hich seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a
realization. She was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family
came up to London, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams
and visions for her company. These years were but the prelude, the
preparatory period. She then entered on the experimental phase, the
testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and
later fulfillment. In her forty-first year came her marriage to Robert
Browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous
achievement, during which the incomparable "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
and "Aurora Leigh" were written,--the period of realization.

Before the beginning of the London period Miss Barrett's literary work had
been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that
somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or
less crude experimenter. For Poetry to Elizabeth Barrett was a divine
commission no less than an inborn gift. Under any circumstances, she would
have poured her life "with passion into music," and with the utmost
sincerity could she have said, with George Eliot's "Armgart,"

"I am not glad with that mean vanity
Which knows no good beyond its appetite
Full feasting upon praise! I am only glad,
Being praised for what I know is worth the praise;
Glad of the proof that I myself have part
In what I worship!"

As is revealed and attested in many expressions of her maturer years,
Poetry was to her the most serious, as well as the most enthralling, of
pursuits, while she was also a very accomplished scholar. A special gift,
and a facility for the acquirement of scholarly knowledge in the academic
sense, do not invariably go together; often is the young artist so
bewitched with his gift, so entranced with the glory and the splendor of a
dream, that the text-book, by contrast, is a dull page, to which he cannot
persuade himself to turn. To him the air is peopled with visions and
voices that fascinate his attention. In the college days of James Russell
Lowell is seen an illustration of this truth, the young student being
temporarily suspended, and sent--not to Coventry, but to Concord. Perhaps
the banishment of a Harvard student for the high crime and misdemeanor of
being addicted to rhyme rather than mathematics, and his penalty in the
form of exile to Concord, the haunt of Emerson and the Muses, may have
made Pan laugh. B