The life and personality of Elizabeth Barrett Browning seem to explain her poetry.  It is a life “without a catastrophe,” except perhaps to her devoted father.  And it is to this father’s devotion that some of Mrs. Browning’s poetical sins are due; for by him she was so pampered and shielded from every outside touch, that all the woes common to humanity grew for her into awful tragedies.  Her life was abnormal and unreal,—­an unreality that passed more or less into everything she did.  Indeed, her resuscitation after meeting Robert Browning would mount into a miracle, unless it were realized that nothing in her former life had been quite as woful as it seemed.  That Mrs. Browning was “a woman of real genius,” even Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter Savage Landor said, “With the exception of Burns, he [Shelley] and Keats were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other poet since Milton.  I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning comes next.”  This is very high praise from very high authority, but none too high for Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true lyric ring, that spontaneity of thought and expression which comes when the singer forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful under the stress of the moment’s inspiration.  All of Mrs. Browning’s work is buoyed up by her luxurious and overflowing imagination.  With all its imperfections of technique, its lapses of taste and faults of expression, it always remains poetry, throbbing with passion and emotion and rich in color and sound.  She wrote because she must.  Her own assertions notwithstanding, one cannot think of Mrs. Browning as sitting down in cold blood to compose a poem according to fixed rules of art.  This is the secret of her shortcomings, as it is also the source of her strength, and in her best work raises her high above those who, with more technical skill, have less of the true poet’s divine fire and overflowing imagination.

So in the ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese,’ written at a time when her woman’s nature was thrilled to its very depths by the love of her “most gracious singer of high poems,” and put forth as translations from another writer and tongue—­in these her imperfections drop away, and she soars to marvelous heights of song.  Such a lyric outburst as this, which reveals with magnificent frankness the innermost secrets of an ardently loving woman’s heart, is unequaled in literature.  Here the woman-poet is strong and sane; here she is free from obscurity and mannerism, and from grotesque rhymes.  She has stepped out from her life of visions and of morbid woes into a life of wholesome reality and of “sweet reasonableness.”  Their literary excellence is due also to the fact that in the sonnet Mrs. Browning was held to a rigid form, and was obliged to curb her imagination and restrain her tendency to diffuseness of expression.  Mr. Saintsbury goes so far as to say that the sonnet beginning—­

     “If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught
     Except for love’s sake only—­”