ELIZABETH BARRETT.  Among the minor poets of the past century Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning) occupies perhaps the highest place in popular favor.  She was born at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, in 1806; but her childhood and early youth were spent in Herefordshire, among the Malvern Hills made famous by Piers Plowman.  In 1835 the Barrett family moved to London, where Elizabeth gained a literary reputation by the publication of The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838).  Then illness and the shock caused by the tragic death of her brother, in 1840, placed her frail life in danger, and for six years she was confined to her own room.  The innate strength and beauty of her spirit here showed itself strongly in her daily study, her poetry, and especially in her interest in the social problems which sooner or later occupied all the Victorian writers.  “My mind to me a kingdom is” might well have been written over the door of the room where this delicate invalid worked and suffered in loneliness and in silence.

In 1844 Miss Barrett published her Poems, which, though somewhat impulsive and overwrought, met with remarkable public favor.  Such poems as “The Cry of the Children,” which voices the protest of humanity against child labor, appealed tremendously to the readers of the age, and this young woman’s fame as a poet temporarily overshadowed that of Tennyson and Browning.  Indeed, as late as 1850, when Wordsworth died, she was seriously considered for the position of poet laureate, which was finally given to Tennyson.  A reference to Browning, in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” is supposed to have first led the poet to write to Miss Barrett in 1845.  Soon afterwards he visited the invalid; they fell in love almost at first sight, and the following year, against the wishes of her father,—­who was evidently a selfish old tyrant,—­Browning carried her off and married her.  The exquisite romance of their love is reflected in Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).  This is a noble and inspiring book of love poems; and Stedman regards the opening sonnet, “I thought once how Theocritus had sung,” as equal to any in our language.

For fifteen years the Brownings lived an ideally happy life at Pisa, and at Casa Guidi, Florence, sharing the same poetical ambitions.  And love was the greatest thing in the world,—­

    How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways. 
    I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
    My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
    For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. 
    I love thee to the level of everyday’s
    Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 
    I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
    I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
    I love thee with the passion put to use
    In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith;
    I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
    With my lost saints—­I love thee with the breath,
    Smiles, tears, of all my life!—­and, if God choose,
    I shall but love thee better after death.