ho wrote at the little table,
is endeared to all the world. Born in 1809, in the county of Durham,
the daughter of wealthy parents, she passed her early years partly in
the country in Herefordshire, and partly in the city. That she loved
the country with its wild flowers and woods, her poem, _The Lost
Bower_, plainly shows.

"Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade;
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade.

* * * * *

"But the wood, all close and clenching
Bough in bough and root in root,--
No more sky (for overbranching)
At your head than at your foot,--
Oh, the wood drew me within it, by a glamour past dispute.

"But my childish heart beat stronger
Than those thickets dared to grow:
_I_ could pierce them! I could longer
Travel on, methought, than so.
Sheep for sheep-paths! braver children climb and creep where they
would go.

* * * * *

"Tall the linden-tree, and near it
An old hawthorne also grew;
And wood-ivy like a spirit
Hovered dimly round the two,
Shaping thence that bower of beauty which I sing of thus to you.

"And the ivy veined and glossy
Was enwrought with eglantine;
And the wild hop fibred closely,
And the large-leaved columbine,
Arch of door and window mullion, did right sylvanly entwine.

* * * * *

"I have lost--oh, many a pleasure,
Many a hope, and many a power--
Studious health, and merry leisure,
The first dew on the first flower!
But the first of all my losses was the losing of the bower.

* * * * *

"Is the bower lost then? Who sayeth
That the bower indeed is lost?
Hark! my spirit in it prayeth
Through the sunshine and the frost,--
And the prayer preserves it greenly, to the last
and uttermost.

"Till another open for me
In God's Eden-land unknown,
With an angel at the doorway,
White with gazing at His throne,
And a saint's voice in the palm-trees, singing, 'All is lost ...
and _won_!'"

Elizabeth Barrett wrote poems at ten, and when seventeen, published
an _Essay on Mind, and Other Poems_. The essay was after the manner
of Pope, and though showing good knowledge of Pl