“poet true,
  Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do
  For Truth,—­the ends being scarcely two.”

Beauty was truth with her, the wife, mother, and poet, three in one, and such an earthly trinity as God had never before blessed the world with.

This day week, at half-past four o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning died.  A great invalid from girlhood, owing to an unfortunate accident, Mrs. Browning’s life was a prolonged combat with disease thereby engendered; and had not God given her extraordinary vitality of spirit, the frail body could never have borne up against the suffering to which it was doomed.  Probably there never was a greater instance of the power of genius over the weakness of the flesh.  Confined to her room in the country or city home of her father in England, Elizabeth Barrett developed into the great artist and scholar.

From her couch went forth those poems which have crowned her as “the world’s greatest poetess”; and on that couch, where she lay almost speechless at times, and seeing none but those friends dearest and nearest, the soul-woman struck deep into the roots of Latin and Greek, and drank of their vital juices.  We hold in kindly affection her learned and blind teacher, Hugh Stuart Boyd, who, she tells us, was “enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings.”  The love of his grateful scholar, when called upon to mourn the good man’s death, embalms his memory among her Sonnets, where she addresses him as her

  “Beloved friend, who, living many years
  With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun,
  Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune
  To visible Nature’s elemental cheers!”

Nor did this “steadfast friend” forget his poet-pupil ere he went to “join the dead":—­

  “Three gifts the Dying left me,—­Aeschylus,
  And Gregory Nazianzen, and a clock
  Chiming the gradual hours out like a flock
  Of stars, whose motion is melodious.”

We catch a glimpse of those communings over “our Sophocles the royal,” “our Aeschylus the thunderous,” “our Euripides the human,” and “my Plato the divine one,” in her pretty poem of “Wine of Cyprus,” addressed to Mr. Boyd.  The woman translates the remembrance of those early lessons into her heart’s verse:—­

  “And I think of those long mornings
  Which my thought goes far to seek,
  When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
  Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek. 
  Past the pane, the mountain spreading,
  Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise,
  While a girlish voice was reading,—­
  Somewhat low for [Greek:  ais] and [Greek:  ois].”

These “golden hours” were not without that earnest argument so welcome to candid minds:—­

  “For we sometimes gently wrangled,
  Very gently, be it said,—­
  Since our thoughts were disentangled
  By no breaking of the thread! 
  And I charged you with extortions
  On the nobler fames of old,—­
  Ay, and sometimes thought your Persons
  Stained the purple they would fold.”