Affectionately yours,
E.B.  BARRETT.

[Footnote 38:  ‘The Romaunt of the Page.’]

‘The Seraphim, and other Poems,’ a duodecimo of 360 pages, at last made its appearance at the end of May.  At the time of its publication, English poetry was experiencing one of its periods of ebb between two flood tides of great achievement.  Shelley, Keats, Byron, Scott, Coleridge were dead; Wordsworth had ceased to produce poetry of the first order; no fresh inspiration was to be expected from Landor, Southey, Rogers, Campbell, and such other writers of the Georgian era as still were numbered with the living.  On the other hand, Tennyson, though already the most remarkable among the younger poets, was still but exercising himself in the studies in language and metrical music by which his consummate art was developed; Browning had published only ‘Pauline,’ ‘Paracelsus,’ and ‘Strafford;’ the other poets who have given distinction to the Victorian age had not begun to write.  And between the veterans of the one generation and the young recruits of the next there was a singular want of writers of distinction.  There was thus every opportunity for a new poet when Miss Barrett entered the lists with her first volume of acknowledged verse.

Its reception, on the whole, does credit alike to its own merits and to the critics who reviewed it.  It does not contain any of those poems which have proved the most popular among its authoress’s complete works, except ‘Cowper’s Grave;’ but ‘The Seraphim’ was a poem which deserved to attract attention, and among the minor poems were ’The Poet’s Vow,’ ‘Isobel’s Child,’ ‘The Romaunt of Margret,’ ‘My Doves,’ and ‘The Sea-mew.’  The volume did not suffice to win any wide reputation for Miss Barrett, and no second edition was called for; on the other hand, it was received with more than civility, with genuine cordiality, by several among the reviewers, though they did not fail to note its obvious defects.  The ’Athenaeum’[39] began its review with the following declaration: 

This is an extraordinary volume—­especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment—­but it is hardly less disappointing than extraordinary.  Miss Barrett’s genius is of a high order; active, vigorous, and versatile, but unaccompanied by discriminating taste.  A thousand strange and beautiful views flit across her mind, but she cannot look on them with steady gaze; her descriptions, therefore, are often shadowy and indistinct, and her language wanting in the simplicity of unaffected earnestness.

[Footnote 39:  July 7, 1838.]

The ’Examiner,’[40] after quoting at length from the preface and ’The
Seraphim,’ continued: