Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“ From the phase of fantasy into the moulds of verse were poured all warm and true the real wanderings of the poet-child, dowered with the freedom of a large country seat in a beautiful region, where she could busy herself with pleasures as leisurely as the day was long. ”

“ Each new day's brightness there outshone the first pale English dawn.
The date and birthplace given by Mrs. Ritchie in the Dictionary of National Biography, like those recorded in various earlier accounts, are incorrect. And one of the first of our poet's biographers, Mr. Ingram, although set right as to date by Robert Browning himself, clung with pertinacity to the idea that a notice, unearthed by him in a contemporaneous newspaper, of the birth of a daughter to Mr. Edward Moulton Barrett, at London, in 1809, must needs refer to Elizabeth, instead of to one of her sisters. ”

“ It is not easy to believe that a discrimination so alert as hers would not have added more direct observations if she had had any such even small chance, as Mr. Ingram asserts, to make any at first-hand. Again writing, in 1845, to Robert Browning of the signal disadvantages she labored under in her art through her seclusion in the country and ignorance of aught but books, she calls herself a "blind poet," since her "brothers and sisters of the earth were names" to her, and she "had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing, in fact." Travel, even across the channel, then, seems unlikely ”

“ When and where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born were details of her life in dispute some time after her death. The uncertainty betokens the greater interest she attracted as a living personality, within an absorbing present environment of thought and action, than as a mere creature of antecedents. ”

“ It is beyond her poetic powers, as yet, to make her pathway light with the light irresistible. It is to be followed feelingly. But there is no groping or fumbling, no mistaking the fact that this girl-sprite is flitting guidingly through the woods of contemplative idealism, and beckoning with airy fingers that promise the highest potency of poetic insight. ”

“ Disesteem of it on this account, however, implies the trying of this poet in her teens by a higher standard than that by which many a mature one is praised. It is the standard of originality in genius which "The Battle of Marathon" does not satisfy. It is the vigor and success of the workmanship which leads the attentive reader to look at the next production for a plainer indication of the individuality behind those qualities. ”

“ This mass of underlying knowledge is touched upon lightly but constantly by the poet and woven into her work, now by one strand, now by another, as suits her poetic purpose. The result is that her allusions are often blind, but distinctive and interesting, and it is hoped that the elucidation of them here given will be found useful.
The text is based, primarily, upon the author's latest revision appearing in the six-volume edition published after her death under the authority of Robert Browning. ”

“ Finally, she glorifies in the human mind capable of the unrewarding deeds of history and feats of intellectual or artistic accomplishment, a continuing life, in face of earthly death, "on mind's lone shore." ”

“ The "Vision of Fame" reveals something of the quaint image-finding faculty and the siren music with which she renders her mystical meanings alluring; but it is especially interesting as a sort of understudy for a riper poem, "A Vision of Poets," one of the shining shafts bringing fame to her feet, later, in London.
The air of "The Seraphim" is rare, almost too lofty for mortal breath. The subject was a daring one, as this wise young poet knew and said better than any of her critics,—a subject almost beyond human Page:The complete works of Mrs. ”

“ Boyd for the Greek reading in which he assisted her at Malvern. This he did as a friend and Greek enthusiast, pleased with so disinterested an explorer of his specialty, and not professionally as a tutor, although in setting down her gratitude to him again, in a later letter, she accounts him as "in a sense" her "tutor," since no other ever taught her so much. She herself, she says, would have turned to the Greek dramatists, poets, and philosophers by "love and instinct," but the Greek Fathers would have stayed in their tombs for her without him. ”

“ It follows Pope's lead again in theme and manner both, but it carries in its catholic embrace a library far beyond his easy-going classic ruts. The comprehensive grasp gives a sense of thorough-going power; the incisive criticisms convey conviction not only of alert intelligence but of rapidly unfolding independence. ”

“ England's New World colony of Jamaica, with its slave-holding customs and a measure of the affluence and command of opportunity belonging to landed proprietorship in tropical seas,—a commingled good and ill to a poet-soul,—lay in the immediate background of Elizabeth Barrett's family as also in that of Robert Browning's. He it is who tells how his wife's father, the heir to estates bequeathed from his grandfather, whose name of Barrett he added to his own, was brought to England on the early death of his father, as the ward of the late Chief Baron Lord Abinger, then Mr. ”

“ The diminution in the household scale of living indicated by this sale, and the removal in 1830 to a temporary home by the sea in Sidmouth, Devonshire, was probably a result of the agitation of the bill for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Two references to it in Elizabeth's letters to Mrs. Martin, a Malvern neighbor and family friend, make it about certain. The fact is comparatively unimportant, and it was apparently not so overwhelming to the finances of the numerous and doubtless expensive Barrett family as the head of it feared it would be ”

“ With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight. ”

“ Save toward one, in her own house, she told Robert Browning long afterward, her sympathies were untrained, and only from the habit of self-consciousness and an intuitional experience backed by books, did she make her "great guesses" at human nature. That one in her own house toward whom she opened her emotions was her brother Edward, a close yoke-fellow in study and in play.
With him, of her own motion, and because she was drawn to Homer through Pope, she read Greek under Mr. ”

“ Town life launched her now into physical discomfort, and turned her incipient difficulties into acknowledged invalidism; still, it also lent a more favorable wind to the development of her mind and heart. Her first poetic work to be ventured in the ordinary professional grooves, "The Romaunt of Margret," was now submitted through a friend to the critical judgment of Mr. R. H. Home, who thence became her friend, co-worker, and correspondent. ”

“ Durham apparently counted for little in Elizabeth's life, since the family was living in London shortly after she was born, and early in 1809 her father bought the country-seat in Herefordshire called Hope End. ”

“ The Chronological Bibliography will be found completer than any preceding one, including the entry of the various poems first published in America and not recorded in British or other editions earlier than this. ”

“ Translated from the Greek of Æschylus, and Misce11aneous Poems, by the Translator, Author of "An Essay on Mind," with other Poems. [Quotations from Mimnermus and Theognis.] London: Printed and published by A. J. Valpy, M.A., Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. ”

“ The Battle of Marathon: A Poem. [Quotations from Akenside and Byron.] By E. B. Barrett. London: Printed for W. Lindsell, 87 Wimpole Street, Cavendish Square. 1820.
1826. An Essay on Mind, with other Poems. [Quotation from Tasso.] London: James Duncan, Paternoster Row. ”

“ E. B. Browning (Volume 1) .djvu/68 Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1) .djvu/69 of Mrs. Browning's death, dated Florence, June 29.)
A View across the Roman Campagna. Independent, July 25.
1862.
Last Poems. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Chapman and Hall, 193, Piccadilly. 1862.
Contents.
Dedication.
Advertisement.
Little Mattie.
A False Step.
Void in Law.
Lord Walter's Wife.
Bianca among the Nightingales.
My Kate.
A Song for the Ragged Schools of London.
May's Love.
Amy's Cruelty.
My Heart and I.
The Best Thing in the World. ”