Miss Barrett seems to have written more letters and longer ones to Miss Mitford than to any of her other correspondents, save one.  Yet she was aware of this rather indiscreet woman’s limitations and wrote down to her understanding.

To Richard H. Horne she wrote freely and at her intellectual best.  With this all-round, gifted man she kept up a correspondence for many years; and her letters now published in two stout volumes afford a literary history of the time.  At the risk of being accused of lack of taste, I wish to say that these letters of Miss Barrett’s are a deal more interesting to me than any of her longer poems.  They reveal the many-sided qualities of the writer, and show the workings of her mind in various moods.  Poetry is such an exacting form that it never allows the author to appear in dressing-gown and slippers; neither can he call over the back fence to his neighbor without loss of dignity.

Horne was author, editor and publisher.  His middle name was Henry, but following that peculiar penchant of the ink-stained fraternity to play flimflam with their names, he changed the Henry to Hengist; so we now see it writ thus:  R. Hengist Horne.

He found a market for Miss Barrett’s wares.  More properly, he insisted that she should write certain things to fit certain publications in which he was interested.  They collaborated in writing several books.  They met very seldom, and their correspondence has a fine friendly flavor about it, tempered with a disinterestedness that is unique.  They encourage each other, criticize each other.  They rail at each other in witty quips and quirks, and at times the air is so full of gibes that it looks as if a quarrel were appearing on the horizon—­no bigger than a man’s hand—­but the storm always passes in a gentle shower of refreshing compliments.

Meantime, dodging in and out, we see the handsome, gracious and kindly John Kenyon.

Much of the time Miss Barrett lived in a darkened room, seeing no one but her nurse, the physician and her father.  Fortune had smiled again on Edward Barrett—­a legacy had come his way, and although he no longer owned the black men in Jamaica, yet they were again working for him.  Sugar-cane mills ground slow, but small.

The brilliant daughter had blossomed in intellect until she was beyond her teacher.  She was so far ahead that he called to her to wait for him.  He could read Greek; she could compose in it.  But she preferred her native tongue, as every scholar should.  Now, Mr. Barrett was jealous of the fame of his daughter.  The passion of father for daughter, of mother for son—­there is often something very loverlike in it—­a deal of whimsy!  Miss Barrett’s darkened room had been illumined by a light that the gruff and goodly merchant wist not of.  Loneliness and solitude and physical pain and heart-hunger had taught her things that no book recorded nor tutor knew.  Her father could not follow her; her allusions were obscure, he said, wilfully obscure; she was growing perverse.