Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/82

66 because ho had inferred from my 'House of Clouds' that illness had impaired my faculties." Ah! but I hope to do something yet, better than the past. I hope, and shall struggle to it.

I have had a great pleasure lately in some correspondence with Miss Martineau, the noblest female intelligence between the seas, "as sweet as spring, as ocean deep." She is in a hopeless anguish of body, and serene triumph of spirit, with at once no hope and all hope! To hear from her was both a pleasure and honour for me.

It is a gratification to know that this high appreciation of one great-souled woman for another—another, too, in many things so different!—was fully reciprocated, and that shortly after the opinion just cited was given, Harriet Martineau told Edward Moxon she deemed "Miss Barrett the woman of women," and that there was nothing to be likened to her recent two volumes of poems.

Not long after the publication of Chaucer Modernized, in which he was greatly assisted by our poetess, Horne projected a work to be entitled A New Spirit of the Age. The title, if not the theme, was suggested, by Hazlitt's well-known work, and, like that, it was to be a work of criticism, but literary criticism only. "As in the case of Chaucer," says Horne, "the work was to be edited and partly written by myself, and the principal and most valuable of my coadjutors was Miss Barrett. The critique entitled "William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt," he proceeds to tell us, "was written in about equal proportions by Miss Barrett and myself." This was done at first in separate manuscripts, and then each interpolated the work of the other "as the spirit moved." It was written in letters, and some of them of considerable length.

"I believe I am making public for the first time," says Horne, "the fact that the mottoes, which are singularly happy and appropriate, were for the most