In the summer Mrs. Somerville and her daughters went out of Naples, and took a pleasant little house near the sea.
She still took a keen interest in passing events; she knew she could not live much longer, and she worked on to the actual day of her death, which took place in the autumn of 1872.
Mrs. Somerville stands alone as the greatest woman in the world of science; she was entirely self-taught, and it was by her own efforts she rose to be what she was—a woman of untiring energy, with wonderful power of thought and clearness of mind, a woman in advance of her times.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1809-1861).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning is the greatest “woman poet” England has ever had. Though some of her poetry is difficult to understand, owing to her depth of thought and great reading, yet many of her prettiest and most touching poems have been written about little children; she with her pitiful heart felt for the sorrows they could not express, and has told us about them; she has told us about little Lily, who died when she was “no taller than the flowers,” of the little factory children, who only cried in their playtime, and only cared for the fields and meadows just to “drop down in them and sleep,” of little Ellie sitting alone by the stream dipping her feet into the clear cool water and dreaming the hours away.
Elizabeth Barrett always looked on Malvern as her native place, though she was not actually born there, but in Durham, in 1809.
The early years of her life seem to have been very happy; we hear of her as a little girl with clusters of golden curls, large tender eyes, and a sweet smile. She herself has not told us much about her early years, but the glimpses she has given us are very bright. Her father had a country house near Malvern, and over the Malvern Hills the child loved to roam. She liked to be out all day with the flowers and the bees and the sun.
“If the rain fell, there was sorrow,” she says, and she laid her curly head against the window, while her little finger followed the “long, trailing drops” down the pane, and, like other children, she would gently sing, “Rain, rain, come to-morrow,” to try and drive it away. When she went out, it was not along the sheep paths over the hills that she cared to go, but to wander into the little woods, where the sheep could not stray. Now and then, she tells us, one of them would venture in, but its wool caught in the thickets, and with a “silly thorn-pricked nose” it would bleat back into the sun, while the little poet-girl went on, tearing aside the prickly branches with her struggling fingers, and tripping up over the brambles which lay across her way.