Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/86

70 even old Night, it is growing so dark. I live in London, to be sure, and except for the glory of it, I might live in a desert—so profound is my solitude, and so complete my isolation from things and persons without. I lie all day, and day after day, on this sofa, and my windows do not even look into the street. To abuse myself with a vain deceit of rural life, I have had ivy planted in a box—and it has flourished and spread over one window, and strikes against the glass, with a little stroke from the thicker leaves, when the wind blows at all briskly. Then I think of forests and groves. . . It is my triumph, when the leaves strike the window pane. And this is not to sound like a lament. Books and thoughts and dreams (too consciously dreamed, however, for me—the illusion of them has almost passed) and domestic tenderness can and ought to leave nobody lamenting.

To Horne—in reply to his request that she would furnish him with some biographical particulars of herself, for use in his article on her in the New Spirit of the Age—she says:—

So you think that I am in the habit of keeping biographical sketches in my table drawer for the use of hypothetical editors?

Once, indeed, for one year, I kept a diary in detail and largely; and at the end of the twelve months was in such a crisis of self-disgust that there was nothing for me but to leave off the diary. Did you ever try the effect of a diary upon your own mind? It is curious, especially where elastic spirits and fancies are at work upon a fixity of character and situation. . ..

My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak), it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography: you must not allow your kindness for me to place me in a prominency which I have to deserve—and do not yet deserve. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage could have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts.

"For the rest," she adds, "you see that there is nothing to say: it is a blank"; and, considering that up to this time, how little she had done to startle the world, that how few even of her better poems were