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the third number of the Tableaux, to accompany one of these commonplace pictures, Miss Barrett wrote her ballad, "The Romaunt of the Page." The subscribers to the five-shillings part must, if they were intellectually capable of appreciating it, have been surprised at the power, originality, and beauty of the poem thus given to them.

      Notwithstanding many defects, partly due to the nature of her inspiration, "The Romaunt of the Page," although not to be included among her finest poems, will always be a favourite one with Elizabeth Barrett's readers, because it is free from metaphysical obscurity and deals directly with the "human feeling and human ​action" Miss Mitford had so wisely recommended her to resort to as theme for her poesy. This same experienced counsellor, who had succeeded Mrs. Hall in the editorship of the Tableaux, writing to her young correspondent on 28th June, says:—

       My Sweet Love—I want you to write me a poem in illustration of a very charming group of Hindoo girls floating their lamps upon the Ganges—launching them, I should say. You know that pretty superstition. I want a poem in stanzas. It must be long enough for two pages, and may be as much longer as you choose. It is for Finden's Tableaux, of which I have undertaken the editorship; and I must entreat it within a fortnight or three weeks if possible, because I am limited to time, and have only till the end of next month to send up the whole copy cut and dry. I do entreat you, my sweet young friend, not to refuse me this favour. I could not think of going to press without your assistance, and have chosen for you the very prettiest subject, and, I think, the prettiest plate of the whole twelve. I am quite sure that, if you favour me with a poem, it will be the gem of the collection.

      To these highly complimentary expressions, Miss Mitford added that the proprietor had given her thirty pounds—"That is to say, five pounds each for my six poets (I am to do all the prose and dramatic scenes myself); and with this five pounds … I shall have the honour of sending a copy of the work, which will be all the prettier and more valuable for your assistance. … If you can give me time and thought enough to write one of those ballad stories, it would give an inexpressible grace and value to my volume. Depend upon it the time will come when those verses of yours will have a money value."

      Miss Barrett agreed to write the required verses, not, it may be assumed, for the money value, whatever may have been her motive. The "prettiest plate," according to the dexterous editorial description, was as commonplace and conventional an engraving as one ​could meet with, even in those days, depicting a group of Hindoo girls, or rather women, following the traditional custom of testing their lovers' fidelity by launching little lamps fixed in cocoa shells down the Ganges. If the lover were faithful the symbol boat floated away safely down the river; but, if otherwise, the tiny token quickly disappeared. That "The Romance of the Ganges" was better than the usual run of such "plate" versification may be granted, but, notwithstanding this fact that it is, as was all she wrote at this period of her life, replete wiih Miss Barrett's idiosyncrasies, it is a poor specimen of her skill, and scarcely worthy of the warm praise lavished on it by Miss Mitford.

      Whilst the editor was writing all sorts of laudatory things to and of her favourite contributor, "the most remarkable person now alive," and of her ballad, "The Romaunt of the Page," as "one of the most charming poems ever written," that contributor's life seemed hanging by a thread. At the very time that Miss Mitford was describing Elizabeth Barrett as "a young and lovely woman, who lives the life of a hermitess in Gloucester Place … and who passes her life in teaching her younger brothers Greek," that very person was suffering from what looked like a mortal illness. Whether she had broken a blood-vessel on the lungs, as is frequently stated, is problematical; but, at any rate, her lungs were affected, and her life, which had so long appeared waning, seemed about to flicker out. Notwithstanding the many poems she continued to write, and the long hours of study she contrived to undergo, nothing but her mind appeared to live; her body was almost helpless.

      At this time, also, occurred a domestic affliction to ​rack the invalid's mind. It was the death of her uncle, the only brother of Mr. Edward Moulton Barrett, and who was, says Elizabeth, "in past times more than an uncle to me." As he died childless, the whole of his considerable property devolved, it is believed, upon his brother and his brother's family.

      In the letter Miss Barrett wrote to Miss Mitford, informing her of her uncle's death, alluding to her own delicate health, she remarked—"The turning to spring is always trying, I believe, to affections such as mine, and my strength flags a good deal, and the cough very little; but Dr. Chambers speaks so encouragingly of the probable effect of the coming warm weather, that I take courage and his medicines at the same time, and 'to preserve the harmonics,' and satisfy some curiosity, have been reading Garth's 'Dispensary,' a poem very worthy of its subject."

      Unfortunately, the hopes which Dr. Chambers endeavoured to inspire his patient with were vain. The warm weather was so long in coming that year (1838) that even in the middle of May Miss Mitford wrote, bitterly, that it seemed as if it would never come. Shortly before that letter from Miss Mitford, Miss Barrett said to her—"Our bouse in Wimpole Street is not yet finished, but we hope to see the beginning of April in it. You must not think I am very bad, only not very brisk, and really feeling more comfortable than I did a fortnight since." The improvement foreshadowed, if not imaginary, was certainly not permanent. Miss Barrett continued bodily ill, although her mental vigour never faltered. In the midst of her ailments she prepared a collection of her poems, and arranged for their publication. Writing to Miss Mitford, to thank her for some encouraging words, she ​tells her the projected volume will include "a principal poem called the 'Seraphim,' which is rather a dramatic lyric than a lyrical drama." "I can hardly hope that you will thoroughly like it," is her comment; "but know well that you will try to do so. Other poems, longer or shorter, will make up the volume, not a word of which is yet printed."

      Why Miss Barrett feared that her friend would not be altogether satisfied with the chief poem in her volume will readily be understood by those acquainted with Miss Mitford's ideas on the treatment of "sacred" themes. The preface was, in all probability, written with a view of combating just such objections as those of her way of thinking were likely to put forward. The preface states:—

       The subject of the principal poem in the present collection having suggested itself to me, though very faintly and imperfectly, when I was engaged upon my translation of the "Prometheus Bound".

      I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic, faith from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity; from the "faded white flower" of the Titanic brow to the "withered grass" of a Heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to His more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! … But if my dream be true that Æschylus might have turned to the subject before us, in poetic instinct, and if in such a case … its terror and its pathos would have shattered into weakness the strong Greek tongue, and caused the conscious chorus to tremble round the thymele, how much more may I turn from it, in the instinct of incompetence! … I have written no work, but a suggestion … I have felt in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer's "Children in a Battle."

      The agents in this poem are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. … I have endeavoured to mark in my two Seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking ​from and repugnance to evil which, in my weaker Seraph, is expressed by fear, and in my stronger one by a more complex passion. … To recoil from evil is according to the stature of an angel; to subdue it is according to the infinitude of a God.

      If the leading poem of her book failed to make the impression on her readers Miss Barrett desired, it was neither owing to her want of the requisite learning, nor the poetic power to deal with her abstruse theme, but rather that the public preferred to abstract spiritualities such poems as Miss Mitford described—"poems of human feeling and human action." With respect to the other shorter pieces in her book, the authoress claimed that though if her life were prolonged she would hope to write better verses hereafter, she could never feel more intensely than at that moment "the sublime

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