“Till another open for me
In God’s Eden-land unknown,
With an angel at the doorway,
White with gazing at His throne,
And a saint’s voice in the palm-trees, singing, ’All is lost ...
and won!’”

Elizabeth Barrett wrote poems at ten, and when seventeen, published an Essay on Mind, and Other Poems.  The essay was after the manner of Pope, and though showing good knowledge of Plato and Bacon, did not find favor with the critics.  It was dedicated to her father, who was proud of a daughter who preferred Latin and Greek to the novels of the day.

Her teacher was the blind Hugh Stuart Boyd, whom she praises in her Wine of Cyprus.

  “Then, what golden hours were for us!—­
     While we sate together there;

* * * * *

  “Oh, our Aeschylus, the thunderous! 
     How he drove the bolted breath
   Through the cloud to wedge it ponderous
     In the gnarled oak beneath. 
   Oh, our Sophocles, the royal,
     Who was born to monarch’s place,
   And who made the whole world loyal,
     Less by kingly power than grace.

  “Our Euripides, the human,
     With his droppings of warm tears,
   And his touches of things common
     Till they rose to touch the spheres! 
   Our Theocritus, our Bion,
     And our Pindar’s shining goals!—­
   These were cup-bearers undying,
     Of the wine that’s meant for souls.”

More fond of books than of social life, she was laying the necessary foundation for a noble fame.  The lives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Margaret Fuller, emphasize the necessity of almost unlimited knowledge, if woman would reach lasting fame.  A great man or woman of letters, without great scholarship, is well-nigh an impossible thing.

Nine years after her first book, Prometheus Bound and Miscellaneous Poems was published in 1835.  She was now twenty-six.  A translation from the Greek of Aeschylus by a woman caused much comment, but like the first book it received severe criticism.  Several years afterward, when she brought her collected poems before the world, she wrote:  “One early failure, a translation of the Prometheus of Aeschylus, which, though happily free of the current of publication, may be remembered against me by a few of my personal friends, I have replaced here by an entirely new version, made for them and my conscience, in expiation of a sin of my youth, with the sincerest application of my mature mind.”  “This latter version,” says Mr. Stedman, “of a most sublime tragedy is more poetical than any other of equal correctness, and has the fire and vigor of a master-hand.  No one has succeeded better than its author in capturing with rhymed measures the wilful rushing melody of the tragic chorus.”