concerning which I knew little and, perhaps, cared less. But I am glad I looked into the splendid eyes which lived like coals, in her pain-worn face, and revealed the soul which Robert Browning trusted to meet again on the threshold of eternity. Was there ever such a testimony as their perfect marriage—living on as it did in the survivor’s heart for a quarter of a century—to the possibility of the eternal union of Genius and Love?

  I knew but little of his wife; she died comparatively early. I never saw her in society, but at her own fireside she struck me as very pleasing and exceedingly sympathetic. Her physique was peculiar: curls like the pendent ears of a water-spaniel, and poor little hands—so thin that when she welcomed you she gave you something like the foot of a young bird; the Hand that made her great had not made her fair. But she had striking eyes, and we forgot any physical shortcomings—they were entirely lost sight of in what I may call her incomparable sweetness, I might almost say affectionateness; just as, while we are reading it, we lose sight of the incompleteness of her poetry—its lack of artistic control. She vanquishes by her genius and her charm.

  How often M. Milsand has told me of his charming conversations with this exquisite woman, whose shining superiority was always concealing itself under her unconscious goodness and lovely simplicity. Neither Mrs. Sutherland Orr nor Miss Thackeray had yet written about her, and everything was new to me that he told me of this life, so imprisoned in suffering and only free in thought, until the day when so kind and robust a génie had come to break the bonds, and carry her in his arms through the years that lay before them.

  It was on June 29, 1861, that Mrs. Browning died. She was buried at Florence, where her body rests in a sarcophagus designed by her friend and her husband’s friend, Frederic Leighton, the future President of the Royal Academy. At a later date, when her husband was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, her remains might have been transferred to England, to lie with his among the great company of English poets in which they had earned their places. But it was thought better, on the whole, to leave them undisturbed in the land and in the city which she had loved so well, and which had been her home so long. In life and in death she had been made welcome in Florence. The Italians, as her husband said, seemed to have understood her by an instinct; and upon the walls of Casa Guidi is a marble slab, placed there by the municipality of Florence, and bearing an inscription from the pen of the Italian poet, Tommaseo:—

A Drama of Exile, 1844

  We rank the “Drama of Exile” among the least successful of her efforts. Although the poem for which she has professed the most partiality, we think it will scarcely gain the acceptation in any quarter for which her preface eloquently but humbly pleads. While fullest of her peculiar faults, it has the fewest of her surpassing beauties. She writes with sincerity, and as sincerely as she writes do we believe that in no one reader will it produce the impression she desires;—less as she tells us for her own fame than for their spiritual progress. We regret the misadventure of so excellent an intent,—but the public are too much indebted to the rich bounteousness of her genius in other poems to justify a single reproach for incompleteness or failure.

  In the plot of the drama of Miss Barrett it is something even worse than incongruity which affronts: a continuous mystical strain of ill-fitting and exaggerated allegory—if, indeed, allegory is not much too respectable a term for it.

  Cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigour and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience, and command of classic allusion, above any female writer the world has yet known…. She has the imagination all compact—the healthy archetypal plant from which all forms may be divined, and, so far as now existent, understood. Like Milton, she sees the angelic hosts in real presence; like Dante, she hears the spheral concords and shares the planetary motions. But she cannot, like Milton, marshal the angels so near the earth as to impart the presence other than by sympathy. He who is near her level of mind may, through the magnetic sympathy, see the angels with her. Others will feel only the grandeur and sweetness she expresses in these forms. Still less can she, like Dante, give, by a touch, the key which enables ourselves to play on the same instrument. She is singularly deficient in the power of compression. There are always far more words and verses than are needed to convey the meaning, and it is a great proof of her strength, that the thought still seems strong, when arrayed in a form so Briarean, clumsy and many-handed.

  The intellect displayed in this noble production is stupendous. The conception is massive: the treatment of the prominent idea truly consistent and powerful: the pathos such as only a woman could have written: and the moral tone of the work most lofty and pure. But, in spite of all these excellencies, the poem often fatigues us. It keeps the mind too much on the stretch; requires an unceasing exercise of our deepest thoughts; and while we never fail at last to see the extreme beauty of the writer’s ideas, we grow tired in studying them.

  As a whole, the poem is strained, extravagant, and unequal to its theme…. The “Drama of Exile” contains many noble passages. Some of its conceptions give evidence of great originality and power. But passages in a poem written upon such a subject, which excite a reader’s laughter by their extravagance, are fatal to its claims to be considered a great work of the imagination. Homer sometimes nods, but he never rants. It has been the unanimous voice of criticism, and cannot fail to be the opinion of every candid and intelligent reader, that in the “Drama of Exile” Mrs. Browning very often and very laughably rants.

  Her chief work, “A Drama of Exile,” is a vision in lyrical dramatic form, a mystery, in which man’s loss of the ideals of his youth is beautifully typified by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise. Eve is a figure of truly ethereal loveliness.

  In the “Drama of Exile” she aimed at the highest, and failed; but such failures are impossible to smaller poets. It contains wonderfully fine passages; is a chaotic mass, from which dazzling lustres break out so frequently that a critic aptly spoke of the “flashes” of her “wild and magnificent genius,” the “number and close propinquity of which render her book one flame.”

  Notwithstanding a few fine passages, “A Drama of Exile” cannot be considered a successful effort. The scheme of the poetess was imperfectly developed, and many of the colloquies of Adam and Eve, and of Lucifer and Gabriel, are forced and unnatural. The lyrics interspersed throughout the poem are often harsh and unmusical, and the whole drama is deficient in action and interest.

  The theme of the “Drama of Exile” is so daring, and the execution, despite innumerable faults, so excellent, that either condemnation or praise is hard to award. The great defect in what the poetess intended should be her masterpiece is that, notwithstanding the introduction of Adam and Eve, and the self-sacrificing love of the latter for her partner in sorrow, it is almost entirely devoid of human interest. Admiration is frequently compelled by bursts of true lyrical beauty; but the heart never throbs with hope nor thrills with terror for the poetic phantasmata whose weeping and wailing fill so many pages of the drama. There are, it is true, some magnificent passages of poetry in the work, notably Lucifer’s description of the effect of the curse upon animal creation.

Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, 1844

  “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” as a transcript from the “red-leaved tablets of the heart”—as a tale of love, set to the richest music—as a picture of the subtle workings, the stern reasonings, and the terrible bursts of passion—is above praise. How like a volcano does the poet’s heart at length explode! How first all power is given him in the dreadful trance of silence, and then in the loosened tempest of speech! What a wild, fierce logic flows forth from his lips, in which, as in that of Lear’s madness, the foundations of society seem to quiver like reeds, and every mount of conventionalism is no longer found; and in the lull of that tempest, and in the returning sunshine, how beautiful, how almost superhuman, seem the figures of the two lovers, seen now and magnified through the mist of the reader’s fast flowing tears. It is a tale of successful love, and yet it melts you like a tragedy, and most melts you in the crisis of the triumph. On Geraldine we had gazed as on a star, with dry-eyed and distant admiration; but when that star dissolves in showers at the feet of her poet lover, we weep for very joy. Truly a tear is a sad yet beautiful thing; it constitutes a link connecting us with distant countries, nay, connecting us with distant worlds.

  With the exception of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” I have never read a poem combining so much of the fiercest passion with so much of the most delicate imagination, as the “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” of Miss Barrett. I am forced to admit, however, that the latter work is a palpable imitation of the former, which it surpasses in thesis, as much as it falls below it in a certain calm energy, lustrous and indomitable—such as we might imagine in a broad river of molten gold.

  It is impetuous and passionate, and the action is carried forward with immense vehemence…. Probably the most characteristic specimen of Mrs. Browning’s peculiar powers and genius.

  “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” was the ballad which gained her a sudden repute among lay-readers. It is said that she composed it in twelve hours, and not improbably; for, although full of melodious sentiment and dainty lines, the poem is marred by commonplaces of frequent occurrence. Many have classed it with “Locksley Hall,” but, while certain stanzas are equal to Tennyson’s best, it is far from displaying the completeness of that enduring lyric. I value it chiefly as an illustration of the greater freedom and elegance to which her poetic faculty had now attained, and as her first open avowal, and a brave one in England, of the democracy which generous and gifted spirits, the round world over, are wont to confess. As for her story, she only succeeds in showing how meanly a womanish fellow might act, when enamored of one above him in social station, and that the heart of a man possessed of healthy self-respect was something she had not yet found out.

  If Mrs. Browning’s intelligent readers were asked to name her most characteristic poem, they would probably fix upon “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.” The choice would lie between that and “The Duchess May.” The finest wine of her genius, the intensest elixir of her poetic sympathy, the very essence of her womanly pride, and not less of her womanly ecstasy of self-surrendering humility, as well as her most original imagery, puissant thought, and splendid language, are present in both poems. I should not, for my own part, undertake to say which of the two is the more characteristic; but I should pronounce it impossible for any one to have a right insight into these two without possessing a fairly accurate idea of the distinctive character of her genius…. “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” is steeped in melody,—the language, the imagery, the sentiment, the thought, all instinct with music, floating and flowing and rippling along in an element of liquid harmony and modulated brilliance.

The Cry of the Children, 1844

  Full of a nervous, unflinching energy—a horror sublime in its simplicity—of which a far greater than Dante might have been proud…. In some cases it is nearly impossible to determine what metre is intended. “The Cry of the Children” cannot be scanned: we never saw so poor a specimen of verse.

  Will always form a worthy companion-piece to Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” losing nothing by the comparison. It is full of a thrilling energy of thought, clothed in simple, nervous language.

  The poetry of Mrs. Browning is not only that of the poet’s inspiration, but it has the influence of exquisite and extended culture. Her genius was that of the highest order—the spiritualisation of intellect. She is the first woman who has expressed the pathos of struggling and repressed life in poetry, as Millet has expressed it in painting. She felt, as did Hood, that the lover’s song, and even that the intimations of nature, are less appealing than the grinding toil that submerges the uncomforted poor. To her was given the task to arouse England and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the child suffering in factory life. Her poem “The Cry of the Children” appeared almost simultaneously with Lord Shaftesbury’s great speech in Parliament on child labour. The poem and eloquence together aroused England, nor has the echo lessened with the years.

Casa Guidi Windows, 1851

  I have lately read again with great delight Mrs. Browning’s “Casa Guidi Windows.” It contains, amongst other admirable things, a very noble expression of what I believe to be the true relation of the religious mind to the past.

  This poem exhibits Mrs. Browning in her greatest intellectual strength. The fabric is solid and enduring; the poem as sustained as anything which she has written, and more perfect than her remaining longer one. Clearly her feeling was in this work as well as her imagination, and the combined powers have given us something which cannot fail to live.

Aurora Leigh, 1856

  The most successful book of the season has been Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh.” I could wish some things altered, I confess; but as it is, it is by far (a hundred times over) the finest poem ever written by a woman. We know little or nothing of Sappho—nothing to induce comparison—and all other wearers of petticoats must courtesy to the ground.

  Yet with all my knowledge I have felt something like a bug ever since reading “Aurora Leigh.” Oh, the wonder of it! and oh, the bore of writing about it.

  I am greatly delighted with Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh.” It is full of strong things, and brilliant things, and beautiful things. And how glad I am to see modern literature tending so much toward the breaking down of social distinctions!

  Although … Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” is her finest work, there are many among her admirers whom her earlier poems will still move the most deeply. Comparatively few can follow, with full sympathy, her entire course. Perhaps most of those whose spiritual life has actually begun, stand yet upon the stage of sorrow and longing. While such gaze with admiration on the shining path of their poet, they will yet feel the deepest sympathy with her, as she is still walking among the shadows, and cheering them with her songs. It appears to us, also, that the “Aurora Leigh” is not to be reckoned among the works destined for immortality. The universal element in it is too much mingled with the peculiarities of our time, to admit of its becoming naturalized in another age. This need not, however, lessen our enjoyment of it; as we should not find the blossom of the century-plant less beautiful for the thought that the entire age had been needed for its production, and that it yet would wither, very shortly, before our eyes.

  It is a unique, wonderful and immortal poem; astonishing for its combination of masculine power with feminine tenderness; for its novelty, its facility, its incessant abundance of thought, and expression; its being an exponent of its age, and a prophetic teacher of it, its easy yet lofty triumph over every species of common place; and its noble and sweet avowal, after all, of a participation of error; its lovely willingness to be no loftier, or less earthly, than something on an equality with love.

  I am reading a poem full of thought and fascinating with fancy: Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh.” In many pages, and particularly 126 and 127, there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. I have not yet read much farther. I had no idea that any one in this age was capable of so much poetry. I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should have a good hearty draught of poetry again; the distemper had got into the vineyard that produced it. Here are indeed, even here, some flies upon the surface, as there always will be upon what is sweet and strong. I know not yet what the story is. Few possess the power of construction.

  We are reading “Aurora Leigh” for the third time, with more enjoyment than ever. I know no book that gives me a deeper sense of communion with a large as well as beautiful mind.

  With here and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleasant with the faults of the worst school of modern poetry,—the physically intense school, as I should be inclined to call it, of which Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” is the worst example, whose muse is a fast young woman with the lavish ornament and somewhat overpowering perfume of the demi-monde, and which pushes expression to the last gasp of sensuous exhaustion.

  An extraordinary work, which is also a masterpiece; I repeat that space fails me in order that I may state, after having perused it twenty times, how beautiful I consider it to be. It contains the confession of a generous, heroic, and impassioned spirit, one superabounding in genius, of which the culture has been complete, of a philosopher and a poet dwelling amid the loftiest ideas, and surpassing the elevation of her ideas by the nobility of her instincts, wholly modern by her education, by her high-mindedness, by her daring, by the perpetual vibration of her strained sensibility, wound up to such a pitch that the slightest touch awakens in her a vast orchestra and a most wonderful symphony of concords. It is all soul, and the inward monologue, the sublime song of a young girl’s and artist’s great heart, attracted and irritated by an enthusiasm and a pride as strong as her own; the sustained contrast of the masculine and feminine utterance, which, amid the outbursts and the variations on the same theme, continually become separated and opposed in greater measure, till at last, suddenly combining, they unite in a prolonged, mournful and exquisite duo, of which the strain is so lofty and so penetrating as to be wholly unsurpassable.

  An audacious, speculative freedom pervades it, which smacks of the New World rather than the Old…. As a poem, merely, it is a failure, if it be fair to judge it by accepted standards.

  Our own view of it is that, as a whole, it is somewhat inconsequent; it lacks unity, for a poem of such magnitude; but even in these higher respects, though not perfect, it is little beneath anything produced by this generation. When we come to regard it in other aspects, however, our praise is almost necessarily unbounded. It is a poem which we could imagine Shakspeare dropping a tear over for its humanity.

  What is “Aurora Leigh,” by the greatest poetess of our century, if not all time, but one long and carefully elaborated lesson of life?

  I cannot state with equal precision what book contributed to the formation of my views on the Woman question. On one side of it, Professor Stuart’s “New Abolitionists,” describing Mrs. Butler’s crusade against the Police des Mœurs, had a great influence. On the other, that of equality and justice, I can hardly say. Mill on the Subjection of Woman had, I think, much less influence than Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh.”

  It probes to the bottom, but with a hand guided by purity and justice, those social problems which lie at the root of what are known as women’s questions. Her intense feeling that the honour of manhood can never be reached while the honour of womanhood is sullied; her no less profound conviction that people can never be raised to a higher level by mere material prosperity, make this book one of the most precious in our language. She herself speaks of it in the dedication as “The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered.” If she had written nothing else, she would stand out as one of the epoch-making poets of the present century.

  Mrs. Barrett Browning, who, with all her weaknesses of style, towers above all women-poets of the first half of the Victorian Era, has eloquently written upon the stunting effects of ordinary life upon women in “Aurora Leigh,” that wonderful book, so strong and at the same time so full of blemishes.

  Concerning “Aurora Leigh” there will always be differences of opinion and feeling, for it exhibits the poet’s weakness not less manifestly than her strength. Its form is defective, its inspiration intermittent, its style unequal; it is greater in parts than as a whole; but if we regard its finest details of description and characterisation, if we weigh the nuggets of imaginative thought which we turn over on nearly every page, we may fairly pronounce it, with all its faults, one of the fullest and most opulent poems produced in this century by any English poet.

  The most complete monument perhaps of her genius. The remarkable thing in this work is its energy and strong poetical vitality, the rush and spring of life which is in a narrative, often lengthy, and of which the subject and the story are not sufficient for the fervour and power of utterance…. There are really admirable pieces of description and bursts of feeling in this poem, but it is throughout a little rhetorical, and its great quality is, as we have said, the remarkable sustained energy and vitality of the long volume of verse.

  It is a difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three hundred to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through.

  I was sixteen, and I read “Aurora Leigh.” A grown person may smile—but, no; no gentle-minded man or woman smiles at the dream of a girl. What has life to offer that is nobler in enthusiasm, more delicate, more ardent, more true to the unseen and the unsaid realities which govern our souls, or leave us sadder forever because they do not? There may be greater poems in our language than “Aurora Leigh,” but it was many years before it was possible for me to suppose it; and none that ever saw the hospitality of fame could have done for that girl what that poem did at that time. I had never a good memory—but I think I could have repeated a large portion of it; and know that I often stood the test of haphazard examinations on the poem from half-scoffing friends, sometimes of the masculine persuasion. Each to his own; and what Shakespeare or the Latin Fathers might have done for some other impressionable girl, Mrs. Browning—forever bless her strong and gentle name!—did for me.

  Mrs. Browning herself considered “Aurora Leigh,” published in 1856, the most mature of her works, and the one into which her highest convictions upon Life and Art had entered. Her view was supported by its great popularity with the general public, but the critics have been more discriminating in their praise. They have been ready to acknowledge the abundance of poetical material, the moments of high suggestion, the many beautiful passages which this poem contains, but they have also pointed out its want of method, its ignorance of real life, its numerous digressions and frequent lapses into prose. Neither the situations nor the characters are dramatically conceived or well delineated.

  The piercing and terrible pathos of the story is as incomparable and as irresistible as the divine expression of womanly and motherly rapture which seems to suffuse and imbue the very page, the very print, with the radiance and the fragrance of babyhood. There never was, and there never will be, such another baby in type as that. Other poets, even of the inferior sex, have paid immortal tribute to the immortal Godhead incarnate in the mortal and transitory presence of infancy; the homage of one or two among them, a Homer or a Hugo, may have been worthy to be mistaken for a mother’s; but here is a mother’s indeed; and “the yearlong creature” so divinely described must live in sight of all her readers as long as human nature or as English poetry survives. No words can ever be adequate to give thanks for such a gift as this.

  Even her dear faults as an artist are those of a woman, and not such as surely befall to the woman who fails to write out of the depths of her womanly consciousness and experience. What these faults are, the author of “Aurora Leigh” knows full well; and knows, also, that the woman-artist shall not escape them even by the knowing of them! It has, of late years, been urged that this poem, by reason of its length, transcends the good reader’s patience. I do not agree with this lazy consensus.

Sonnets

  I am disposed to consider the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” as, if not the finest, a portion of the finest subjective poetry in our literature. Their form reminds us of an English prototype, and it is no sacrilege to say that their music is showered from a higher and purer atmosphere than that of the Swan of Avon…. The most exquisite poetry hitherto written by a woman, and of themselves justify us in pronouncing their author the greatest of her sex,—on the ground that the highest mission of a female poet is the expression of love, and that no other woman approaching her in genius has essayed the ultimate form of that expression.

  It is we imagine, almost universally accepted that to write the sonnet excellently is about the most difficult performance in the domain of poetry. At any rate, it is the one branch of the art least frequently successfully achieved. It is questionable whether we have more than three or four English poets who can be credited with the highest execution in this respect. But to these three or four must be added the name of Mrs. Browning. After Shakspeare, we should be inclined to maintain that she is the equal of any.

  Of these far more truly than of Shakspeare’s “Sonnets” may it be affirmed that “each is an autobiographical confession.”

  The poems which, from what may be called a technical point of view, may be counted irreproachable, may, if we except the Sonnets, almost be reckoned on the fingers. Her sonnets are among the very best work she has produced. Perhaps indeed her greatest poetic success is to be found in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,”—sonnets, it need hardly be said, which are not “from the Portuguese” at all, but are the faintly disguised presentment of the writer’s most intimate experience. Into the “sonnet’s narrow room” she has poured the full flood of her profoundest thought, and yet the minuteness and exquisiteness of the mould has at the same time compelled a rigorous pruning alike of superabundant imagery and of harmonious verbosity, which has had the happiest results. She is one of the greatest sonnet writers in our language, worthy for this at all events to be ranked side by side with Milton and with Wordsworth.

  Most dear and memorable of all those nightingale melodies, those resonant heart-throbs wrought into a divine music, those ecstasies of love and grief and high aspiration, which have been left as an immortal legacy by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  The last half of the third century of the English sonnet need not detain us, for, amid the multitude of singers who have illustrated it, I find but one who seems to me to rank with the great masters of this species of composition,—Mrs. Browning.

  There is a quality in them which is beyond words; an echo from afar which belongs to the highest human expression of feeling.

  No more impassioned soul ever found expression in rhythmical speech than Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and there is nothing in her poetry which is finer than that famous love-record, the so-called “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Impetuous as was her genius, hasty and frequently careless as she was in production, she never found the archetypal sonnet too circumscribed for her. The pathetic beauty, the fascinating personality, the pure poetry displayed in these sonnets, have touched many and many a heart since the tired singer was laid to rest under the cypresses not far from that beloved river whose flow she had so often followed in thought down the far-off Pisan sea. Only those who have thoroughly studied contemporary poetry, and not only the poetry which is familiar to many but that also which is quite unknown, and by minor writers of no reputation or likelihood of reputation, can realise the potency of Mrs. Browning’s influence, especially among women.

  It was in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” that the first living soul was breathed into Mrs. Browning’s poetry. Sonnets they are not, for they err against all the canons; but they are passionate expressions of love, and a few lines will show their drift…. And love, whether timid or ardent, gave Mrs. Browning an insight to her husband’s character which, it may be doubted, his biographers would not express as strongly.

  These “Sonnets” reach the highest poetic tide of her genius—the modest abandon of a heart overflowing with tenderness, and that surprise of delight as of the primal creation, which the true poet finds in each new thing that meets his sight and experience, but still more strongly in what was almost, in this particular case, a resurrection from the dead.

  In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter.

Letters

  Her letters make Cowper’s poor. In a hurried note, whose hurry is evident in the handwriting, she drops … incidental, but brilliant words—just as if the jewels in her rings, jarred by her rapid fingers, had been suddenly unset and fallen out on the paper. No other handwriting is like hers; it is strong, legible, singularly un-English and more like a man’s than a woman’s.

  Her letters ought to be published. In power, versatility, liveliness, and finesse; in perfect originality of glance, and vigour of grasp at every topic of the hour; in their enthusiastic preferences, prejudices, and inconsistencies, I have never met with any, written by men or by women, more brilliant, spontaneous, and characteristic.

  The spiritual strength of Miss Barrett’s letters, combined with modest self estimate, and temporary forgetfulness of her dangerous state of health, which they evince, renders them unique. The struggle, not only for emancipation from solitude but for life itself, during which they were written, gives them psychological as well as literary value in the key they supply to her mind as expressed in her powers.

  Mrs. Browning as a letter writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain—a scraping of the soul, as Turgenief has it.

  These letters, familiarly written to her private friends, without the smallest idea of publication, treating of the thoughts that came uppermost in the ordinary language of conversation, can lay no claim to make a new revelation of her genius. On the other hand, perhaps because the circumstances of Mrs. Browning’s life cut her off to an unusual extent from personal intercourse with her friends, and threw her back upon letter writing as her principal means of communication with them, they contain an unusually full revelation of her character. And this is not wholly unconnected with her literary genius, since her personal convictions, her moral character, entered more fully than is often the case into the composition of her poetry.

General

  The principal poem in this volume is an “Essay on Mind,” occupying some ninety pages. Viewing this as the production of a young lady of sixteen or seventeen, it is a remarkable, nay, extraordinary performance, to which the records of early genius can furnish very few parallels. It is a metaphysical and reflective poem, showing uncommon power of patient and discriminating thought, a wide range of reading, and a ripe judgment. The versification is easy and vigorous. It blends together, in a very happy combination, the forms of philosophic thought and the vivid hues of poetical fancy. It is especially remarkable for its freedom from any of those morbid elements, which are so apt to be attendant upon precocity of genius, especially in women. There is no exaggeration of personal feeling, no overwrought sensibility, no extravagance of thought and expression, and no sickly melancholy. It seems to be written by one whose mind had been healthy and naturally developed, and whose symmetry had not been impaired by rapid growth.

  Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles forme either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work,—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being,—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain,—and as work I offer it to the public,—feeling its shortcomings more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration,—but feeling also that the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done should give it some protection with the reverent and sincere.

  Probably the greatest female poet that England has ever produced, and one of the most unreadable, is Elizabeth B. Barrett. In the works of no woman have we ever observed so much grandeur of imagination, disguised, as it is, in an elaborately infelicitous style. She has a large heart and a large brain; but many of her thoughts are hooded eagles. That a woman of such varied acquirements, of so much delicacy of sentiment and depth of feeling, of so much holiness and elevation of thought, possessing, too, an imagination of such shaping power and piercing vision, should not consent always to write English, should often consent to manufacture a barbarous jargon compounded of all languages, is a public calamity. “The Cry of the Human” to her, is, “Be more intelligible.”… A number of her poems are absolutely good for nothing, from their harshness and obscurity of language. Her mind has taken its tone and character from the study of Æschylus, Milton, and the Hebrew poets; and she is more familiar with them than with the world. Vast and vague imaginations, excited by such high communion, float duskily before her mind, and she mutters mysteriously of their majestic presence; but she does not always run them into intelligible form.

  That Miss Barrett has done more, in poetry, than any woman, living or dead, will scarcely be questioned:—that she has surpassed all her poetical contemporaries of either sex (with a single exception) is our deliberate opinion—not idly entertained, we think, nor founded on any visionary basis.

  Among my holiday gifts was Miss Barrett’s poems. She is a woman of vigorous thought, but not very poetical thought, and throwing herself into verse involuntarily becomes honied and ornate, so that her verse cloys. It is not natural, quite…. Burrill did not see why I called Miss Barrett purple. It was because her highly colored robe was not harmonious with her native style of thought.

  In selecting Mrs. Hemans as our first specimen of Female Authors, we did so avowedly, because she seemed to us the most feminine writer of the day. We now select Mrs. Browning for the opposite reason, that she is, or at least is said by many to be, the most masculine of our female writers…. To say that Mrs. Browning has more of the man than any female writer of the period, may appear rather an equivocal compliment; and its truth even may be questioned. We may, however, be permitted to say, that she has more of the heroine than her compeers. Hers is a high heroic nature, which adopts for the motto at once of its life and of its poetry, “Perfect through suffering.”… To do Mrs. Browning justice, she has not complained of neglect nor of injury at all. But she has acknowledged herself inspired by the genius of suffering. And this seems to have exerted divers influences upon her poetry. It has, in the first place, taught her to rear for herself a spot of transcendental retreat, a city of refuge in the clouds. Scared away from her own heart, she has soared upwards, and found a rest elsewhere. To those flights of idealism in which she indulges, to those distant and daring themes which she selects, she is urged less, we think, through native tendency of mind, than to fill the vast vacuity of a sick and craving spirit.

  The most imaginative poetess that has appeared in England, perhaps in Europe, and who will attain to great eminence if the fineness of her vein can but outgrow a certain morbidity, reminds her readers of the peculiarities of contemporary genius. She is like an ultra-sensitive sister of Alfred Tennyson.

  The poems of this lady are marked with strength of beauty and beauty of strength. She is deeply read, being familiar with the original of the great ancients (the Greek dramatists having been her particular study), and with the more attractive of the Christian fathers. Her translation of the untranslatable “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus received high praise as a worthy attempt; and her various writings show that she has drunk true inspiration from the fountain to which she has so often resorted with the graceful vase of her natural genius. Miss Barrett is singularly bold and adventurous. Her wing carries her, without faltering at their obscurity, into the cloud and the mist, where not seldom we fail to follow her, but are tempted, while we admire the honesty of her enthusiasm, to believe that she utters what she herself has but dimly perceived. Much of this, however, arises from her disdain of carefulness. Her lines are often rude, her rhymes forced, from impatience rather than affectation; and for the same reason, she falls into the kindred fault of verboseness, which is always obscure. She forgets the advice which Aspasia gave a young poet, “to sow with the hand, and not with the bag.” Her Greek studies should have taught her more sculptor-like finish and dignity; but the glowing, generous impulses of her woman’s heart are too much for the discipline of the classics. Hence it is that we like her less as a scholar than as a woman; for then she compels our sympathy with her high religious faith, her love of children, her delight in the graceful, and beautiful, her revelations of feminine feeling, her sorrow over the suffering, and her indignation against the oppressor.

  I think it may be said that she is chief amongst the learned poetesses of our land: at least, I know of no British female writer who exhibits so intimate an acquaintance with the spirit of both antique and modern philosophy, or so refined a perception of intellectual purity and beauty. Her poetry is the poetry of pure reason.

  She has more poetic genius than any other woman living—perhaps more than any other woman ever showed before, except Sappho. Still there is an imperfectness in what she produces; in many passages the expressions are very faulty, the images forced and untrue, the sentiments exaggerated, and the situations unnatural and unpleasant. Another pervading fault of Mrs. Browning’s poetry is rugged, harsh versification, with imperfect rhymes, and altogether that want of art in the department of metre which prevents the language from being an unobstructive medium for thought.

  Gifted with a fine and peculiar genius, what Mrs. Browning might have achieved, or may yet achieve, by concentration of thought and rejection of unworthy materials, it is impossible to say; but most assuredly she has hitherto marred the effect of much she has written by a careless self-satisfaction. Instead of being a comet that “from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war,” she might have been, and I trust is destined yet to be, a constellation to twinkle for ever in silver beauty amid the blue serene.

  Her poems were to me, in my sick-room, marvellously beautiful: and, now that from the atmosphere of the sick-room, my life has been transferred to the free open air of real, practical existence, I still think her poetry wonderfully beautiful in its way, while wishing that she was more familiar with the external realities which are needed to balance her ideal conceptions.

  What a treasure-house of thought that woman is. Some of the boxes are locked, and you must turn the key with a will; but when you have opened, you are rich for life.

  Mrs. Browning’s Death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real Genius, I know: but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and their Children; and perhaps the Poor: except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.

  The long study of her sick-bed (and her constant chafing against the common estimate of the talents and genius of her sex) overcharged her works with allusions and thoughts relating to books, and made her style rugged with pedantry. She was often intoxicated, too, with her own vehemence. “Aurora Leigh” sets out determined to walk the world with the great Shakespearian stride, whence desperate entanglement of feminine draperies and blinding swirls of dust. The sonnets entitled “From the Portuguese” reveal better her inmost simple nature.

  Mrs. Browning’s works are distinguished by their intellectuality and their freedom from that weak sentimentalism which is too often the fault of female writers, as well as by their lively interest in the great questions of the age in which she lived, which made her an enthusiastic, rather than a wise partisan, and not always on the right side. Like Browning, she paid too little attention to form and finish; and many of her poems, especially of later years, seem intentionally strained in language and rugged in versification. In depth of thought, however, she is perhaps unequalled among English female poets.

  She, at any rate, has demonstrated what emotional poetry really means, in contradistinction to the poetry of simple art; and it cannot be said, either, that she has altogether come short in the matter of design—the design which stamps the greatest poets. Sensibility and intuition, those endowments of supereminent importance to individuals whose greatness is to grow in proportion to their understanding and interpretation of human life, were in her united in a degree seldom witnessed.

  Her taste never seemed quite developed, but through life subordinate to her excess of feeling. So noble, however, was the latter quality, that the critics gave her poetry their attention, and endeavoured to correct its faults of style. For a time she showed a lack of the genuine artist’s reverence, and not without egotism followed her wilful way. The difficulty with her obsolete words was that they were introduced unnaturally, and produced a grotesque effect instead of an attractive quaintness. Moreover, her slovenly elisions, indiscriminate mixture of old and new verbal inflections, eccentric rhymes, forced accents, wearisome repetition of favored words to a degree that almost implied poverty of thought,—such matters justly were held to be an outrage upon the beauty and dignity of metrical art.

  The highest place among our modern poetesses must be claimed for Mrs. Browning, formerly Miss Barrett. In purity and loftiness of sentiment and feeling, and in intellectual power, she is excelled only by Tennyson, whose best works, it is evident, she had carefully studied. Her earlier style reminds us more of Shelley, but this arises from similarity of genius and classical tastes, not imitation.

  Leigh Hunt called her the “Sister of Tennyson,” and another writer, more daringly, the “Daughter of Shakespeare.” I think she was worthy of that high parentage.

  The best English poetess.

  Her rhymes are often illegitimate, her words are often far-fetched, and occasionally even ungrammatical. The splendid dash and energy with which she throws herself at a difficult piece of work should not blind us to the fact that after all its difficulties are sometimes evaded rather than met.

  Apparently poured off hastily, without any attempt at correction or curtailment, her poems contain many flaws—faults of language, and faults of thought, but they also show genuine lyric impetuosity, true pathos, and unfailing freshness and force.

  Her poetry as a whole is an uneven production, full of prosaic episodes, with much that is forced and unnatural, a chaos from which rare lustres break out.

  The notes of Mrs. Browning’s poetry are emotion, purity, pathos, intense earnestness, sympathy with every form of suffering, with everything great and good, hatred of everything evil, specially of all oppression. Her want of humour, a few rough and careless rhymes, and occasional forcing of sense and phrase, have made some critics of word and style complain; but students may rely on it, that to know Mrs. Browning as she reveals herself in her works is a liberal education, and to enter into her spirit one of the most ennobling pursuits that a man can undertake.

  Mrs. Browning will probably be longest remembered by her incomparable sonnets and by her lyrics, which are full of pathos and passion. Perhaps her two finest poems in this kind are the “Cry of the Children” and “Cowper’s Grave.” All her poems show an enormous power of eloquent, penetrating, and picturesque language; and many of them are melodious with a rich and wonderful music.

  Apart from Dante and Shakspeare, it would be difficult to meet with so great a condensation of thought, such abridged yet complete characterization, as is frequently met with in this marvellous poem; and yet, all things considered, it is not perhaps very strange that the “Vision of Poets” has failed to elicit the applause of critics, and indeed to find that many of them have refrained from speaking of it at all. In the whole range of literature it would be difficult to parallel, in prose or verse, such concise yet descriptive portraiture as the poem contains.

  Mrs. Browning’s poetry awakened in me the very greatest and deepest interest from the time of her first introduction to the American public as Elizabeth Barrett. That her educational influence over me was as great as that of Wordsworth I should not like to assert, but her emotional was certainly greater. She was eminently the religious, the Christian poet, and so she sounded every depth of feeling. She had learned in suffering what she taught in song, and so she won our sympathy. She was a woman, feminine in all her tastes and feelings, but masculine in the breadth of her attainments and the strength of her intellect.

  If ever any poet stood in the white light of the beauty which we call poetry, it was Mrs. Browning. Her thoughts were as fire and her words were as fire.

  Mrs. Browning, in her studies of Greek Dramatists, displayed nothing less than a genius for form, so that her first and most unstudied utterances were always her best.

  The stifling air of the sick-chamber is oppressive in these writings of hers—writings wherein the strength of her mind is seen engaged in a life and death struggle with the weakness of her body, where she is always ambitious and straining after effect, where her language, though forcible, is violent, and her imagination, never well in hand, runs riot.

  Mrs. Browning, with all her noble idealism and her profound sense of responsibility, was most depressingly indifferent about form, and was quite a law to herself in the matter of rhymes.

  Her success, it must be admitted, grows every day more dubious. Where she strove to be passionate she was too often hysterical; a sort of scream spoils the effect of all her full tirades. She remains readable mainly where she is exquisite, and one small volume would suffice to contain her probable bequest to posterity.

  Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

  In the spirituality of life that characterised Elizabeth Barrett Browning, genius assumes its highest form and it is in this spiritualisation of human life that Mrs. Browning is seen apart from all other great modern poets. In her expression she has embodied a potency of influence which the world is only beginning to recognise and estimate aright. Among women poets she easily stands supreme, and there are passages in her work which surpass anything that has been given to the world since Shakespeare. Nor is this assertion a mere trick of phrasing that should shrink abashed before so lofty a presence. It is but a single expression of truth.

  The poetesses of the world form a company so small that the retrospective eye is hardly arrested till it reaches the shadowy and fragmentary Sappho; and to vote a niche to Elizabeth Barrett Browning in so nearly empty a temple may seem but a doubtful honour…. The technical defects of her verse are numerous and occasionally flagrant, and her literary taste was far from irreproachable; but she had a passionate sense of beauty in all its forms, and she sounds at her best moments a note of thrilling and poignant pathos which not many poets of her own or any time have matched.

  She who was so profoundly acquainted with the life of her day, who understood and pitied its miseries and misfortunes, this most distinguished artist who longs to join a Faculty of Arts in promoting the welfare of humanity, knew also how to frame stanzas of a limpid confidence in which her most intimate emotions are revealed. No one can read certain poems of Mrs. Browning without perceiving in them that peculiar and tender frankness of which only a woman’s heart is capable.

  Mrs. Browning’s technique is uncertain, and she never freed herself from her characteristic faults of vagueness and unrestraint. But her sympathy with noble causes, the elevation and ardor of her moods of personal emotion, and the distinction of her utterances at its best, outbalance these negative considerations. She shares her husband’s strenuousness and optimism, but she speaks always from the feminine vantage-ground.