Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/22

x fesses, most of the events of her early life and nearlyall her intense pleasures took place.

Save toward one, in her own house, she told Robert Browning long afterward, her sympathies were untrained, and only from the habit of self-consciousness and an intuitional experience backed by books, did she make her "great guesses" at human nature. That one in her own house toward whom she opened her emotions was her brother Edward, a close yoke-fellow in study and in play.

With him, of her own motion, and because she was drawn to Homer through Pope, she read Greek under Mr. MacSwiney, the tutor. He was putting Edward through the usual school allotment of the classics, and in writing of her share in this instruction to Mr. H, S. Boyd she says it was rather "guessing and stammering and tottering through parts of Homer and extracts from Xenophon than reading." She adds that she studied hard by herself afterwards, and that to no other is she so indebted as to Mr. Boyd for the Greek reading in which he assisted her at Malvern. This he did as a friend and Greek enthusiast, pleased with so disinterested an explorer of his specialty, and not professionally as a tutor, although in setting down her gratitude to him again, in a later letter, she accounts him as "in a sense" her "tutor," since no other ever taught her so much. She herself, she says, would have turned to the Greek dramatists, poets, and philosophers by "love and instinct," but the Greek Fathers would have stayed in their tombs for her without him. Such gratitude as this is sufficient sign of her unusual independence. Obviously, from her own and all other reports, her proficiency in Greek was both deeper