CHAPTER XVIII.

POETS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

(Continued).

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING-JOHN Keble.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1809-1861.

THE biography of Mrs. Browning has not yet been written, and perhaps never will be. Much of it may be read in her poems and in her correspondence, and it must suffice to insert here the few dates and facts which link together the different portions of her life.

Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1809, at Hope End (near Ledbury), a house built by her father in the Turkish style. Her childhood and youth were spent in the most eager acquisition of knowledge, which extended to the poets and philosophers of Greece. Miss Mitford, who won her friendship in 1836, describes her as "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 eyelashes, a

smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend that the translator of the "Prometheus" of Æschylus, the authoress of the "Essay on Mind," was old enough to be introduced into society-in technical language, was out."

The next year Miss Barrett broke a blood-vessel on the lungs, and after many months of ill health, she was ordered to spend the winter at Torquay. Her eldest brother-" a brother in heart and talent worthy of such a sister"-accompanied her, and there, at a later period, he was drowned within sight of his sister's windows. "This tragedy nearly killed Elizabeth Barrett; she was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural but most unjust feeling that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that she could be removed in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home." Arriving there, she was confined to her room, Miss Mitford adds, for many years, "reading almost every book in every language, and giving herself heart and soul to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess." In 1846 Miss Barrett married Mr. Robert Browning, and began a new and happy life in Italy. They settled at Florence, and the one son was born (now well known as an artist) whom his mother addresses with such tenderness, in "Casa Guidi Windows," as her own young Florentine. Mrs. Browning died

in 1861, the year in which that Italy which she loved so well gained her freedom, and took her rightful place among the nations of Europe.

To say that Mrs. Barrett Browning is the greatest poetess of this country is to say little. There is no woman who stands near her on the poetic heights. If her power of execution were equal to the scope and buoyancy of her imagination, her place would be among the crowned kings of poetry. Unfortunately her splendid gifts were recklessly, or perhaps it would be more correct to say wilfully, trifled with. Her finest work is often marred by some defect in the execution, by perversity of taste, by eccentricities of language, or by jarring notes of rhythm which irritate the sensitive reader. And this flaw is the more remarkable, since from early years she had been familiar with the sanity and symmetry of Greek poetry.

"Aurora Leigh," a long, rambling poem, which might be almost called a novel in verse, was, in the writer's judgment, the most mature of her works, and expressed her highest convictions upon life and art. It has passages of almost unequalled beauty, but as a whole the poem is spasmodic, hysterical, unreal. The characters are lifeless, there is much in the descriptive passages of doubtful taste, and in the social judgments, of which there are not a few, one detects also an ignorance of human nature. Self-restraint and sustained energy are wanting, and these deficiencies compel the reader who would gain pleasure from "Aurora

Leigh" to search its pages for beauties. These are not difficult to find, and will always make the poem welcome. Not only are there lovely and accurate pictures of English scenery, but the work, rambling and diffuse though it be, contains also a number of tersely written and poetically suggestive sayings which are not to be found elsewhere in Mrs. Browning's poetry. Take a few examples :

"Better far

Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means
Than a sublime art frivolously."

:—

"I do distrust the poet who discerns

No character or glory in his times,

And trundles back his soul five hundred years."

"My Father! Thou hast knowledge, only Thou.
How dreary 'tis for women to sit still,

On winter nights by solitary fires,

And hear the nations praising them far off!"

"Death quite unfellows us,

Sets dreadful odds betwixt the live and dead,
And makes us part as those at Babel did,
Through sudden ignorance of a common tongue.
A living Cæsar would not dare to play
At bowls, with such as my dead father is."

"Good love, howe'er ill-placed,

Is better for a man's soul in the end

Than if he loved ill what deserves love well."

"There are nettles everywhere;

But smooth green grasses are more common still:
The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud."

"Free men freely work;

Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.”

It would be uncritical to call "Aurora Leigh a great poem, but it has many great thoughts, and some so full of life that we seem to be conscious of a new life in reading them. It was published at the close of 1856, within five years of Mrs. Browning's death. Some of her most ambitious poems, and also some of her best poems, which are, perhaps, among the least ambitious, had appeared twenty years before-about the time when Mr. Tennyson's "Poems, chiefly Lyrical," had given the world assurance of a poet. The young woman who had already translated Æschylus, and who (in 1844) was daring enough to compete with Milton in the high argument of "The Drama of Exile," was no mean rival in the poetic race. Whatever failure there is in her larger works, among which “The Seraphim," published in 1838, holds a noticeable place, is due to execution rather than to conception. The thoughts are often sublime, the expression staggering and uncertain, and the rhymes of the lyrics forced and grating.

The deep reverence and profound spiritual emotion that prompted "The Drama of Exile," in which it is attempted once more to produce a poetical conception of Adam and Eve, and of their archenemy Lucifer, is also seen in "The Seraphim,”