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 of 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 eat and drank Greek and made my head ache with it.  Do you know the Malvern Hills?  The hills of Piers Plowman’s Visions?  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 neighbourhood, 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.’[4]

[Footnote 4:  R.H.  Horne, Letters of E.B.  Browning, i. 158-161.]

So, while the young Robert Browning was enthusiastically declaiming passages of Pope’s Homer, and measuring out heroic couplets with his hand round the dining table in Camberwell, Elizabeth Barrett was drinking from the same fount of inspiration among the Malvern Hills, and was already turning it to account in the production of her first epic.  The fifty copies of the ‘Battle of Marathon,’ which Mr. Barrett, proud of his daughter’s precocity, insisted on having printed, bear the date of 1819.  Only five of them are now known to exist, and these are all in private hands; even the British Museum possesses only the reprint which the hero-worship of the present generation caused to be produced in 1891.  Seven years later, when she had just reached the age of twenty, her first volume of verse was offered to the world in general.  It was entitled ‘An Essay on Mind, and other Poems,’ and included, besides the didactic poem after the manner of Pope which formed the piece de resistance, a number of shorter pieces, several of which, as she informed Horne,[5] had been written when she was not more than thirteen.