Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

“ A child of those days flying in terror along one of these steep Herefordshire lanes, perhaps frightened by a cow's horns beyond the hedge, still describes being overtaken by a young girl in a pony carriage with a pale spiritual face and a profusion of dark curls, who suddenly caught her up into safety and drove rapidly away with her. ”

“ There is a quality in them which is beyond words; an echo from afar which belongs to the highest human expression of feeling. Leigh Hunt may be quoted as expressing his wonder at the marvellous beauty, ‘the entire worthiness and loveliness’ of these sonnets. Some time in 1846 the doctors had declared that Miss Barrett's life depended upon her leaving England for the winter, and immediately after their marriage Mr. Browning took his wife abroad. ”

“ Browning at Florence, has described her as ‘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.’ ‘It is wonderful,’ he says, ‘to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, 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 whiter.’ There is another description of Mrs. ”

“ She seemed even in her life something of a spirit, and her view of life's sorrow and shame, of its beauty and eternal hope, is something like that which one might imagine a spirit's to be.
It has been said that the news of the death of Cavour, coming when she was very ill, hastened her own. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died at Florence 30 June 1861. ”

“ A bird in a cage would have as good a story; most of my events and nearly all my intense pleasure have passed in my thoughts.’
In 1843 Miss Barrett wrote the ‘Cry of the Children,’ so often quoted. It was suggested by the report of the commissioners appointed to investigate the subject of the employment of young children. In the early part of 1846 she assisted Mrs. Jameson, who was preparing a volume of collected papers, by contributing a translation from the ‘Odyssey.’ About this time Mr. Kenyon first brought Mr. Browning as a visitor to the house. ”

“ He would not allow his wife to be troubled or told of this crisis in his affairs, and compounded at an enormous cost with his creditors, materially diminishing his income for life, so as to put off any change in the ways at Hope End until change could trouble the sick lady no more. ”

“ The ‘Prometheus Bound’ was rewritten and printed in 5. 3. ‘The Seraphim, and other Poems,’ by E. B. Barrett, author of ‘A Translation of the Prometheus Bound,’ &c., 12mo, 1838. 4. ‘Poems by E. Barrett Barrett,’ author of ‘The Seraphim,’ &c., 2 vols. 12mo, 1844. Preface says, all written later than 3. 5. ‘Poems by E. B. Browning,’ 2nd edition, 2 vols. 12mo, 1850, containing new poems and an entirely new version of the ‘Prometheus.’ 3rd edition, 1853; 4th, 1856, &c. 6. ‘Casa Guidi Windows,’ a poem by E. B. Browning, 12mo, 1851. 7. ‘Aurora Leigh,’ by E. B. Browning, 8vo, 1857 ”