and should, fresh from Sophocles and Dante, convey her thoughts in a stream which was seldom translucent and never calm. In some of her lyrics, however, and more rarely in her sonnets, she rose to heights of passionate humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country.

About the year 1850, when, as Mrs. Browning, she was writing at her best, all but a few were to be excused if they considered her the typical vates, the inspired poet of

human suffering and human aspiration. But her art, from this point onward, declined, and much of her late work was formless, spasmodic, singularly tuneless and harsh, nor is it probable that what seemed her premature death, in 1861, was a serious deprivation to English literature. Mrs. Browning, with great afflatus and vigour, considerable beauty of diction, and not a little capacity of tender felicity of fanciful thought, had the radical fault of mistaking convulsion for strength, and believing that sublimity involved a disordered and fitful frenzy. She was injured by the humanitarian sentimentality which was

just coming into vogue,

Miss Mitford

and by a misconception of the uses of language somewhat analogous to that to which Carlyle had resigned himself. She suffered from contortions produced by the fumes of what she oddly called

"The lighted altar booming o'er

The clouds of incense dim and hoar;"

and if "the art of poetry had been a less earnest object to" her, if she had taken it more quietly, she might have done greater justice to her own superb ambition.

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), afterwards Mrs. Robert Browning, was the eldest of the eleven children of Edward Moulton-Barrett and Mary GrahamClarke, his wife; she was born at Coxhoe Hall, the residence of her father's brother,

Samuel Moulton, on the 6th of March 1806. Her father had lately assumed the name of Barrett, on inheriting his grandfather's estates in Jamaica. In 1809 the family moved to Hope End, close to the Malvern Hills, where the next twenty-two years of Elizabeth's life were spent. She began to write verses before she was eight years old. In 1819 her father printed an "epic" of his daughter's, The Battle of Marathon. More important, but still immature, was An Essay on Mind published in 1826. She was by this time in weak health; in 1821 she had strained herself while tightening her pony's girths, and injured her spine, and from this time forth she was often "for years upon her back." She read with the greatest avidity, and, even as a child, “ate and drank Greek, and made her head ache with it.” In 1828 her mother, of whom little is known, died at Hope End, which was sold in 1832, and the home of the Barretts broken up. They removed to Sidmouth, where Elizabeth wrote her version of the Prometheus Bound, which saw the light, with other verses, in 1833. In 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth and settled in London, at 74 Gloucester Place. Elizabeth's friendships at this time were few, but they already included the blind Hellenist, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and her cousin, John Kenyon (1784-1856), and were soon to be extended to Miss Mary Mitford (1787-1855), and R. H. Horne. She now began to contribute to the magazines of the day, and in 1838 she published her first important volume, The Seraphim. In this year the Barretts moved to 50 Wimpole Street, which remained their home for the rest of her life. The winters of 1838 and 1839 she had to spend at Torquay for the benefit of her health, and she was staying on there when, on the 11th of July 1840, her favourite brother Edward was drowned, by the foundering of his boat, in Babbicombe Bay. The shock was so severe that her own life was long despaired of, and it was not until September of the following year that she could even be removed from Torquay to London. She was now a confirmed invalid, excluded from all but a few privileged visitors, and with no relaxation but the incessant pursuit of literature She now (1842) wrote the essays on The Greek Christian Poets, which were not published in book-form until after her death (1863), and, what was more important, she was closely occupied in original composition. The result was her Poems of 1844, in two volumes, which placed her for the first time among the foremost living poets. An allusion to Robert Browning in one of the pieces in this collection-"Geraldine's Courtship"-is believed to have led him to write Miss Barrett a letter (in January 1845), which opened an acquaintance between her and “the king of the mystics,” as she called him. In May of the same year he was permitted to visit her, and "we are growing," she wrote, "to be the truest of friends." She was considered a hopeless invalid, and never left the house; there can be no question that her delicacy was fostered by the artificial nature of her treatment. Her father was a man of strong, selfish feeling, who had the almost maniacal determination that none of his children should marry, since he needed the personal services of all of them. That a daughter of his should wish to marry, Mr. Barrett considered "unfilial treachery." The doctors, meanwhile, determined that to winter abroad might be of great service to Elizabeth Barrett, but her father bluntly refused his permission. At the same time the friendship between her and Robert Browning had developed into a passion of love freely expressed on both sides. Her health, meanwhile, under this excitement revived, and in the spring of 1846 she was stronger than she had been since the shock at Torquay in 1840. With the consent of two of her sisters, but without even their knowledge of the details, the