again until her marriage long afterwards.  She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle.  In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous.  She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards happened to her when she was riding.  The injury to her spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto been attached to it.  Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter’s sickbed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian.  She was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to her bed.  Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed.  She was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all atmospheres—­a medical atmosphere.  The existence of this atmosphere has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease.  A man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional and the two as normal.  But the curse that lay on the Barrett household was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a human being.  The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally and aesthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his daughter’s decline.  He did not know this, but it was so.  Scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty of the sentimentalist.

It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable tenderness.  In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer.  It is evident that she practically believed herself to be dying.  But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of life.  Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault.  She could still own with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, “tearing open parcels instead of untying them;” looking at the end of books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her.  It is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.