e
who lived for others was

"poet true,
Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do
For Truth,--the ends being scarcely two."

Beauty _was_ truth with her, the wife, mother, and poet, three in one,
and such an earthly trinity as God had never before blessed the world
with.

This day week, at half-past four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning
died. A great invalid from girlhood, owing to an unfortunate accident,
Mrs. Browning's life was a prolonged combat with disease thereby
engendered; and had not God given her extraordinary vitality of spirit,
the frail body could never have borne up against the suffering to which
it was doomed. Probably there never was a greater instance of the power
of genius over the weakness of the flesh. Confined to her room in
the country or city home of her father in England, Elizabeth Barrett
developed into the great artist and scholar.

From her couch went forth those poems which have crowned her as "the
world's greatest poetess"; and on that couch, where she lay almost
speechless at times, and seeing none but those friends dearest and
nearest, the soul-woman struck deep into the roots of Latin and Greek,
and drank of their vital juices. We hold in kindly affection her
learned and blind teacher, Hugh Stuart Boyd, who, she tells us, was
"enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple
and upright of human beings." The love of his grateful scholar, when
called upon to mourn the good man's death, embalms his memory among her
Sonnets, where she addresses him as her

"Beloved friend, who, living many years
With sightless eyes raised vainly to the sun,
Didst learn to keep thy patient soul in tune
To visible Nature's elemental cheers!"

Nor did this "steadfast friend" forget his poet-pupil ere he went to
"join the dead":--

"Three gifts the Dying left me,--Aeschylus,
And Gregory Nazianzen, and a clock
Chiming the gradual hours out like a flock
Of stars, whose motion is melodious."

We catch a glimpse of those communings over "our Sophocles the royal,"
"our Aeschylus the thunderous," "our Euripides the human," and "my Plato
the divine one," in her pretty poem of "Wine of Cyprus," addressed to
Mr. Boyd. The woman translates the remembrance of those early lessons
into her heart's verse:--

"And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio's turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.
Pas