Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/35

Rh Wordsworth, and most of the best, as well as best known, literary folk of the day were among Kenyon's most intimate assoeiates, and it was one among the many pleasant traits of his character to seek to introduce and make acquainted with each other such celebrities as he knew himself. Such was Kenyon, whom it delighted Elizabeth Barrett to call "cousin," and to whom she naturally turned for advice in literary matters.

It was Kenyon who introduced the young poetess to most of her earliest literary friends, and he was the means of getting her poems accepted and works noticed by the chief literary journals of the day. Many of her earlier poems have, doubtless, been lost sight of altogether, not so much on account of their unworthiness as through their author's carelessness or forgetfulness of their existence.

"The Romaunt of Margret," which appeared in the July part of the New Monthly Magazine, was a great advance upon everything the poetess had as yet published, and was well calculated to enhance her reputation, not only among those few literary acquaintances who began to proclaim her as a rising star, but also with the outside public. This fine ballad is based upon the idea which permeates so many literatures, and has excited the imagination of so many great poets, of the possibility of man's dual nature; upon the possibility of a mortal being enabled, generally just before death, to behold the double or duplicate of himself.

Although here and there somewhat misty in the filling up, as are, indeed, many of her later poems, the "Romaunt" is worthy of its author's most matured powers. It has that weird, pathetic, indescribable glamour often found pervading the older