Round the young life of Elizabeth Barrett was so much of illness and dreariness, that we have accustomed ourselves to thinking joy came to her only with her marriage, and we forget, often, that her childhood was not unhappy. Few children, it would seem, were ever born with greater promise of a bright life. Her father was wealthy and generous; she had brothers and sisters near her in age and congenial in tastes, and she was, at least, a fairly strong, active child.

She was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, in the county of Durham, and when she was but three years old, her father removed to Hope End, in Herefordshire. The estate which he purchased there was a beautiful one, and the house, with its Turkish windows and Oriental-looking decorations, was most picturesque. That the scenery which surrounded her in her youth made on Elizabeth an impression which remained with her all her life is shown clearly in various passages in her poems:

“Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade;
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade.”Of all the brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was her father’s favorite, and he encouraged her constantly in her precocious studies and in her childish attempts at composition. Long before she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the “Battle of Marathon,” of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved Iliad in a much more childish way, of which she has written delightfully in a poem called Hector in the Garden. A great flower bed, roughly shaped like a man and bordered about with turf, was made for her, and this she named after Hector, the Trojan hero and her great favorite.

“Eyes of gentianellas azure,
Staring, winking at the skies;
Nose of gillyflowers and box;
Scented grasses put for locks,
Which a little breeze at pleasure
Set a-waving round his eyes.”

“Brazen helm of daffodillies,
With a glitter toward the light;
Purple violets for the mouth,
Breathing perfumes west and south;
And a sword of flashing lilies,
Holden ready for the fight.”

“And a breastplate made of daisies,
Closely fitting, leaf on leaf;
Periwinkles interlaced
Drawn for belt about the waist;
While the brown bees, humming praises,
Shot their arrows round the chief.”

It was natural enough that Elizabeth should have wanted to begin the study of Greek; and with the help of her father and of Mr. Boyd, a blind friend of her father’s, she became a most proficient Greek scholar.

When she was fifteen years old she met with an accident which deprived her in part of the out-of-door life and rambles which she had loved, and threw her more than ever upon her books for company. Impatient because a horse which she desired to ride was not ready just when she wanted it, she went out into the field and attempted to saddle it herself. She fell, with the saddle on top of her; and while this did not leave her the invalid she later became, it weakened her and made her an easy prey to the troubles which afterward came upon her.

That Pope, as well as Homer, left his mark on Miss Barrett was shown by her first published volume, which was brought out when she was about twenty. It was entitled An Essay on Mind, and Other Poems, and the poem which gave its name to the book was quite after the manner of Pope. This poem, while remarkable for a girl of Miss Barrett’s age, contained little freshness or originality, and she spoke of it afterwards as having been “long repented of as worthy of all repentance.”

In 1828 Mrs. Barrett died, and left Elizabeth, the eldest of the ten children, with much of the responsibility of the family. Since her death came before her daughter reached fame or began that voluminous correspondence from which have been gathered most of the facts of her life, little can be known of the mother’s character, or of her influence on her daughter. That Miss Barrett was devotedly attached to her mother, however, is to be seen from a sentence in one of her letters. “Her memory,” she says, “is more precious to me than any earthly blessing left behind!”

The beloved home at Hope End was sold in 1832, owing, apparently to some fall in the family fortunes, and the Barretts removed to Sidmouth, in Devonshire. The life there was uneventful, as the life at Hope End had been. Miss Barrett, in writing later of herself, declared that “a bird in a cage would have as good a story.” But she was by no means idle, for her Greek studies and her writing kept her busy and happy. While at Sidmouth, she brought out a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, a version with which she was so dissatisfied that she later replaced it, in her collected works, with another.

For three years the Barretts lived at Sidmouth, and their removal to London, in 1835, made important changes in Elizabeth’s life. Her health, never good since her fifteenth year, broke down, and from some date shortly after the arrival in London she became an apparently hopeless invalid, confined to her room and often to her bed. Some compensation for this confinement, however, she found in the new friends, few, indeed, but devoted and congenial, who were admitted to her sick room. Chief among these friends of her earlier London years were John Kenyon, a distant cousin, and Mary Russell Mitford, author of Our Village. Miss Mitford made the acquaintance of Miss Barrett in one of the latter’s rare appearances in society, and she has left an account of the meeting and a description of Miss Barrett which is famous.

“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 eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend ... 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.’”

Although Miss Mitford was nineteen years older than Miss Barrett, the friendship which sprang up between them was most close, and lasted until Miss Mitford’s death in 1855. Their correspondence was constant and voluminous, as was that, in fact, of Miss Barrett with all of her intimate friends. These letters of hers from her sick room are no more remarkable for number than for brightness and vivacity. Little mention is made of her ailments, except when her friends have specifically demanded news of her health, and the letters deal rather with literary than with other subjects. This was, of course, most natural; the invalid could have little news to communicate from her couch to her friends in the outer world. Her literary activity, too, increased, and she began to contribute to magazines poems of various kinds, which attracted much attention. Not all comment on them was favorable; the people declared that some of them were Sphinx-like—too difficult, if not impossible, of interpretation. But every one realized that here was a real poet, one of striking individuality, and, for a woman, most remarkable learning.

By the autumn of 1838, her health had become so much worse that the doctor ordered removal to a warmer climate, and she was taken to Torquay, where she remained for three years. Her father and her brothers and sisters visited her there from time to time, but her constant companion was her brother Edward, who had all her life been her favorite. What little good Torquay seemed to be doing her was more than overbalanced by a tragedy which occurred in the summer of 1840. Her brother, with two of his friends, went for a sail in a small boat, intending to be absent only until evening. When they did not return, inquiry was set on foot, and it was learned that a small boat had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay. The fears caused by this report became certainty three days later, on the recovery of the bodies. The effect on Miss Barrett may be partially imagined. Not only had she lost her best-loved companion, but she was haunted by the morbid feeling that she had caused his death, since he had come to Torquay only to be with her. Twelve years afterward she wrote: “I have lived heart to heart with my husband these five years. I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips.”

Naturally her health suffered greatly from the shock, and it was thought that she could not possibly live more than a few months. Quite unexpectedly, however, she began to improve; it seemed that the desire to quit Torquay, which had grown unendurable to her since the tragedy, gave her strength of body. During the spring and summer of 1841 she was able to resume work on translations, compositions, plans for new poems. Indeed, it was this which saved her, for she wrote some time later to a friend—“I do believe I should be mad at this moment, if I had not forced back the current of rushing recollections by work, work, work.”

After her return to London in the autumn of 1841, her life went on as before—or rather, stood still as before. From her couch she continued to send forth the poems which were bringing her ever-increasing fame, and the letters which were binding her friends closer to her. But an event was drawing nearer, which was from the first an event and not an episode in Miss Barrett’s life. In January, 1845, we find her writing “And I had a letter from Browning the poet last night, which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, and the king of mystics;” and a little later she says, “I am getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic, and we are growing to be the truest friends.”

Robert Browning had felt and expressed great admiration for Miss Barrett’s poems and an allusion to himself in her Lady Geraldine’s Courtship gave him an excuse for addressing her. Their correspondence flourished, and they rapidly passed from regarding each other as mere acquaintances, to looking upon each other as friends. In fact, there seems to have been from the very first an almost mystical attraction between them. Miss Barrett might have contented herself all her life with this delightfully personal and literary correspondence, but Browning soon grew impatient and expressed his desire to see her. The admission of a new friend to Miss Barrett’s room was at no time a thing to be undertaken lightly, so hedged about was she by the care of her family; and in this case she herself seems to have hesitated long before allowing Browning to call, for the very feminine reason that “there is nothing to see in me nor to hear in me.” Had she known Browning better, she would have realized that his determination would carry him past all obstacles; and so, indeed, it did.

On May 20, 1845, they met for the first time, and within a short time his friendship for her had ripened into love, and he asked her to marry him. She herself told, in a letter to a friend after her marriage, the story of her courtship.

“He came, and with our personal acquaintance began his attachment for me, a sort of infatuation call it, which resisted the various denials which were my plain duty at the beginning, and has persisted past them all. I began with the grave assurance that I was in an exceptional position and saw him just in consequence of it, and that if he ever recurred to that subject again, I never could see him again while I lived; and he believed me and was silent. To my mind, indeed, it was a bare impulse—a generous man of quick sympathies taking up a sudden interest with both hands.”

Browning was, as she said, silent, but he was not discouraged, and his letters, his visits, his flowers, at length convinced Miss Barrett that his feeling was something more than a “bare impulse.”

“So then,” she continued, “I showed him how he was throwing into the ashes his best affections—how the common gifts of youth and cheerfulness were behind me—how I had not strength, even of heart, for the ordinary duties of life—everything I told him and showed him. ‘Look at this—and this—and this,’ throwing down all my disadvantages. To which he did not answer by a single compliment, but simply that he had not then to choose, and that I might be right or he might be right, he was not there to decide; but that he loved me, and should to his last hour.*** He preferred, he said, of free and deliberate choice, to be allowed to sit only an hour a day by my side, to the fulfilment of the brightest dream which should exclude me, in any possible world.”

What Robert Browning wanted so much, it was a foregone conclusion that he would have; and Miss Barrett was at last brought to consent to an engagement. But the difficulties were just begun. Mr. Barrett, adored as he was by his daughter, was more than a little tyrannical, especially with his favorite daughter. His family all well knew that he would never under any circumstances be brought to consent to the marriage of any of his children; and he had, moreover, in the case of Elizabeth, the appearance of reason on his side, in that she was, in the opinion of her family and of most of her medical advisers, a hopeless invalid, unfit to be moved. “A life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth.” Browning believed otherwise, and events showed that he was right.

In the autumn of 1845, the doctors advised that Miss Barrett be taken to Italy, declaring, in fact, that her life depended upon it. Some of her brothers or sisters could easily have accompanied her; there was no lack of money, and the journey was actually planned. For no apparent reason, however, Mr. Barrett refused his consent—said that his daughter should not leave his house. In vain the family argued; in vain a generous friend offered to accompany Miss Barrett, paying all expenses. He was brutally firm. Much hurt by this selfishness and disregard for her life, Miss Barrett promised Browning that if she lived through the winter and were no worse in the following year, she would marry him without her father’s consent, for which they knew it was useless to ask. Accordingly, on September 12, 1846, she walked out of her father’s house, accompanied only by her maid, was married and returned home. One week later she joined her husband, and they set out for Italy, their future home. Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter, and his unrelenting anger was a deep sorrow to her, in the midst of her great life happiness.

The Brownings went first to Pisa, and from there to Florence, which they afterward regarded as their home, though they made many excursions and spent seasons elsewhere. Mrs. Browning grew so much better that a friend said to her, “You are not improved, you are transformed;” and while she was never strong and was often very ill, she never again sank back to the state in which she had been before her marriage. The happiness which shows in her letters is wonderful. “As for me,” she writes, “when I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as not to put my foot into a puddle, why my duty is considered done to a perfection, which is worthy of all adoration.” And again, “If I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness.”

Mrs. Browning, like her husband, loved Italy, and especially Florence, and many of her poems, notably the Casa Guidi Windows, deal with Italian subjects. Of the poems published after her marriage, however, none are more exquisite than the series of Sonnets from the Portuguese. These sonnets, which are not translations, and to which the name From the Portuguese was given simply as a blind, describe her uncertainty and her joy in the love which was hers.

In 1849 another joy came to her. On March 9th of that year a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning was born, and from that time on her letters, quite like the letters of any unliterary mother, are full of the wonderful doings of this child. Not that her interest in things literary flagged in the least; she read everything which the libraries of Italy afforded, or which her friends could send to her—novels, for which she confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning’s self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most willing to be judged.

Broken by several trips to England and by excursions to the most beautiful parts of Italy, the years slipped by in uneventful happiness. Many friends visited the Brownings, and all came away wondering and delighted at the perfect family life they had been allowed to witness. Frail always, Mrs. Browning was spoken of by acquaintances in her later years as seeming “scarce embodied at all.”

In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had an attack of bronchial trouble and on the night of the twenty-ninth, alone in the room with her husband, she died; and one writer says “none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but only a splendid surface.” Mrs. Browning was buried at Florence, the city she had loved. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the building in which she had lived, the citizens, grateful for her love and understanding of them, placed a marble tablet in her memory.

The wonderful thing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that from her weakness should have come poems of such strength. There was nothing morbid in the words which came from her hushed, darkened sick room. Indeed, her spirit was never tamed, and she herself confessed that one of her faults was “head-longness;” that she snatched parcels open instead of untying the string, and tore letters instead of cutting them. In Browning’s poems, which contain numerous beautiful allusions to her, there is nothing more beautiful and more descriptive than the lines—

“O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.”