Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/112

96 Mr. Robert Browning, at that time personally unknown to her.

Writing on the 3rd December to Horne, Miss Barrett says: "The volumes are succeeding past any expectation or hope of mine. . . . I continue to have letters of the kindest from unknown readers. I had a letter yesterday from the remote region of Gutter Lane, beginning, 'I thank thee!' . . . The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in sack-cloth."

There was no need to have feared for the American any more than for the English publisher—both found Miss Barrett's poems a good investment. Her reputation, indeed, was of almost as early a growth in the United States as in Great Britain. Edgar Poe, if not the first, was one of the first to introduce her to the American public, issuing some of her earlier pieces through the pages of Graham's Magazine, which he was then editing.

In a critique he subsequently wrote on Miss Barrett's poetry, Poe alludes to certain shortcomings in the technicalities of verse, especially bewailing her inattention to rhythm, an error that might have been fatal to her fame; but concludes with the declaration that the pen is impotent to express in detail the beauties of her work. "Her poetic inspiration," he remarks, "is the highest; we can conceive nothing more august." Nevertheless, he perceives that her sense of art, pure in itself, "has been contaminated by pedantic study of false models—a study which has the more easily led her astray, because she placed an undue value upon it as rare—as alien to her character of woman. The accident," he considers, "of her having