Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/71

Rh In the year 1837 Miss Barrett broke a bloodvessel on the lungs. As it refused to heal, her physician, at the approach of winter, ordered her to the milder climate of the coast. She went to Torquay, Devonshire, accompanied by her elder brother and other relatives. On a bright morning in the following summer this brother, with two friends, embarked on a small sailing vessel for a trip of a few hours. Being excellent sailors and familiar with the coast, they sent back the boatmen and undertook to manage the little craft. But within a few minutes, just as they were crossing the bar, the boat went down, and all perished. The bodies were never found, nor was anything belonging to them recovered.

Miss Barrett, still physically weak, was utterly prostrated by grief and horror at the tragedy. She even blamed herself as having been the indirect cause of the loss. Unable to be moved from the sheltered house below the cliffs, she heard for a whole winter the sound of the waves like the moans of the dying. Her only diversion from these painful thoughts was study. Her physician could not approve such occupation in one hanging between death and life, and to prevent his remonstrances she had an edition of Plato bound like a novel. Yet she did not disdain nor altogether discard novels, and to them she owed "many a still, serene hour."

When she had recovered sufficiently to be removed to her London home in an invalid carriage, she was still confined to her couch in a darkened room. In these years of bodily imprisonment her spirit roamed over the universe. She enjoyed the loving care of her family and a few devoted friends. Of a pet dog, called Flush, she says in a cheerful letter: "Flushie is my friend—my companion—and loves me better than he loves the sunshine without. Oh, and if you had seen him when he came home (after being stolen and lost for three days). He threw himself in my arms, palpitating with joy—in that dumb, inarticulate ecstasy which is so af-