poke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to
her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents.
And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long
before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of
Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique
kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West
Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part
in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt
and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though
little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was
a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation
and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his
conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a
certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and
responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But
selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was
eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of
all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole
atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as
oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad
ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of
egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand
in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that
nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must
be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten
or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the
family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had
known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again
until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general
popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost
moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and
sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good
horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years
afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her
spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be
only one of the influences which were to da