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24 against lapses into obscurity, bidding her write "poems of human feeling and human action." Such warnings could not have hindered Elizabeth Barrett at any time from writing as she felt, but they may have caused her to feel occasionally that the human element should not be quite overshadowed by the psychological. Sometimes when she turned her thoughts to incidents of her daily life, she wrote with a simplicity and pathetic tenderness as unparalleled in their way as were her spiritualistic speculations in theirs. One such poem as these, entitled "My Doves," refers to a pair of doves recently sent to her from the tropics as a present. She wrote to Miss Mitford:—

The doves formed quite a topic for the two authoresses to dilate upon. Miss Mitford considered that when she said that her father was quite charmed with Miss Barrett's account of the little brown birdies, she had, indeed, awarded high honour, and when she heard that they had so far grown accustomed to the strangeness of their new habitation as to build a nest and lay their eggs therein, she sent her love to them, with the hope that the eggs might be good. "It would