he understood them, to which
the Autocrat replied, "God forbid!"

This very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery,
was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power
of Miss Barrett later on. From her earliest childhood she had the
scholar's instinct and love of learning; she read fluently French, German,
and Italian; she was well grounded in Latin, and for the Greek she had
that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation
rather than an acquirement. Its rich intellectual treasure entered into
her inmost life. She also read Hebrew, and all her life kept with her a
little Hebrew Bible, as well as a Greek Testament, the margins of both of
which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic
handwriting. Miss Barrett's earliest work, published anonymously, at her
father's expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make
any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality,
whatever its promise; but once in London, something in the very atmosphere
seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and
crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. Poetry had always been to
her "its own exceeding great reward," but she was now conscious of a
desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who
must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch
forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of
its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father's home, there
was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material
side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every
serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse
heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered.

"Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way,--
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards ... day!"

Miss Barrett finds London "wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist," but
she tries to like it, and "looks forward to seeing those here whom we
might see nowhere else." Her brother George, who had recently graduated
from the University of Glasgow, was now a barrister student at the Inner
Temple. Henrietta and Arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight
in the new surroundings.

Retrospectively viewed, Mrs. Browning's life falls easily into three
periods, w