CHAPTER I.

HER EARLIEST VERSES.

LIZABETH BARRETT BARRETT, now better

known as Mrs. Browning, seems almost literally to have lisped in numbers. Those for whom it was a sacred obligation to guard her fame and enforce her wishes manifested the utmost displeasure when Mr. Herne Shepherd, that inevitable literary treasuredigger, reissued the verses published by her in her seventeenth year. It is perhaps not surprising that, from the vantage-ground of "higher things" to which they have risen, poets should look with disdainful irritation on their "dead selves," and ask for them the boon of oblivion. But this is a weakness.

How proud we are

In daring to look down upon ourselves!

says Mrs. Browning in her mature time, intending to signify that such pride is not strong, but weak; not great, but mean. No fact in a man's history can do him injustice, and the nobly proud man wants only justice. Nor is the labour of friends, in guarding one's reputation from one's dead self, other than

labour thrown away. The world inexorably forgets everything that is not preserved by its intrinsic merit, and inexorably refuses to forget all that really takes its ear. The few lines in which, through some felicity of inspiration, or some happy chance of association or local colour, a boy Cowley, Pope, or Byron, has struck a deathless note, are as safe as the strains of their ripest genius; but all the publishers in England could not perpetuate a tenth of what they wrote in boyhood.

None of Mrs. Browning's earliest verses will, I think, form part of the world's current coin of poetry, but they are pleasant and instructive as biographical records of a poet's youth. They set before us her bright presence as she moved about her father's parsonage, an ardent, affectionate girl, not without her meditative hours, her melancholy moments, but happy because full of love and truth and admiration. A long poem on Mind, not much superior on the whole to College prize-poetry, is interesting as a stammering prophecy of that intensely spiritual enthusiasm which was to glow like purifying fire in all her works. The spirituality of her poems attests their high quality; for spirituality is the characteristic of all supreme art. It is because of its spirituality that the sculpture of Greece is radiantly pure. It treats the body with a sense of beauty so elevating that, as we look, we think not of bodily things. The "marble burns, and becomes transparent with very spirit." A thoroughly base painter, on the other hand, as Mr. Ruskin, from

Her Affectionate Nature.

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whom these words are quoted, again observes, "puts a scent of common flesh about his marble Christ." To say that poetry is sensuous-that it suggests the body rather than the soul, matter rather than spirit, flesh rather than immortality-is to say that it is bad poetry. In Mrs. Browning's, from first to last, the spirituality burns with the intensity of flame.

Another lovely characteristic of Mrs. Browning that comes out in these early poems is the strength of her domestic affections. She finds in her father her "best Mæcenas." She writes with tender joy of her studies and readings with her brother. She is already on the side of progress and freedom, and is the gentlest comforter of the exiled widow, who dies heart-broken when her patriot husband is executed. I quote a passage from Mind. We may note with interest that the poetry freshens and brightens from commonplace exactly when the girl-poet turns from her books to her personal experiences.

If human faults to Plato's page belong,
Not even with Plato willingly go wrong.
But though the judging page declare it well
To love Truth better than the lips which tell;
Yet 'twere an error, with injustice class'd,
T'adore the former, and neglect the last.

Oh! beats there, Heaven! a heart of human frame,
Whose pulses throb not at some kindling name?
Some sound which brings high musings in its track,
Or calls perchance the days of childhood back,

In its dear echo,-when, without a sigh,

Swift hoop, and bounding ball, were first laid by,
To clasp in joy, from schoolroom tyrant free
The classic volume on the little knee,
And con sweet sounds of dearest minstrelsy,

Or words of sterner lore; the young brow fraught
With a calm brightness which might mimic thought,
Leant on the boyish hand-as, all the while,

A half-heaved sigh, or aye th' unconscious smile
Would tell how, o'er that page, the soul was glowing,
In an internal transport, past the knowing!
How feelings, erst unfelt, did then appear,

Give forth a voice, and murmur, "We are here!"
As lute-strings, which a strong hand plays upon;
Or Memnon's statue singing 'neath the sun.

The negative qualities of these earliest pieces are as good as their positive. They are an effluence, not strong, but sweet, of tenderness and of beautiful enthusiasm, and they are illustriously void of asperity, of conventional satire, of conceit, of any kind of flippancy. They show that, if Mrs. Browning did not in her girlish years write poetry, she looked poetry, felt poetry, lived poetry, was a radiant incarnation of music and beauty moving about the Hereford parsonage within sight of the Malvern Hills.

CHAPTER II.

THE SERAPHIM, AND DRAMA OF EXILE.

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|HE first poems by which Mrs. Browning chose to be permanently represented have as their subject that tale of sin and redemption which occupied the mature genius and veteran skill of Milton. Speaking somewhat largely, we may say that the Drama of Exile corresponds, in subject, to Milton's Paradise Lost, and The Seraphim to his Paradise Regained. In the Drama of Exile, indeed, the victory of Christ is touched upon, just as Satan's defeat is referred to in Paradise Lost, but it is in the second of Mrs. Browning's poems that the triumph of the Saviour is expressly delineated, as Milton reserved for Paradise Regained the specific conflict between Christ and Satan. We may, therefore, compare broadly the treatment of the entire theme by two great poets, the one a man, the other a woman; the one a Puritan, the other the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England.

As works of literary art, the performances of Mrs. Browning cannot enter into rivalry with those of