A discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in Wimpole Street, and Elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house, “whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out.” She continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. With a strong will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction, and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious insistence upon the matters of external life. She had her preferences; but she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the hour, and there was an end of it. She had that rare power of instantaneous mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a burden to every one concerned by endless discussion.
London itself did not captivate her fancy. “Did Dr. Johnson in his paradise in Fleet Street love the pavements and the walls?” she questioned. “I doubt that,” she added; “the place, the privileges, don’t mix in one’s love as is done by the hills and the seaside.”
The privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. One of these was when she met Wordsworth, whom she describes as being “very kind,” and that he “let her hear his conversation.”
This conversation she did not find “prominent,” for she saw at the same time Landor, “the brilliant Landor,” she notes, and felt the difference “between great genius and eminent talent.” But there was a day on which she went to Chiswick with Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, and all the way she thought she must be dreaming. It was Landor, though, who captivated her fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. Landor, “in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again,” she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had recently written. All this time she is reading everything,—Sheridan Knowles’s play of “The Wreckers,” which Forrest had rejected, “rather for its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit,” she concludes; and “Ion,” which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. Reading Combe’s “Phrenology,” she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, “for my pulse is in a continual flutter,” she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd that the line
“One making one in strong compass”
in “The Poet’s Vow,” which he found incomprehensible, really means that “the oneness of God, ‘in Whom are all things,’ produces a oneness, or sympathy, with all things. The unity of God preserves a unity in man.”
All in all, Miss Barrett is coming to enjoy her London life. There was the Royal Academy, “and real live poets, with their heads full of the trees and birds, and sunshine of Paradise”; and she has “stood face to face with Wordsworth and Landor”; Miss Mitford has become a dear friend, but she visits London only at intervals, as she lives—shades of benighted days!—thirty miles from London. A twentieth century residence across the continent could hardly seem more remote.
The removal to Wimpole Street was decided upon, and to that house (No. 50), gloomy or the reverse, the Barretts migrated. Miss Barrett’s new book, under the title of “The Seraphim and Other Poems,” was published, marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own name. “I feel very nervous about it,” she said; “far more than I did when my ‘Prometheus’ crept out of the Greek.”
Mr. Kenyon was about to go to Rydal Mount on a visit to Wordsworth, and Miss Barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of myrtle or geranium, and send to her—two, that she may be sure of saving one.
Autographs had value in those days, and in a note to Mr. Bray Miss Barrett alludes to one of Shakespeare’s that had been sold for a hundred pounds and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own Shakespearean autograph.