Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/117

Rh men would feel, one would think, and yet it is a truth not very widely promulgated or generally recognised. Elizabeth Barrett was not the woman to feel and not assert her ideas on such a theme. "Please to recollect," she says, writing to Horne on the subject of eminent women, "that when I talk of women, I do not speak of them as many men do, . . . according to a separate, peculiar, and womanly standard, but according to the common standard of human nature."

Her fidelity to a conviction could not be shaken by any amount of popular prejudice or private influence. Her ideal of a truth once conceived nothing could destroy, or argument upset. She had formed strong opinions with regard to Leigh Hunt's theology, and, consequently, looked on his writings with suspicion. "There may be sectarianism in the very cutting off of sectarianism," she says, and instances his omission in a critical work upon poetry, "of one of the very noblest odes in the English language—that on the Nativity, because—it is not on the birth of Bacchus."

Such remarks, and they abound in her characteristic epistles, are of great biographical value, as throwing light upon her firm and thoroughly independent mind. By far the larger portion of her correspondence that has as yet come to light is purely literary. Books and their builders is her constant theme. The popularity of her works in the United States caused her to receive many letters from Americans, and sometimes drew her into discussions with them on the social and other aspects of their country. Writing to one of her New England friends, she says:—

"The cataracts and mountains you speak of have been—are—mighty dreams to me; and the great