A strange and beautiful life—with its cloistered maidenhood, its pathetic wavering between Death and Love, to fall at last into Love’s most gracious hands, its sequel of perfect wifehood. “She was like the insect that weaves itself a shroud, yet by some inward force, after a season, is impelled to break through its covering, and come out a winged tiger-moth, emblem of spirituality in its birth, and of passion in the splendor of its tawny dyes.”[4]
Browning’s ‘By the Fireside’ undoubtedly contains a sketch of her own fireside; we recognize at once the tiny figure of the woman
“Reading by firelight—that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it.”
No line other than loving has ever been written of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But from all that friends and appreciative critics can say we must ever turn for the last touch to the “One Word More” of him who knew the “silent silver lights and darks undreamed-of” of his own “moon of poets.”
Her education and development described by herself.
As to stories, my story amounts to the Knife-grinder’s, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses—as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems—very early; at eight years old and earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me—an object to read, think, and live for. And I could make you laugh, although you could not make the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope’s Homer until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great “epic” of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and called The Battle of Marathon, and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope’s Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek—and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards, as in my ‘Essay on Mind,’ a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling—the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this, it has a pertness and pedantry, which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.
All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me, except by books and my own thoughts; and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank Greek, and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman’s Vision? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighborhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills, they are! And yet, not for the whole world’s beauty, would I stand in the sunshine and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk.
From thence we went to Sidmouth for two years; and there I published my translation of Æschylus, which was written in twelve days, and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards—the only means of giving it a little warmth. The next removal was to London.... And then came the failure in my health, which never had been strong (at fifteen I nearly died), and the publication of The Seraphim, the only work I care to acknowledge, and then the enforced exile to Torquay, with prophecy in the fear, and grief, and reluctance of it—a dreadful dream of an exile, which gave a nightmare to my life forever, and robbed it of more than I can speak of here; do not speak of that anywhere. Do not speak of that, dear Mr. Horne; and for the rest, you see that there is nothing to say. It is “a blank, my lord.”
Elizabeth Barrett: Letter to R. H. Horne, 1843. ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.