George Barnett Smith

“ BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett, the most distinguished poet of her sex that England has produced, was born in London in the year 1809. She was the daughter of Mr Barrett, an English country gentleman. From a very early age, almost before the years of childhood had passed, she exhibited a remarkable preference for the arts, but especially that of the poetic. Previous to attaining her fifteenth year she had written verse upon which was the stamp of true genius—poems eminently worthy of preservation. ”

“ The position of Mrs Browning as a poet is now yielded. Her genius was perhaps as great as that of any poet of our generation, but circumstances retarded its highest possible development. In certain intellectual qualities she was inferior to Tennyson and the author of Sordello, but in others she was their superior. Be her exact niche, however, what it may, she occupies a favoured place in English literature, and is undoubtedly one of the few leading poets of the 19th century. Her poetry is that which refines, chastens, and elevates. ”

“ A peculiar tenderness breathes through her writings, whether of the humblest or the most ambitious description. Almost her first work bore upon it the traces of her Greek studies, being an excellent translation of the Prometheus. Another very early production, The Drama of Exile, is unquestionably marked by great sublimity of thought, though the conception may lack the mighty outlines of the majestic Milton. Eloquent and sustained, however, the poem made manifest a pure and original writer. Mrs Browning's genius had two sides—the lyric and the dramatic. ”

“ Mrs Browning died at Florence in the year 1861, after testifying in many ways her singular devotion to the country of her adoption.
The poetry of this writer is distinguished for its emotional spirit; had her imagination equalled her capacity for feeling she might have taken rank with the highest of our poets. Sensibility and intuition, those endowments of supreme importance to writers of genius, whose greatness is to grow in proportion to their understanding and interpretation of human life, were in her united in a degree seldom witnessed. ”

“ The writer unfolds with great beauty of expression the truth that that is real art which assists in any degree to lead back the soul to contemplate God, the supreme artist of the universe. But notwithstanding its philosophy, as a solution for many of the problems of our social existence, the poem must be pronounced a failure. ”

“ Not being able to pass from place to place without fatigue and danger, the solitude she was compelled to maintain probably threw her still more ardently into those pursuits which, while dear to the mind, were probably injurious to the body. ”

“ The extraordinary wealth and strength of imagery which the poem contains must have been noticed by every reader, and it includes doubtless much of her finest writing. In the inditing of the sonnet, always conceded to be a most difficult task, Mrs Browning was very successful. She is the equal of Wordsworth in this respect, and her "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (but thinly disguised, and giving really the history of her own feelings) are a compact and remarkable series of verses. They present us with a complete study of a human heart as it is affected by the passion of love. ”

“ Her physical constitution was most fragile and delicate, but nature seemed to have supplemented her deficiency in this respect by bestowing upon her an unusually sensitive mental and spiritual organization. ”

“ Much of it is imperishable, and although she did not reach the height of the few mighty singers of all time, she has shown us the possibility of the highest forms of the poetic art being within the scope of woman's genius. ”