[Footnote 42:  September 1840.]

In a word, we consider Miss Barrett to be a woman of undoubted genius and most unusual learning; but that she has indulged her inclination for themes of sublime mystery, not certainly without displaying great power, yet at the expense of that clearness, truth, and proportion, which are essential to beauty; and has most unfortunately fallen into the trammels of a school or manner of writing, which, of all that ever existed—­Lycophron, Lucan, and Gongora not forgotten—­is most open to the charge of being vitiis imitabile exemplar.

So much for the reception of ‘The Seraphim’ volume by the outside world.  The letters show how it appeared to the authoress herself.

The first of them deserves a word of special notice, because it is likewise the first in these volumes addressed to Miss Mary Russell Mitford, whose name holds a high and honourable place in the roll of Miss Barrett’s friends.  Her own account of the beginning of the friendship should be quoted in any record of Mrs. Browning’s life.

’My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago.[43] She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen.  Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm.  Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the “Prometheus” of Aeschylus, the authoress of the “Essay on Mind,” was old enough to be introduced into company, in technical language, was ‘out.’  Through the kindness of another invaluable friend,[44] to whom I owe many obligations, but none so great as this, I saw much of her during my stay in town.  We met so constantly and so familiarly that, in spite of the difference of age,[45] intimacy ripened into friendship, and after my return into the country we corresponded freely and frequently, her letters being just what letters ought to be—­her own talk put upon paper.’[46]

[Footnote 43:  This was written about the end of 1851.]

[Footnote 44:  Probably John Kenyon, whom Miss Mitford elsewhere calls ‘the pleasantest man in London;’ he, on his side, said of Miss Mitford that ‘she was better and stronger than any of her books.’]

[Footnote 45:  Nineteen years, Miss Mitford having been born in 1787.]

[Footnote 46:  Recollections of a Literary Life, by Mary Russell Mitford, p. 155 (1859).]

Miss Barrett’s letters show how warmly she returned this feeling of friendship, which lasted until Miss Mitford’s death in 1855.  Of the earlier letters many must have disappeared:  for it is evident from Miss Mitford’s just quoted words, and also from many references in her published correspondence, that they were in constant communication during these years of Miss Barrett’s life in London.  After her marriage, however, the extant letters are far more frequent, and will be found to fill a considerable place in the later pages of this work.