MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to Rev. Mr. Harness_.
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[Sidenote: Her shyness.]
She is a delightful young creature; shy and timid and modest.... She is so sweet and gentle, and so pretty, that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letter to her Father_, May, 1836. L’Estrange’s ‘Life of M. R. Mitford.’ London: R. Bentley & Sons, 1870.
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[Sidenote: Her personal appearance in 1836.]
My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago.[5] She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the Prometheus of Æschylus, the authoress of the ‘Essay on Mind,’ was old enough to be introduced into company, in technical language was _out_. Through the kindness of another invaluable friend, ... I saw much of her during my stay in town. We met so constantly and so familiarly that in spite of the difference of age, intimacy ripened into friendship, and after my return into the country, we corresponded freely and frequently, her letters being just what letters ought to be--her own talk put upon paper.
[Sidenote: Her illness.]
[Sidenote: The tragedy at Torquay.]
The next year was a painful one to herself and to all who loved her. She broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, which did not heal.... After attending her for above a twelve-month at her father’s house in Wimpole Street, Dr. Chambers, on the approach of winter, ordered her to a milder climate. Her eldest brother, a brother in heart and in talent worthy of such a sister, together with other devoted relatives, accompanied her to Torquay, and there occurred the fatal event which saddened her bloom of youth, and gave a deeper hue of thought and feeling, especially of devotional feeling, to her poetry.... Nearly a twelve-month had passed and the invalid, still attended by her affectionate companions, had derived much benefit from the mild sea-breezes of Devonshire. One fine summer morning her favorite brother, together with two other fine young men, his friends, embarked on board a small sailing-vessel, for a trip of a few hours. Excellent sailors all, and familiar with the coast, they sent back the boatmen and undertook themselves the management of the little craft. Danger was not dreamt of by any one; after the catastrophe, no one could divine the cause, but in a few minutes after their embarkation, and in sight of their very windows, just as they were crossing the bar, the boat went down, and all who were in her perished. Even the bodies were never found.
This tragedy nearly killed Elizabeth Barrett. She was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural but a most unjust feeling, that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that she could be removed in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home.
The house that she occupied at Torquay had been chosen as one of the most sheltered in the place. It stood at the bottom of the cliffs, almost close to the sea; and she told me herself that during that whole winter the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.
[Sidenote: Anecdote of her reading.]
Still she clung to literature and to Greek; in all probability she would have died without that wholesome diversion to her thoughts. Her medical attendant did not always understand this. To prevent the remonstrances of her friendly physician she caused a small edition of Plato to be so bound as to resemble a novel. He did not know ... that to her such books were not an arduous and painful study, but a consolation and a delight.
[Sidenote: Her monotonous life.]
Returned to London, she began the life which she continued for so many years, confined to one large and commodious, but darkened, chamber, admitting only her own affectionate family and a few devoted friends (I, myself, have often joyfully travelled five-and-forty miles to see her, and returned the same evening, without entering another house); reading almost every book worth reading in almost every language, and giving herself, heart and soul, to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess.
MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: ‘Recollections of a Literary Life.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1852.
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[Sidenote: Omnivorous reading.]
I read without principle. I have a sort of unity indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting--do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldee--and the Greek poets, and Plato, right through from end to end--I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas. It is only useful knowledge and the multiplication table I never tried hard at. And now--what now? Is this matter of exultation? Alas, no! Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from the romances? Certainly, no!--never, except in joke. It’s against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that we _all_ generally err by _reading too much_, and out of proportion to what we _think_. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much--should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation. The fact is, that the _ne plus ultra_ of intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call “whittling.”
ELIZABETH BARRETT: _Letter to R. H. Horne_, 1843. ‘Letters of E. B. Browning to R. H. Horne.’
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[Sidenote: Her letters.]
Her letters ought to be published. In power, versatility, liveliness, and finesse; in perfect originality of glance, and vigor of grasp at every topic of the hour; in their enthusiastic preferences, prejudices, and inconsistencies, I have never met with any, written by men or by women, more brilliant, spontaneous, and characteristic. This was _her_ form of conversation.
HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’ London: Bentley, 1873.
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Her letters make Cowper’s poor. In a hurried note, whose hurry is evident in the handwriting, she drops ... incidental, but brilliant words--just as if the jewels in her rings, jarred by her rapid fingers, had been suddenly unset and fallen out on the paper.
[Sidenote: Handwriting.]
No other handwriting is like hers; it is strong, legible, singularly un-English (that is, not a slanted or running hand), and more like a man’s than a woman’s.
THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’ New York: James Miller, 1862.
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[Sidenote: Characteristic fragments from her letters.]
More of us, you will admit, do harm by groping along the pavement with blind hands for the beggar’s brass coin, than do folly by clutching at the stars from “the misty mountain-top.” And if the would-be star-catchers catch nothing, they keep at least clean fingers.
As to _poetry_, they are all sitting (in mistake), just now, upon Caucasus for Parnassus--and wondering why they don’t see the Muses!
It comes to this. If poetry, under any form, be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature be--we are near a blasphemy--I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul.
ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’
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[Sidenote: Her character sketched by a friend.]
I have never seen one more nobly simple, more entirely guiltless of the feminine propensity of talking for effect, more earnest in assertion, more gentle, yet pertinacious in difference, than she was. Like all whose early nurture has chiefly been books, she had a child’s curiosity regarding the life beyond her books, co-existing with opinions accepted as certainties concerning things of which (even with the intuition of genius), she could know little. She was at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument; without any more practical knowledge of social life than a nun might have, when, after long years, she emerged from her cloister and her shroud.
HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’
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[Sidenote: Her religious faith.]
I receive more dogmas, perhaps, than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense--that He was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn’t; in fact, churches, all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments.