Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/53

Rh which express and promise peace, such as 'The Lord of peace Himself give you peace always and by all means'; 'My peace I give you, not as the world giveth give I'; and 'He giveth His beloved sleep,"—all such passages. They strike upon the disquieted earth with such a foreignness of heavenly music. Surely the 'variety,' the change, is to be unexcited, to find a silence and a calm in the midst of thoughts and feelings given to be too turbulent."

In these remarks, so illustrative of her character at this period, Miss Barrett, as is not unusual with her, fails to appreciate the immense difference there is between opposite dispositions, between the bright, healthy, wealthy, much fêted man of the world, and the invalided, pious, somewhat superstitious "hermitess." "I am tolerably well just now," is her significant conclusion, "and all the better for the sight of papa. He arrived the day before yesterday."

But even all the kind care, much less the sight of dear ones, could not restore the invalid to health and strength. Her studies and her poetry, her readings and her correspondence, were carried on fitfully and during intervals of longer or shorter duration as her forces permitted. To her enthusiastic praises of some foreign poetry, sent during this period to Miss Mitford, that lady rejoins, in a letter of May 28th: "After all, to be English, with our boundless vistas in verse and in prose, is a privilege and a glory; and you are born amongst those who make it such, be sure of that. I do not believe, my sweetest, that the very highest poetry does sell at once. Look at Wordsworth! The hour will arrive, and all the sooner, if to poetry, unmatched in truth and beauty and feeling, you condescend to add story and a happy ending, that being