Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/46

30 tells her the projected volume will include "a principal poem called the 'Seraphim,' which is rather a dramatic lyric than a lyrical drama." "I can hardly hope that you will thoroughly like it," is her comment; "but know well that you will try to do so. Other poems, longer or shorter, will make up the volume, not a word of which is yet printed."

Why Miss Barrett feared that her friend would not be altogether satisfied with the chief poem in her volume will readily be understood by those acquainted with Miss Mitford's ideas on the treatment of "sacred" themes. The preface was, in all probability, written with a view of combating just such objections as those of her way of thinking were likely to put forward. The preface states:—

The subject of the principal poem in the present collection having suggested itself to me, though very faintly and imperfectly, when I was engaged upon my translation of the "Prometheus Bound".

I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic, faith from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity; from the "faded white flower" of the Titanic brow to the "withered grass" of a Heart trampled on by its own beloved; from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the taster of death for every man; from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to His more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love! . . . . But if my dream be true that Æschylus might have turned to the subject before us, in poetic instinct, and if in such a case. . . its terror and its pathos would have shattered into weakness the strong Greek tongue, and caused the conscious chorus to tremble round the thymele, how much more may I turn from it, in the instinct of incompetence! . . . I have written no work, but a suggestion. . . I have felt in the midst of my own thoughts upon my own theme, like Homer's "Children in a Battle."

The agents in this poem are those mystic beings who are designated in Scripture the Seraphim. . . . I have endeavoured to mark in my two Seraphic personages, distinctly and predominantly, that shrinking