Italian, who was afterward associated with Seymour Kirkup in
discovering Dante's portrait concealed under the whitewash applied to the
walls of the Bargello in Florence. Miss Barrett was at this time entering
into that notable correspondence with Richard Hengist Horne, many of these
letters containing passages of interest. For instance, of poetry we find
her saying:

"If poetry under any form be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature is,
we are near a blasphemy, and I, for one, could not believe in the
immortality of the soul.

'_Si l'ame est immortelle,_
_L'amour ne l'est-il-pas?_'

Extending _l'amour_ into all love of the ideal, and attendant power of
idealizing.... I don't believe in mute, inglorious Miltons, and far
less in mute, inglorious Shakespeares."

Referring to some correspondence with Miss Martineau, Miss Barrett
characterizes her as "the noblest female intelligence between the seas,"
and of Tennyson, in relation to some mention of him, she wrote that "if
anything were to happen to Tennyson, the whole world should go into
mourning."

A project (said to have originated with Wordsworth) was launched to
"modernize" Chaucer, in which Miss Barrett, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes,
Mr. Horne, and one or two others enthusiastically united, the only
dissenter being Landor, who characteristically observed that any one who
was fit to read Chaucer at all could read him in the original. Later on
the co-operation of Browning, Tennyson, Talfourd, Bulwer, Mary Howitt, and
the Cowden Clarkes was solicited and in part obtained. But Landor held
firm, and of his beloved Chaucer he said: "I will have no hand in breaking
his dun, but rich-painted glass, to put in thinner (if clearer) panes." A
great deal of correspondence ensued in connection with this Herculean
labor, most of which is of less interest to the general reader than it
might well be to the literary antiquarian.

The next special literary enthusiasm of Mr. Horne and Miss Barrett was the
projection of a work of criticism, to be issued anonymously, and entitled
"The New Spirit of the Age." They collaborated on the critique on
Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and for the one on Landor Miss Barrett was
mainly responsible, in which she says he "writes poetry for poets, and
criticism for critics;... and as if poetry were not, in English, a
sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing
poetry in Latin." She speaks o