Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/172

156 put away certain velvet suits and lace collars in which the little son was to make his appearance among his English relatives. Mrs. Browning's chief concern was not for her manuscripts, but for the loss of her little boy's wardrobe, which had been devised with so much tender motherly care and pride. Happily one of her brothers was at Marseilles, and the box was discovered stowed away in some cellar at the Customs there."

At Paris the Brownings again met Bayard Taylor, and the American remarks about the forthcoming poem, that it is entirely new in design, and that the authoress "feels a little nervous about it." The nervousness was natural, but needless; probably no long poem ever met with so enthusiastic a reception. The success of Aurora Leigh was immediate and wide, and its publication invoked a chorus of praise that time has somewhat modified the tone of. Barry Cornwall, alluding to it as "the most successful book of the season," adds, "it is, a hundred times over, the finest poem ever written by a woman." Landor, writing of it to John Forster, says, in many pages, "there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. . . . I had no idea that anyone in this age was capable of so much poetry. I am half drunk with it." Other equally laudatory things were said by the choicest spirits of the time, and Mrs. Browning was at once and, doubtless, for ever, awarded one of the loftiest places in the fane of Poesy.

The splendour and grandeur of Aurora Leigh cannot be gainsaid, but at the period of its production literary England was somewhat more enthusiastic, and public taste somewhat more volcanic in its ebullitions than now-a-days, when a surfeit of sweets has somewhat blunted the appetite for such things. Aurora Leigh