Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/23

Rh and less exact in small external details—accents among these, be it admitted—than that of most Greek students. She was drawn to the language solely as a means to the contents and artistic stimulation of its literature. Her wide self-culture in other languages,—and Hebrew, German, French, Italian, followed the Greek in due time,—and also in other subjects,—philosophy, political history, above all, poetry and poetics,—was carried on by her at her own sweet will, with the same devouring eagerness to get at the marrow of the knowledge she desired and to leave its bones alone.

In such preoccupations with the past as she began to enjoy, even thus early, present domestic life, she acknowledged afterwards with some misgiving, "only seemed to buzz gently around like the bees." Warm-hearted records of this life of the hive remain, however, in the Juvenilia of 1826, in the verses "To my Brother," and "To my Father on his Birthday." Even these show how at home her heart was in poetry, how prone to make excursions into family incidents the occasion for trial flights of song.

She liked to ride Moses, her black pony, but he was less to her than the Agamemnon of her dreams. Greek gods and heroes clanged their spears, and echoed Homer's haughty phrases in her youngest poetic adventurings. Among these resounding odes and epics, "The Battle of Marathon," written at fourteen, and fifty copies of it printed by her proud father, is the only example of this epoch now extant. It probably best represents its forgotten fellows.

Even childish sports, like flower-bed making, assumed a shape heroic. The gigantic form of "Hector, son of Priam," sprawled visibly in the earth of