Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/28

xvi Everybody prominently associates illness now with her, but it properly should seem to be no essential part of her real self, and it was not ushered in until she was fifteen. It came with a violence of which she nearly died, yet it was a slow foe afterwards, as if reluctant to crush so bright and dauntless a soul. According to all accounts it was traceable to an over-strain connected in some dim way with an impatient attempt she made to saddle her pony in the field herself. Her son, Mr. R. Barrett Browning, says that the injury she then received was not due to a fall, as the story of it goes, related by Mrs. Ritchie, but to a strain sustained in tightening the saddle-girths. Wherever the root of the difficulty lay, "the strong leaping of the stag-like heart awake," which, in "The Lost Bower," she herself tells us was apt to find the pale too low "for keeping in the road it ought to take," was disciplined now into a cruel quiet. It was held in leash henceforth by a gradual weakening of lungs and nervous force which never entirely released its grasp. The volume of 1826 followed the illness, however, and showed no pause in the leading and the light her constant mind held in view.

With the death of her mother, Oct. 1, 1828, the Malvern period of her life drew near its close, sadly, and four years later it was cut short by the sale of Hope End.

The diminution in the household scale of living indicated by this sale, and the removal in 1830 to a temporary home by the sea in Sidmouth, Devonshire, was probably a result of the agitation of the bill for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. Two references to it in Elizabeth's letters to Mrs. Martin, a Malvern neighbor and family friend, make it about certain.