antique beauty.  It was a lifelong joy to both, that “serene air of Greece.”  Many an hour of gloom was charmed away by it for the poetess who translated the “Prometheus Bound” of AEschylus, and wrote “The Dead Pan”:  many a happy day and memorable night were spent in that “beloved environment” by the poet who wrote “Balaustion’s Adventure” and translated the “Agamemnon.”

The chief sorrow of her life, however, occurred in her thirty-first year.  She never quite recovered from the shock of her well-loved brother Edward’s tragic death, a mysterious disaster, for the foundering of the little yacht La Belle Sauvage is almost as inexplicable as that of the Ariel in the Spezzian waters beyond Lerici.  Not only through the ensuing winter, but often in the dreams of after years, “the sound of the waves rang in my ears like the moans of one dying.”

The removal of the Barrett household to Gloucester Place, in Western London, was a great event.  Here, invalid though she was, she could see friends occasionally and get new books constantly.  Her name was well known and became widely familiar when her “Cry of the Children” rang like a clarion throughout the country.  The poem was founded upon an official report by Richard Hengist Horne, the friend whom some years previously she had won in correspondence, and with whom she had become so intimate, though without personal acquaintance, that she had agreed to write a drama in collaboration with him, to be called “Psyche Apocalypte,” and to be modelled on “Greek instead of modern tragedy.”

Horne—­a poet of genius, and a dramatist of remarkable power—­was one of the truest friends she ever had, and, so far as her literary life is concerned, came next in influence only to her poet-husband.  Among the friends she saw much of in the early forties was a distant “cousin,” John Kenyon—­a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man, who acted the part of Providence to many troubled souls, and, in particular, was “a fairy godfather” to Elizabeth Barrett and to “the other poet,” as he used to call Browning.  It was to Mr. Kenyon—­“Kenyon, with the face of a Bendectine monk, but the most jovial of good fellows,” as a friend has recorded of him; “Kenyon the Magnificent,” as he was called by Browning—­that Miss Barrett owed her first introduction to the poetry of her future husband.

Browning’s poetry had for her an immediate appeal.  With sure insight she discerned the special quality of the poetic wealth of the “Bells and Pomegranates,” among which she then and always cared most for the penultimate volume, the “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.”  Two years before she met the author she had written, in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”—­

“Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate’ which, if cut deep down
the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”