Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/20

4 Of Hope End and the surrounding scenery "Aurora Leigh" furnishes many glimpses, but whether the heroine's father, "who was an austere Englishman" who taught his little daughter Latin and Greek himself, is intended for Mr. Barrett, is more than doubtful. Indulgent as her father was in some things, he was sternly despotic in others, and although, as she grew up, Elizabeth evidently revered him, it is certain that he would never allow himself to be thwarted. There is evidence that the gentle wife, who flits like a colourless spirit across the early life-track of her celebrated child, had often to soothe the anger of the wealthy West Indian slave-owner against his own offspring.

Although little Elizabeth found some things "as dull as grammar on an eve of holiday," as a rule she took more kindly to grammars than children of her age generally do. At nine—she herself is the authority—the only thing the mystic number nine suggested to the little girl was that the Greeks had spent nine years in besieging Ilium! Pity for her lost childhood's pleasures rather than admiration for her precocity would arise were it not palpable that infant necessity for play caused her to mingle frolic with her classical endowments. In the poem of "Hector in the Garden," Elizabeth Barrett tells that a device for amusement she invented when she was only nine years old was to cut out with a spade a huge giant of turf and, laying it down prostrate in the garden, style the creation of her childish fancy "Hector, son of Priam." Then, she says,—