Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/21

Rh she was born, and early in 1809 her father bought the country-seat in Herefordshire called Hope End.

It is the "first holy poet-ground" of England, therefore, the beautiful Malvern Hills, the hills of Piers Plowman's Visions, the heights of Langland's early dream of an ideally humane and regenerated society, that may be associated happily and most fitly with the dewy impressions of the growing girl whose ethical fervor and large-minded political interests were destined to animate her poetic expression with a potency as peculiarly vital and exalted as that inherent in her lovely lyrical creative gift. She herself said that the hills which "loom a-row, keepers of Piers Plowman's Visions through the sunshine and the snow," always seemed to her to be her native earth, because, although she was born in Durham county, she came as an infant to the Malvern neighborhood and lived there till past twenty.

At eight and earlier she wrote verses, her susceptible fancy speedily turning into a will, and making poetry, as she puts it, "an object to read, think, and live for." Into the eager craving of her spirit to be and to see as an artist, from the first she poured in a concentrating stream all the random flowings of her sense-impressions.

During her child-life she was exuberantly well and active. The delights of a healthy and sensitive nature in the out-of-doors world; her congenital precocious hungering for books, books, books; and her daily family relationships—surely anything but meagre with one who rejoiced in two sisters and eight brothers—were all lavished upon the inner being. She became rather the resultant of such outside influences than their absorbed enjoyer. In her thoughts, she con-