Here, at least, we are on assured ground:  here, at any rate, we realise the scope and quality of his genius.  But, let me hasten to add, he, at his highest, not being of those who would make Imagination the handmaid of the Understanding, has given us also a Dorado of pure poetry, of priceless worth.  Tried by the severest tests, not merely of substance, but of form, not merely of the melody of high thinking, but of rare and potent verbal music, the larger number of his “Men and Women” poems are as treasurable acquisitions, in kind, to our literature, as the shorter poems of Milton, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Tennyson.  But once again, and finally, let me repeat that his primary importance—­not greatness, but importance—­is in having forced us to take up a novel standpoint, involving our construction of a new definition.

CHAPTER VII.

There are, in literary history, few scenes de la vie privee more affecting than that of the greatest of English poetesses, in the maturity of her first poetic period, lying, like a fading flower, for hours, for days continuously, in a darkened room in a London house.  So ill was Miss Elizabeth Barrett, early in the second half of the forties, that few friends, herself even, could venture to hope for a single one of those Springs which she previsioned so longingly.  To us, looking back at this period, in the light of what we know of a story of singular beauty, there is an added pathos in the circumstance that, as the singer of so many exquisite songs lay on her invalid’s sofa, dreaming of things which, as she thought, might never be, all that was loveliest in her life was fast approaching—­though, like all joy, not without an equally unlooked-for sorrow.  “I lived with visions for my company, instead of men and women ... nor thought to know a sweeter music than they played to me.”

This is not the occasion, and if it were, there would still be imperative need for extreme concision, whereon to dwell upon the early life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  The particulars of it are familiar to all who love English literature:  for there is, in truth, not much to tell—­not much, at least, that can well be told.  It must suffice, here, that Miss Barrett was born on the 4th of March 1809, and so was the senior, by three years, of Robert Browning.

By 1820, in remote Herefordshire, the not yet eleven-year-old poetess had already “cried aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips” in various “nascent odes, epics, and didactics.”  At this time, she tells us, the Greeks were her demi-gods, and she dreamt much of Agamemnon.  In the same year, in suburban Camberwell, a little boy was often wont to listen eagerly to his father’s narrative of the same hero, and to all the moving tale of Troy.  It is significant that these two children, so far apart, both with the light of the future upon their brows, grew up in familiarity with something of the