To quote Mrs. Browning again,—‘What’s the best thing in the world?—Something out of it I think.’”
The reader will not need to be told that the poetry of her nature had not been crushed out by that long fight. Far from it. All through the strenuous days she had been supported by the very poems she had repeated by the fireside in Sussex Square, but the store had grown till her repertory must have been nearly unique. To many passages from the Psalms and Isaiah, George Herbert, Trench, Alford and others, she had added a harvest from Whittier, Emerson, Lowell and divers less known American poets. She loved her Tennyson and Browning too—Abt Vogler and Rabbi Ben Ezra—but indeed the “poetry book-case” included a very catholic range, from Macaulay’s Lays to Swinburne and Christina Rossetti, with a corner for Jean Ingelow and for Mrs. Hamilton King. We have seen the store she set in her youth on some of Sadie’s Poems. No one who has ever heard it will forget how the “pathetic voice” would repeat:
“Is it so, O Christ in Heaven, that the highest suffer most?
That the strongest wander farthest, and more hopelessly are lost?
That the mark of rank in nature is capacity for pain,
And the anguish of the singer makes the sweetness of the strain?—
‘I have many things to tell you, but ye cannot bear them now.‘”
or again,
“No, no, by all the martyrs, and the dear dead Christ;
By the long bright roll of those whom joy enticed