Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/27

Rh broken to me except by books and my own thoughts, and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways There I had my fits of Pope and Byron and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and eat and drank Greek and made my head ache with it."

The young girl by practice and increasing intensity of feeling was gradually learning to become a true poet. Most of the events of her life, she said, had passed in her thoughts, and these thoughts she had continuously striven to transmute into poesy. Many youths wrote verses, but with her, "what is less common," as she remarked, "the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day poetry has been a distinct object with me—an object to read, think, and live for."

Already as early as 1825, Elizabeth Barrett had contributed fugitive verses to literary publications of the day, but now her ambition prompted her to more daring flights. Her childish lines on The Battle of Marathon can scarcely be taken into account in any chronicle of her literary deeds, but a volume which she published anonymously in 1826 marks a distinct epoch in her career. It was entitled An Essay on Mind and Other Poems, and the leading piece, written in heroic verse, and extending to eighty-eight pages, is produced in view, not without some doubts as to its truth, of the utterly false dictum of Byron, that "ethical poetry is the highest of all poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects is moral truth."

The lines display no originality of thought, are in the see-saw style of the Pope school, and are not very