"but

tells her the projected volume will include "a principal poem called the 'Seraphim,' which is rather a dramatic lyric than a lyrical drama." "I can hardly hope that you will thoroughly like it," is her comment; know well that you will try to do so. Other poems, longer or shorter, will make up the volume, not a word of which is yet printed."

Why Miss Barrett feared that her friend would not be altogether satisfied with the chief poem in her volume will readily be understood by those acquainted with Miss Mitford's ideas on the treatment of "sacred" themes. The preface was, in all probability, written with a view of combating just such objections as those of her way of thinking were likely to put forward. The preface states:—

The subject of the principal poem in the present collection having suggested itself to me, though very faintly and imperfectly, when I was engaged upon my translation of the "Prometheus Bound"

I thought that had Eschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic, faith from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity; from the "faded white flower" of the Titanic brow to the "withered grass " of a Heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to His more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! . . . . But if my dream be true that Eschylus might have turned to the subject before us, in poetic instinct, and if in such a case ... its terror and its pathos would have shattered into weakness the strong Greek tongue, and caused the conscious chorus to tremble round the thymele, how much more may I turn from it, in the instinct of incompetence! I have written no work, but a suggestion . . . I have felt in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer's "Children in a Battle."

The agents in this poem are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. . . . I have endeavoured to mark in my two Seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking

...

from and repugnance to evil which, in my weaker Seraph, is expressed by fear, and in my stronger one by a more complex passion. . . To recoil from evil is according to the stature of an angel; to subdue it is according to the infinitude of a God.

If the leading poem of her book failed to make the impression on her readers Miss Barrett desired, it was neither owing to her want of the requisite learning, nor the poetic power to deal with her abstruse theme, but rather that the public preferred to abstract spiritualities such poems as Miss Mitford described—“ poems of human feeling and human action." With respect to the other shorter pieces in her book, the authoress claimed that though if her life were prolonged she would hope to write better verses hereafter, she could never feel more intensely than at that moment "the sublime uses of poetry and the solemn responsibilities of the poet." When it is considered that among the poems thus referred to were, besides those already spoken of, such examples of her genius as "Isabel's Child," "The Deserted Garden," "Cowper's Grave," and others equally representative of her various moods, and all now become permanent glories of our language and literature, the intensity of Elizabeth Barrett's feelings in their production will not be doubted for a moment by anyone having belief in "the sublime uses" of her art, and in "the solemn responsibilities" alluded to by their architect.

CHAPTER III.

TORQUAY.

TOWARDS the autumn of 1838 Miss Barrett's condi tion grew critical. Almost as a last resource Dr. Chambers, her medical adviser, recommended her removal to a warmer situation than London. Whilst on the one hand it was feared she could not survive the winter in the metropolis, on the other a long journey was hazardous. Ultimately, in preference to trying a foreign climate, it was decided to risk a move as far as Torquay, and her brother Edward, a brother, as Miss Mitford says, "in heart and in talent worthy of such a sister," constituted himself her guardian. Miss Barrett herself said that her beloved brother meant to fold her in a cloak and carry her in his arms.

The journey to Torquay was accomplished in safety. Comfortable apartments, with a fine view of the bay, were obtained at the lower end of Brecon Terrace, At first the mild breezes of the south coast appeared to exercise a beneficial effect upon the invalid, and she was enabled to continue her correspondence with literary friends, especially with Miss Mitford. That lady writes on November 5th, "My beloved Miss

Barrett is better If she be spared to the world and should, as she probably will, treat of such subjects as afford room for passion and action, you will see her passing all women and most men, as a narrative or dramatic poet. After all," she adds, "she is herself in her modesty, her sweetness, and her affectionate warmth of heart, by very far more wonderful than her writings, extraordinary as they are." A few days after these eulogistic lines their writer received a letter from the subject of them, in which she remarks, "Whenever I forget to notice any kindness of yours, do believe, my beloved friend, that I have, notwithstanding, marked the date of it with a white stone, and also with a heart not of stone." Referring then to some precious seedlings which Miss Mitford, from her own luxuriant little floral realm had sent her, she adds: "You said, 'Distribute the seeds as you please,' so, mindful of 'those of my own household,' I gave Sept. and Occy. (Septimus and Octavius, her youngest brothers) leave to extract a few very carefully for their garden, composed of divers flower-pots and green boxes a-gasping for sun and air from the leads behind our house, and giving the gardeners fair excuse for an occasional coveted colloquy with a great chief gardener in the Regent's Park. Yes, and out of a certain precious packet inscribed as Arabel (her sister Arabella) described it to me from Mr. Wordsworth-I desired her to reserve some for my very own self, because, you see, if it should please God to permit my return to London, I mean ('pway don't waugh,' as Ibbit says, when she has been saying something irresistibly ridiculous)—I mean to have a garden too- a whole flower-pot to myself-in the window of my particular sitting-room; and then it will be hard indeed if, while the flowers

grow from those seeds, thoughts of you and the great poet may not grow from them besides."

A page or two more of such innocent chatter follows, and would seem to imply that the invalid's case was not deemed so hopeless, at least by herself, as had been imagined. Turning to more personal affairs, Miss Barrett says:

My beloved father has gone away; he was obliged to go two days ago, and took away with him, I fear, almost as saddened spirits as he left with me. The degree of amendment does not, of course, keep up with the haste of his anxieties. It is not that I am not better, but that he loves me too well; there was the cause of his grief in going, and it is not that I do not think myself better, but that I feel how dearly he loves me; there was the cause of my grief in seeing him go. One misses so the presence of such as dearly love us. His tears fell almost as fast as mine did when we parted, but he is coming back soon-perhaps in a fortnight—so I will not think any more of them, but of that. I never told him of it, of course, but, when I was last so ill, I used to start out of fragments of dreams, broken from all parts of the universe, with the cry from my own lips, "Oh, papa! papa !" I could trace it back to the dream behind, yet there it always was very curiously, and touchingly too, to my own heart, seeming scarcely of me, though it came from me, at once waking me with, and welcoming me to, the old straight humanities. Well! but I do trust I shall not be ill again in his absence, and that it may not last longer than a fortnight.

This exposure of her inmost thoughts is thoroughly characteristic of Elizabeth Barrett: the words not only show what intense affection existed between her and her father, but are representative of that semimesmeric state which illness, confinement, and overstudy appear to have cast her into. Her religion was so real, so intense, so much a part of her existence at this period of her life, that it coloured everything about her and caused her to regard every incident for good or ill as if it were a direct interposition of the Deity. Seraphim and Cherubim, of whom she had recently