Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/19



When and where Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born were details of her life in dispute some time after her death. The uncertainty betokens the greater interest she attracted as a living personality, within an absorbing present environment of thought and action, than as a mere creature of antecedents. To this dwarfing of preceding facts, doubtless not concealed but simply lost sight of, the conditions of her life in Italy during its last rich fifteen years contributed. Each new day's brightness there outshone the first pale English dawn.

The date and birthplace given by Mrs. Ritchie in the Dictionary of National Biography, like those recorded in various earlier accounts, are incorrect. And one of the first of our poet's biographers, Mr. Ingram, although set right as to date by Robert Browning himself, clung with pertinacity to the idea that a notice, unearthed by him in a contemporaneous newspaper, of the birth of a daughter to Mr. Edward Moulton Barrett, at London, in 1809, must needs refer to Elizabeth, instead of to one of her sisters.

That Elizabeth, the oldest child, was born at Coxhoe Hall, five miles south of Durham, is now estab-