Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/110

94 and requested his opinion upon it. What was his full reply is unknown, but he remarks: "Of course, I admired its poetry and versification, but concerning her victims of perfect and imperfect, or allowable rhymes, in that, and several of her other productions, I wished, once for all, to object, and give full reasons for it." "I took objection to many of the rhymes," says Horne. "I did not like 'tell us' as a rhyme for 'Hellas,' and still less 'islands' as a rhyme for 'silence.'" Other still less excusable examples were objected to, such as "rolls on" and "the sun"; "altars" and "welters"; "flowing" and "slow in"; "iron" and "inspiring"; "driven" and "heaving," and so forth. What little effect her brother poet's animadversions had upon Miss Barrett, the following words will show:—

"My dear Mr. Horne,—Do you know I could not help, in the midst of my horror and Panic terror, smiling outright at the naïveté of your doubt as to whether my rhymes were really meant for rhymes at all? That is the naïveté of a right savage nature—of an Indian playing with a tomahawk, and speculating as to whether the white faces had any feeling in their skulls, quand même! Know, then, that my rhymes are really meant for rhymes, . . . and that in no spirit of carelessness or easy writing, or desire to escape difficulties, have I run into them, but chosen them, selected them, on principle, and with the determinate purpose of doing my best. . . . What you say of a "poet's duty," no one in the world can feel more deeply in the verity of it than myself. If I fail ultimately before the public—that is, before the people—for an ephemeral popularity does not appear to me worth trying for—it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of