ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

(1809-1861)

It is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss Mitford and her “dear young friend Miss Barrett,” when the _-esses_ of “authoresses” and “poetesses” and “editresses” and “hermitesses” make the pages sibilant; when ‘Books of Beauty,’ and ‘Keepsakes,’ and the extraordinary methods of “Finden’s Tableaux” make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford “to the giraffes and the Diorama,” called for “Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who reads Greek as I do French, who has published some translations from AEschylus, and some most striking poems,”—­“Our sweet Miss Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is to think of her.”  Of her own life Mrs. Browning writes:—­“As to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder’s, with nothing at all for a catastrophe.  A bird in a cage would have as good a story; most of my events and nearly all my intense pleasure have passed in my thoughts.”

[Illustration:  Mrs. Browning]

She was born at Burn Hall, Durham, on March 6th, 1809, and passed a happy childhood and youth in her father’s country house at Hope End, Herefordshire.  She was remarkably precocious, reading Homer in the original at eight years of age.  She said that in those days “the Greeks were her demigods.  She dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses, her black pony.”  “I wrote verses very early, at eight years old and earlier.  But what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me.”  At seventeen years of age she published the ’Essay on Mind,’ and translated the ‘Prometheus’ of AEschylus.  Some years later the family removed to London, and here Elizabeth, on account of her continued delicate health, was kept in her room for months at a time.  The shock following on the death of her brother, who was drowned before her eyes in Torquay, whither she had gone for rest, completely shattered her physically.  Now her life of seclusion in her London home began.  For years she lay upon a couch in a large, comfortably darkened room, seeing only the immediate members of her family and a few privileged friends, and spending her days in writing and study, “reading,” Miss Mitford says, “almost every book worth reading in almost every language.”  Here Robert Browning met her.  They were married in 1846, against the will of her father.  Going abroad immediately, they finally settled in Florence at the Casa Guidi, made famous by her poem bearing the same name.  Their home became the centre of attraction to visitors in Florence, and many of the finest minds in the literary and artistic world were among their friends.  Hawthorne, who visited them, describes Mrs. Browning as “a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all, at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice.  It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes.  There is not such another figure in the world, and her black ringlets cluster down in her neck and make her face look whiter.”  She died in Florence on the 30th of June, 1861, and the citizens of Florence placed a tablet to her memory on the walls of Casa Guidi.