even old Night, it is growing so dark. I live in London, to be sure, and except for the glory of it, I might live in a desert-so profound is my solitude, and so complete my isolation from things and persons without. I lie all day, and day after day, on this sofa, and my windows do not even look into the street. To abuse myself with a vain deceit of rural life, I have had ivy planted in a box-and it has flourished and spread over one window, and strikes against the glass, with a little stroke from the thicker leaves, when the wind blows at all briskly. Then I think of forests and groves . . . It is my triumph, when the leaves strike the window pane. And this is not to sound like a lament. Books and thoughts and dreams (too consciously dreamed, however, for me the illusion of them has almost passed) and domestic tenderness can and ought to leave nobody lamenting.

To Horne-in reply to his request that she would furnish him with some biographical particulars of herself, for use in his article on her in the New Spirit of the Age-she says:

So you think that I am in the habit of keeping biographical sketches in my table drawer for the use of hypothetical editors?

Once, indeed, for one year, I kept a diary in detail and largely; and at the end of the twelve months was in such a crisis of self-disgust that there was nothing for me but to leave off the diary. Did you ever try the effect of a diary upon your own mind? It is curious, especially where elastic spirits and fancies are at work upon a fixity of character and situation . . . .

My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak), it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography: you must not allow your kindness for me to place me in a prominency which I have to deserve-and do not yet deserve. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts.

"For the rest," she adds, "you see that there is nothing to say it is a blank"; and, considering that up to this time, how little she had done to startle the world, that how few even of her better poems were

before it, it must be confessed that Horne's request for particulars of her life seems to have been rather premature. Still she could not dismiss the idea from her mind, and resuming the subject, says, "Yet I could write an autobiography, but not now, and not for an indifferent public; of whom, by the way, I never did and do not complain, seeing that they received my 'Seraphim' with some kindness, and that everything published previously by me I reject myself, and cast upon the ground as unworthy. The 'Seraphim has faults enough-and weaknesses, besides-but my voice is in it, in its individual tones, and not inarticulately."

'

Miss Barrett's projected paper on "Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt" for A New Spirit, aroused a controversy between the editor and contributor: they were fully agreed as to the treatment of Wordsworth, but over Leigh Hunt held a somewhat excited discussion. Hunt's theological ideas did not come up to the standard of Miss Barrett's faith, but, upon the assurance of Horne that the man was really "a religious man," only not quite orthodox, she relented towards him, adding to her remarks upon the tone of his poetry-" May I say of myself that I hope there is nobody in the world with a stronger will and aspiration to escape from sectarianism in any sort or sense, when I have eyes to discern it, and that the sectarianism of the National Churches, to which I do not belong, and of the Dissenting bodies, to which I do-stand together before me on a pretty just level of detestation."

In a subsequent note, referring to the projected paper on herself, after protesting that she will be neither surprised nor disconcerted if the remarks are not of the pleasantest, she says:-" For the rest, or

rather under the whole, if I myself am not tame about the Seraphim,' it is because I am the person interested. I wonder to myself sometimes, in a climax of dissatisfaction, how I came to publish it. It is a failure, in my own eyes; and if it were not for the poems of less pretension in its company, would have fallen, both probably and deservedly, a dead weight from the press.

In a further epistle, dated in December, she confesses curiosity to know whom it is Mr. Horne now, with some mystery, is wishing her to write on. "Not Dr. Pusey!" she exclaims. "Thank you for the 'not.' And not a political economist, I hope-not a mathematician, nor a man of science-such a one as Babbage, for instance, to undo me." "I am a little beset with business just now," she continues, "being on the verge of getting another volume into print-with one or two long poems struggling for completion at my hands, in order to a subsequent falling upon the printer's."

Later letters continue to discuss the merits and demerits of various authors omitted from, or commented upon, in A New Spirit of the Age. Several female contemporary writers are passed in review, and then the novelists come under notice. Here, as everywhere, Miss Barrett does not hesitate to express her own opinions, although they may differ widely from her editor's. "It appears to me," she remarks, "that you cultivate scorn for the novel-readers, or else have no comprehension for them, dividing them into classes of Godwin-readers, Fielding-readers, Richardson-readers, James-readers, and so forth. You have no sympathy for persons who, when they were children, beset everybody in the house, from the proprietor to the second housemaid, to tell them a story,' and retain so much

of their childhood-green as grass-as that love of stories."

Oh, that love for story-telling! It may be foolish, to be sure; it leads one into waste of time and strong excitements, to be sure; still, how pleasant it is! How full of enchantment and dream-time gladnesses! What a pleasant accompaniment to one's lonely coffee-cup in the morning or evening, to hold a little volume in the left hand and read softly along how Lindoro saw Monimia over the hedge, and what he said to her! After breakfast we have other matters to do-grave business matters," poems to write upon Eden, or essays on Carlyle, or literature in various shapes to be employed seriously on. But everybody must attend to a certain proportion of practical affairs of life, and Lindoro and Monimia bring us ours. And then, if Monimia behaves pretty well, what rational satisfaction we have in settling her at the end of the book. No woman who speculates and practises her own account" has half the satisfaction in securing an establishment that we have with our Monimias, nor should have, let it be said boldly. Did we not divine it would end so-albeit, ourselves and Monimia were weeping together at the end of the second volume? Even to the middle of the third, when Lindoro was sworn at for a traitor by everybody in the book, may it not be testified gloriously of us that we saw through him, and relied implicitly upon an exculpating fidelity which should be "in" at the finis, to glorify him finally? What, have you known nothing, Mr. Editor, of these exaltations? Indeed your note looks like it.

66 on

The correspondence with Horne, in respect to matters connected with the New Spirit, ran on into the new year. One note in January contained some very appropriate and truthful words on Byron, one of Elizabeth Barrett's childish idols, to whom, with her usual unswerving tenacity, she held true in her maturity. "Horne!" she exclaims, "do you, too, call Byron vindictive? I do not. If he turned upon the dart, it was by the instinct of passion, not by the theory of vengeance, I believe and am assured. Poor, poor Lord Byron! Now would I lay the sun and moon against a tennis-ball that he had more tenderness in one section of his heart than * * * * has in all hers, though a

tenderness misunderstood and crushed, ignorantly, profanely, and vilely, by false friends and a pattern wife. His blood is on our heads-on us in England."

Many contemporaries included in or suggested for A New Spirit of the Age are criticised by Miss Barrett with that independence of expression, that vigourabsurdly styled "masculine vigour "-of thought; but enough has been said to prove that her mastery of language was not confined to poesy only, and that her thoughts could be told as fluently, yet as condensedly,

in prose. With some few words from her letters on Horne's paper about herself, a paper of which she saw nothing until it appeared in print, we can take leave of A New Spirit of the Age. To write about herself was, as Horne points out, a nice and delicate thing, but, as he adds, "she gets through it with the ease of any truthful person who believes in the truthfulness of another."

It has been haunting me all this morning that you may be drawing the very last inference I should wish you to draw from my silence. But I have been so unwell that I could not even read, and the writing has been impossible, and people cry out even now, "Why, surely you are not going to write!"

I must write. It is on my mind and must be off it.

First to thank you for the books, which it was such unnecessary kindness for you to send-and then for the abundant kindness in another way which will, at the earliest thought, occur to you. My only objection to the paper is, that the personal kindness is too evident. My objection, you will see, leaves me full of gratitude to you, and fills to the brim that Venetian goblet of former obligations, which never held any poison.

You are guilty of certain exaggerations, however, in speaking of me, against which I shall oppose my dele as you allow me. For instance, I have not been shut up in one room for six or seven years-four or five would be nearer; and then, except on one occasion, I have not been for "several weeks together in the dark" during the course of them. And then there is not a single "elegant Latin verse" extant from my hand. I never cultivated Latin verses.