ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1775, 14 March 1906, Page 27

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

(Contributed.)

On March 6, 1806, was born to Ed-

ward Barrett Moulton Barrett, at Coxhoe Hall, County of Durham, his eldest child Elizabeth, later to win fame as England’s greatest poetess, and to become the life’s partner of the no less celebrated Robert Browning. The centenary of this distinguished woman was last week commemorated throughout the English-speaking world' by small but ardent circles of people, who, despite the increasing eyanescence of literary fame, have still memory for the great ones of the past. In London the Pioneer Club arranged to hold a meeting, at which addresses were to be delivered by men and women, whose devotion to the higher aspects of life compels them to* pay tribute to one, the birth of whom it is honour to England to claim. There was also mooted during the past year a project to place within Westminster Abbey, near by the tomb of Robert Browning, a simple centenary tablet in memory of the kindred soul who won and held beyond the limits of earthly life his great, manly, adoration and love. In America, whither the cult of English literature in its higher walks seems steadily shifting its centre, much more demonstration was arranged for, and though not without some element of the ostentatious, the Transatlantic celebrations have within them too much of sincerity to be regarded as other than a true tribute to combined womanly and poetic greatness. In a Florentine street, by Arno’s banks. English-speaking men and women were to gather on last week’s centenary. There, upon the wall of the house wherein the life of two poets was itself a poem, may be read an inscription which stands as a memorial of both husband and wife. “Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who in the heart of a woman reconciled the science of a man of learning, and tho spirit of a poet, and of her verso made a golden ring between Italy and England ” So runs the writing, and the reverent few, who on March (j stood about that shrine of Love ?nd Labour, perchance caught some true glimpse of that spirit of perfect mutual devotion between two kindred_sou-Is which when allied with native greatness must always make for immortalityAs an artist, Elizabeth Barrett Browning stands indisputably first in the small—very small—roll of women poets. She was passionately an artist, jealous of the right of art to rise into that empyrean of purer feeling which is sexless. With fiery soul and determined will she demanded to be allowed to “deliver right the music of her nature,” and “step out grandly to the Infinite,” if so it lay within her. Her delicate health made hem a position of tender regard and solicitude to her father, a man of educated tastes and cultivated mind, possessing an independency of income which allowed him leisure to note and cherish tho poetical gift of his daughter. In her girlhood, she was an active-bodied, intellectual child, drinking eagerly, with her blind friend Mr Hugh Boyd, that wisdom of the great men of Greece, which was to be the solace of later weary hours. A fall from her homo in early life, and the loss of a favourite brother by drowning, reduced her health to that delicacy, which love only was to have . power to dispel. We are not treading profanely when we follow the confidences of the heartbroken woman, in her famous letters, for undoubtedly Robert Browning meant us to enter their secret precincts, obstinately as he had guarded his private life from the great, irtupid British Public while living. It was the tragedy of Battiscombe Bay which turned the maker of verse

into the poet. At the age of fourteen, the eager girl was composing an “Epic on Marathon.” She wrote much, encouraged by a father proud of his poet daughter. But it was from her invalid's couch., from which it was believed she would never rise again, that she struck that deeper note which disclosed the genius and true poet, in the “Sonnets from tho Portuguese.” It i© not within the scope of an article of this nature, minutely to discuss her work. Each poem is of deep and abiding value, as the truthful expression of a living growing soul, from tho awed exultation of the human mind, striving to utter tho infinite of which it is conscious, to the glad Hosanna of the love of one human heart for another. Her beautiful love story is now almost historic, and) tho perfect marriage but the crown, and aureole to a life (Strenuous and passionate, so noble in its ideals, so perfect in its soul’s expression, so pitiful to the bitter cries of human suffering, that, shattered as that life was, she demanded and obtained relief for the suffering and oppressed children of England in a poem which stirred public opinion to shame and repentance.

“O lyric love, half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire, writes lier stricken husband after hei death.

“Boldest of hearts that ever braved the Took sanctuary within the holier blue And sang a kindred soul out to his face.”

Those who celebrated her centenary might well be proud of the privilege of paying tribute to that great life”that high thought and great art, which place Elizabeth Barrett Browning where she so passionately aspired to bo, “solemnised and crowned,” among the torch-bearers of the race — the poets and artists who assure us of a ravishment, an intoxication which liberate the soul, and lift it to a delighted contemplation of those eternal mysteries, in which the human soul “lives, and moves, and has its being.”