Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/178

162 her babe can afford her, gratefully declines the offer and leaves Romney to Aurora.

Aurora now learns that Romney's plans for succouring the wretched and the criminal had all failed; that his house, Leigh Hall, had been destroyed by the rabble; he himself, in striving to rescue one of the inmates had been irretrievably blinded, and had been driven by calumny from the neighbourhood. Her love no longer restrainable, she flings herself into the blind man's arms, and all the pent-up feelings of years find vent in a burst of acknowledged affection.

Such is a tame summary of the story which invoked so enthusiastic a reception throughout the English world of letters. Our plain prose can, of course, afford no conception of the magnificent aspirations, the glowing thoughts, the brilliant scintillations of genius, the innumerable gem-like passages of pathos, the passionate rushes of language, and the daring assaults upon time-honoured customs with which this crowning work of woman's genius is replete; nothing but citation from end to end can do justice to Aurora Leigh. When the glamour of perusal has passed off, however, and the reader begins to take a calm survey of the whole story, he is astounded at the extent of its shortcomings. The poem is most needlessly lengthened and hampered by continual digressions which interrupt without enriching the narrative. Nearly all the incidents are of an improbable, not to say impossible nature. None of the characters introduced, save that of the aunt, are life-like or typical. Romney Leigh's opinions and purposes, so far as they be comprehended, are something more than Quixotic, they are unnatural, and could never have been conceived by a sane, much less