A new poetic era had dawned about the time that “The Seraphim” appeared. Tennyson had written “Audley Court,” and was beginning to be known in America, owing this first introduction to Emerson, who visited Landor in Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had published only “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford.” Shelley and Keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful English cemetery in Rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, by the colossal pyramid of Caius Cestus. Byron and Scott and Coleridge had also died. There were Landor and Southey, Rogers and Campbell; but with Miss Barrett there came upon the scene a new minstrelsy that compelled its own recognition. Some of her shorter poems had caught the popular ear; notably, her “Cowper’s Grave,” which remains, to-day, one of her most appealing and exquisite lyrics.
“It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying;
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying.”
The touching pathos of the line,
“O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!”
moves every reader. And what music and touching appeal in the succeeding stanza:
“And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory,
And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted.”
In seeing, “on Cowper’s grave,... his rapture in a vision,” Miss Barrett pictured his strength—
“... to sanctify the poet’s high vocation.”
Her reverence for poetic art finds expression in almost every poem that she has written.
Among other shorter poems included with “The Seraphim” were “The Poet’s Vow,” “Isobel’s Child,” and others, including, also, “The Romaunt of Margret.” The Athenæum pronounced the collection an “extraordinary volume,—especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment,—but hardly less disappointing than extraordinary. Miss Barrett’s genius is of a high order,” the critic conceded; but he found her language “wanting in simplicity.” One reviewer castigated her for presuming to take such a theme as “The Seraphim” “from which Milton would have shrank!” All the critics agree in giving her credit for genius of no ordinary quality; but the general consensus of opinion was that this genius manifested itself unevenly, that she was sometimes led into errors of taste. That she was ever intentionally obscure, she denied. “Unfortunately obscure” she admitted that she might be, but “willingly so,—never.”