Chapter 3 - Page 2

spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He
admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring
leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in
that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or
greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the
literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it
rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had
already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had
been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady
poet, Miss Barrett.

That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was
thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very
weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was
open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When
she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a
straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a
certain element which had not been present in it since the last days
of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human
passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain
love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and
of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct
from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries
of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find
it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of
Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:--

"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth,
But glittered dew-like in the covenanted
And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted,
But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth
Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified
The image of the freedom he denied."

Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the
peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the
Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the
ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime.
Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then
urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life
or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness.
Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very
nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a
difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light
shades of the same colour.

Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private
life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon.