Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/51

Rh written so much, were not the purely ideal personages of her poetic fancy, but she held on to her belief in them as strongly as if they were visually knowable, and she regarded Lucifer, Adam, Eve, and other characters of the ancient scriptures as truly historical as Cæsar or Brutus, Antony or Cleopatra. Science was little more than blasphemy, and that the world had existed upwards of six thousand years the fancy at the best of over-heated imagination. Such a woman could be a poet of poets, a very woman of women, with a heart for all that suffers and exists, and yet, at times, so bigoted and so blinded by excess of faith that she could not rightly judge the motives and their main-springs of many of the best about her.

Life at Torquay passed away quietly enough. The invalid's physical state varied, yet on the whole a gradual improvement was evidently taking place in her physique. On the 3rd of December she is found writing Miss Mitford one of her usual chatty epistles, discussing with her wonted clarity their various literary and personal matters of mutual interest, not, however, without some slight allusions to her own foreboding fancies. Referring to some disputes the editress of the Tableaux was having with its proprietor, Miss Barrett says, "You may make whatever use of me you please, as long as I am alive, and able to write at all," and that Miss Mitford did not fail to avail herself of this permission is self-evident. After some remarks about Mr. Kenyon, Miss Barrett observes, "So he won't have anything to say to our narrative poetry in Finden? But he is a heretic, therefore we won't mind. After all, I am afraid (since it displeases you) that what I myself delight in most, in narrative poetry, is the narrative. Beaumont and Fletcher, strip them to their