BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT English poet, wife of the poet Robert Browning, was born Mar. 6, 1806, the daughter and eldest child of Edward Barrett Moul ton, who added the surname of Barrett on the death of his maternal grandfather, whose large estates in Jamaica he inherited. His wife was Mary Graham Clarke, daughter of J. Graham Clarke of Fenton Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne. Elizabeth's childhood was passed in the country, chiefly at Hope End, a house bought by her father in the beautiful country in sight of the Malvern Hills. Her country poems, such as "The Lost Bower," "Hector in the Garden" and "The Deserted Garden," refer to the woods and , gardens of Hope End. Elizabeth Barrett was much the companion of her father, who pleased himself with printing fifty copies of what she calls her "great epic of eleven or twelve years old, in four books"—The Battle of Marathon (sent to the printer in 1819). The love of Pope's Homer, she adds, led her to the study of Greek, and of Latin as a help to Greek. In 1832, Mr. Barrett sold his house of Hope End and brought his family to Sidmouth, Devon, for some three years. There Eliza beth made a translation of the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, published with some original poems (1833) . After that time London became the home of the Barretts until the children mar ried and the father died. The temporary dwelling was at 74, Gloucester Place, Portman Square, and in 1838 the lease was taken of 5o, Wimpole Street.
In the middle of the year 1836 Elizabeth Barrett made the acquaintance of R. H. Horne, afterwards famous for a time as the author of Orion, but perhaps best remembered as her cor respondent (Letters to R. H. Horne, 2 vols., 1877). This ac quaintance led to the appearance of poems by Miss Barrett in the New Monthly Magazine, edited by Bulwer (Lord Lytton), and in other magazines or annuals. But the publication of The Seraphim and other Poems (1838) was a graver step. Miss Barrett's volume was well reviewed, but not popular, and no second edition was required ; of the poems afterwards famous it con tained three, "Cowper's Grave," "My Doves," and "The Sea Mew." In 1837 Elizabeth had made the memorable acquaintance of Wordsworth. With Landor, at the same date, a meeting took place that lilad long results. At this time, too, began another of Elizabeth's valued friendships—that with Miss Mitford, author of Our Village. Mr. John Kenyon also became at about this time a dear and intimate friend. He was a distant cousin of the Barretts, had published some verse, and was a warm and generous friend to men of letters. From the date of the birth of their child he gave the Brownings a hundred pounds a year, and when he died in 1856 he bequeathed to them f i i,000. To him a great number of Elizabeth's letters are addressed, and to him in later years was Aurora Leigh dedicated. Elizabeth Barrett began also in London an acquaintance with Harriet Martineau. In early girlhood Eliz abeth had a spinal affection and her lungs became delicate. She broke a blood-vessel in the beginning of the Barretts' life in town and was thereafter an invalid, and generally a recluse, until her marriage. In 1838 it was found necessary to remove her to Tor quay, where she spent three years, accompanied by her brother Edward, the dearest of her eight brothers, and for a time by her father and sisters. During this time of physical suffering she underwent the greatest grief of her life by the drowning of her beloved brother in Babbacombe bay. The accident of Edward Barrett's meeting with his death through her residence at Torquay, and the minor accident of her having parted from him on the day of his death, as she said, "with pettish words," increased her anguish of heart to horror. With an impulse of self-protection she went to work as soon as her strength sufficed. One of her tasks was a part taken in the Chaucer Modernized (1841), a work sug gested by Wordsworth, to which he, Leigh Hunt, Home and others contributed. In 1841 she returned to Wimpole Street, and in that and the following year she was at work on two series of articles on the Greek Christian poets and on the English poets, written for the Athenaeum.
In 1842 we notice the name of Robert Browning in her letters : "Mr. Horne the poet and Mr. Browning the poet were not behind in approbation," she says in regard to her work on the poets. "Mr. Browning is said to be learned in Greek, especially the dramatists." In this year also she declares her love for Tennyson. To Kenyon she writes, "I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson." In 1842, moreover, she had the pleasure of a letter from Wordsworth, who had twice asked Kenyon for permission to visit her. The visit was not permitted on account of Miss Barrett's ill-health. Now Haydon sent her his unfinished painting of the great poet musing upon Helvellyn; she wrote her sonnet on the portrait, and Haydon sent it to Rydal Mount. Wordsworth's commendation is rather cool. In August 1843 "The Cry of the Children" appeared in Blackwood's Mag azine, and during the year she was associated with her friend Horne in a critical work, The New Spirit of the Age, rather by advice than by direct contribution. Her two volumes of poems (1 844) appeared, six years after her former book, under the title of Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. In the beginning of the following year came the letter from a stranger that was to be so momentous to both. "I had a letter from Browning the poet last night," she writes to her old friend Mrs. Martin, "which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, the king of the mystics." America was at least as quick as England to appreciate her poetry; among other messages thence came in the spring letters from Lowell and from Mrs. Sigourney. In the same year the letters first speak of the hope of a journey to Italy. The winters in London were lowering Elizabeth's strength of resistance against disease. She longed for the change of light, scene, manners and language, and the longing became a hope, until her father's prohibition doomed her, as she and others thought, to death, with out any perceptible reason for the denial of so reasonable a desire.
Meanwhile the friendship with Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett's life. The correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. He became her frequent visitor and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in friendship or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of the letters between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love-story from beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger than the woman he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be confined by some hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and resolution he never doubted. Her hesitation, in regard for his liberty and strength, to burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the sonnets after wards published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portu guese. She refused him once "with all her will, but much against her heart," and yielded at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father's will was that his children should not marry, and the prohibition struck terror into the hearts of the three dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning's addresses were, therefore, kept secret. Browning was reluctant to practise the deception; Eliz abeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she was persuaded to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror, upon a secret wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and on Sept. 12 the two poets were married in St. Marylebone Parish church. Elizabeth's two sisters had been permitted to know of the engagement but not of the wedding, so that their father's anger might not fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs. Browning remained in her father's house. On Sept. 19 she left it, taking her maid and her little dog, joined her husband and crossed to the Continent.
For climate and cheapness they settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there, with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and Rome, and to Paris and England, until Mrs. Browning's death. It was at Pisa that Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems which his wife had written in secret and had no thought of publishing. He, however, resolved to give them to the world. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." The judg ment, which the existence of Wordsworth's sonnets renders ob viously absurd, may be pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at Reading as Sonnets by E. B. B., in 1847. In 185o they were included, under their final title, in a new issue of poems. During the Pisan autumn appeared in Blackwood's Magazine seven poems by Mrs. Browning which she had sent some time before; at Pisa also she wrote and sent to America a poem, "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point," which was pub lished in Boston, in The Liberty Bell, in 1848, and separately in England in 1849. In the summer of 1847 the Brownings left their temporary dwelling in Florence and took the apartment in Casa Guidi, near the Pitti Palace, which was thenceforth their chief home. Early in their residence began that excited interest in Italian affairs which made so great a part of Mrs. Browning's emotional life. Mrs. Browning, by degrees, wrote Casa Guidi Windows on behalf of the Florentines and as an appeal to the always impulsive sympathies of England. In 1849 was born the Brownings' only child, Robert Wiedemann Barrett. After this event, Mrs. Browning prepared a new issue, with some additions of her poems (1850). Casa Guidi Windows followed in 1851. Visiting England in that year, the Brownings saw much of the Procters, and something of Florence Nightingale, Kingsley, Ruskin, Rogers, Patmore and Tennyson, and also of Carlyle, with whom they went to Paris where they saw George Sand, and where they passed the December days of their coup d'etat. Mrs. Browning happened to take a political fancy to Napoleon III. whom she would probably have denounced if a tithe of his tyrannies had occurred in Italy, and the fancy became more emotional in after years.
A new edition of Mrs. Browning's poems was called for in and at about this time, in Florence, she began to work on Aurora Leigh. She was still writing this poem when the Brownings were again in England in 1855. After another interval in Paris they were in London again—Mrs. Browning for the last time. She was with her cousin Kenyon during the last months of his life. In October 1856 the Brownings returned to their Florentine home, Mrs. Browning leaving her completed Aurora Leigh for publica tion. The book had an immediate success; a second edition was required in a fortnight, a third a few months later. In the fourth edition (1859) several corrections were made.
In 1857 Mrs. Browning addressed a petition in the form of a letter, to the emperor Napoleon begging him to remit the sentence of exile upon Victor Hugo. In 1857 Mrs. Browning's father died, unreconciled. Henrietta Barrett had married, like her sister, and like her was unforgiven. In 1858 occurred another visit to Paris and another to Rome, where Hawthorne and his family were among the Brownings' friends. In 1859 came the Italian war in which Mrs. Browning's hasty sympathies were hotly engaged. Her admiration of Napoleon III. knew no bounds, and was not even destroyed by the peace of Villafranca. That peace, however, was a bitter disappointment, and her fragile health suffered. At Siena and Florence this year the Brownings were very kind to Landor, old, solitary and ill. Mrs. Browning's poem, "A Tale of Villafranca," was published in the Athenaeum in September and afterwards included in Poems before Congress (186o) . Then fol lowed another long visit to Rome, and there Mrs. Browning pre pared for the press this, her last volume. The little book was judged with some impatience, A Curse for a Nation, being mis taken for a denunciation of England, whereas it was aimed at America and her slavery.
On June 3o, 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. Her married life had been supremely happy. Something has been said of the difference between husband and wife in regard to "spirit ualism," in which Mrs. Browning had interest and faith, but no division ever interrupted their entirely perfect affection and happiness. Browning buried his wife in Florence, under a tomb designed by their friend Frederick Leighton. On the wall of Casa Guidi is placed the inscription "Qui scrisse e mori Elizabetta Barrett Browning, the in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta, e fece del suo verso aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra. Pone questa lapide Firenze grata 1861." In 1866 Robert Browning published a volume of selections from his wife's works.
The place of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in English literature is high, if not upon the summits. She had an original genius, a fervent heart, and an intellect that was, if not great, exceedingly active. She seldom has composure or repose, but it is not true that her poetry is purely emotional. It is full of abundant, and even over-abundant thoughts. It is intellectually restless. The impassioned peace of the greatest poetry, such as Wordsworth's, is not hers. Nor did she apparently seek to attain those heights. Her Greek training taught her little of the economy that such a poetic education is held to impose ; she "dashed" not by reason of feminine weakness, but as it were to prove her possession of masculine strength. Her gentler work, as in the Sonnets from the Portuguese, is beyond praise. There is in her poetic personality a glory of righteousness, of spirituality, and of ardour that makes her name a splendid one in the history of an incomparable lit erature.