The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
between them concerning this possible venture. Meanwhile Miss Barrett’s poems won success past her “expectation or hope. Blackwood’s high help was much,” she writes, “and I continue to have the kindest letters from unknown readers.... The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in sackcloth.”
In another of her letters to Mr. Horne we read that Wordsworth is in a fever because of a projected railroad through the Lake Country, and that Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau “quite mad,” because of her belief in Mesmerism. “For my own part,” adds Miss Barrett, “I am not afraid to say that I almost believe in Mesmerism, and quite believe in Harriet Martineau.” She is delighted that Horne’s “Orion” is to be published in New York. “I love the Americans,” she asserts, “a noble and cordial people.”
Miss Barrett remained for three years in Torquay, the climate being regarded as better for her health. But the tragedy of her life took place there in the drowning of her brother Edward, who went out one day with two friends in a boat and never returned. Three days later the boat was found floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were recovered. This sad event occurred in the August of 1840, and it was more than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her correspondence. In the September of 1841 she returned to London, and in a letter to Mr. Boyd soon after she replied to his references to Gregory as a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand De Virginitate, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in prose.
Miss Barrett’s delicacy of health through all these years has been so universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated) that it needs no more than passing allusion here. So far as possible she herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with, yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a far greater degree than has usually been realized. “My time goes to the best music when I read or write,” she says, “and whatever money I can spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books.”
Elizabeth Barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends, and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. She was glad to return from Torquay to her family again. “Papa’s domestic comfort is broken up by the separation,” she said, “and the associations of Torquay lie upon me, struggle against them as I may, like a nightmare.... Part of me is worn out; but the poetical part—that is, the love of poetry—is growing in me as freshly every day. Did anybody ever love poetry and stop in the middle? I wonder if any one ever could?... besides, I am becoming better. Dear Mr. Boyd,” she entreats, “do not write another word about my illness either to me or to others. I am sure you would not willingly disturb me. I can’t let ... prescribe anything for me except her own affection.” These words illustrate the spirit in which Miss Barrett referred to her own health. No one could be more remote from a morbid invalidism too often associated with her.
One of her first efforts after her return from Torquay was to send to the Athenæum some Greek translations, which, to her surprise, were accepted, and she writes to Mr. Boyd that she would enclose to him the editor’s letter “if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading from the Pyramids.” It must have been due to a suggestion from the editor of the Athenæum at this time that she wrote her noble and affluent essay on “The Greek Christian Poets,” which is perhaps her finest work in prose. Something in the courteous editorial note suggested this to her, and she discusses the idea with Mr. Boyd.
Mr. Dilke was then the editor of the Athenæum. He quite entered into the idea of this essay, only begging Miss Barrett to keep away from theology. Mr. Dilke also suggests that she write a review of English poetical literature, from Chaucer to contemporary times, and this initiated her essay called “The Book of the Poets.” For her Greek review she desired a copy of the Poetæ Christiani, but found the price (fourteen guineas) ruinous. But whether she had all the needful data or not, the first paper was a signal success, and she fancied that some bona avis, as good as a nightingale, had shaken its wings over her. Of the three Greek tragedians, Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, Elizabeth Barrett had read every line. Plato she loved and read exhaustively; of Aristotle at this time she had read his Ethics, Poetics, and his work on Rhetoric, and of Aristophanes a few, only, of his plays. But Miss Barrett was also a great novel-reader, keeping her “pillows stuffed with novels,” as she playfully declared. Her room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of the scholar. Upon a bracket the bust of Homer looked down; her bookcase showed one entire shelf occupied by the Greek poets; another relegated wholly to the English poets; and philosophy, ethics, science, and criticism were liberally represented. A bust of Chaucer companioned that of Homer. By her sofa nestled Flush, her dog, Miss Mitford’s gift.
It was in this year of 1841 that there penetrated into her atmosphere and consciousness the first intimation of Robert Browning. “Pippa Passes” had just been published, and John Kenyon, ever alert to bring any happiness into the lives of his friends (Kenyon, “the joy-giver,” as he was well termed), suggested introducing the young poet to her, but on the plea of her ill-health she declined. A little later, in a letter to Mr. Boyd, she mentions one or two comments made on her essay, “The Greek Christian Poets,”—that Mr. Horne, and also “Mr. Browning, the poet,” had both, as she was told, expressed approval. “Mr. Browning is said to be learned in Greek,” she adds, “especially the dramatists.” So already the air begins to stir and tremble with the coming of him of whom in later days she wrote:
“I yield the grave for thy sake, and resign
My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee.”
The entrancing thrill of that wonderful Wagner music that ushers in the first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of “Lohengrin” is typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of Elizabeth Barrett. A new element with its transfiguring power awaited her, and some undefined prescience of that
“... most gracious singer of high poems”
whose music was to fall at her door
“... in folds of golden fulness”
haunted her like “an odor from Dreamland sent.”
She pondered on
“... how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,”
but she dared not dream that the “mystic Shape” that drew her backward, and whose voice spoke “in mastery,” had come to lead her,—not to Death, but Love.
CHAPTER V
1841-1846
“... If a man could feel,
Not one day in the artist’s ecstasy,
But every day,—feast, fast, or working-day,
The spiritual significance burn through
The hieroglyphic of material shows,
Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings.”
“Bells and Pomegranates”—Arnould and Domett—“A Blot in the ’Scutcheon”—Macready—Second Visit To Italy—Miss Barrett’s Poetic Work—“Colombe’s Birthday”—“Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”—“Romances And