Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/85

Rh be, a clearer, more condensed, and more impartially worded critique on a fellow author than one on Miss Mitford by Elizabeth Barrett, sent to the editor of The New Spirit of the Age.

In the course of their correspondence anent the various personages to be introduced in the projected work Horne had desired his fair contributor to write on one side only of her paper and to leave wide margins to her manuscript, in order, evidently, to permit of his alterations and annotations. She replied: "Very well! I will be good as I am fair—i.e. by courtesy. And I will be very courteous to your right honourable printers, who can't be at the trouble to turn over a leaf or read from anything except large paper, and an inch of margin on each side! Very well, they shall have their will—although, to be sure, I have been in the habit of writing for the press on the ordinary long note paper, and on both sides the page, and never heard a printer's murmur." In her postscript she says, How I do go on in the dark!' To be sure I do. The dark, you know, is my particular province—even without the political economy. That would have made me a Princess of Darkness."

Miss Barrett's allusion to the darkness will be more readily comprehended, when it is known that after the return to London she lived in a large darkened chamber whence, for some years, she never went further than the bed-room adjoining. She makes frequent allusions to this solitary confinement in her poems and, occasionally, in her correspondence, as in the following letter to a fellow poet:—

I am thinking—lifting up my pen—what I can write which is likely to be interesting to you. After all I come to chaos and silence, and