Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/69

Rh richness and verbal picturesqueness of English prose in competent hands.

In the preceding October, Miss Barrett had published in the Athenæum, to which she was a frequent contributor, some charming, characteristic lines, entitled, "Lessons from the Gorse," and in many ways displayed increased literary activity. With reviving health her energies appeared to revive; and although she suffered much during the short frost which ushered in the early winter of 1811, she recovered quickly. Her correspondence with literary people increased and, at rare intervals, friends were admitted into the darkened chamber in which she passed her time. She was, indeed, much better now that she had left behind the terrible, suggestive sound of the never-silent sea, and had regained the calm seclusion of home. She wrote continually, and read and studied unceasingly. Without these occupations for her mind, it has been suggested, she never could have lived. Her medical attendant did not comprehend this phase of her constitution, and remonstrated with her on her close application to her favourite Greek authors. To save herself from his diatribes she had a small edition of Plato bound up to resemble a novel.

Writing to Horne on the subject of her varied reading, Elizabeth Barrett says:—

So you think I never read Fonblanque or Sydney Smith—or Junius, perhaps? Mr. Kenyon calls me his "omnivorous cousin." I read without principle. I have a sort of unity, indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting—do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldean—and the Greek poets, and Plato, right through from end to end—I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the