Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/29

Rh The fact is comparatively unimportant, and it was apparently not so overwhelming to the finances of the numerous and doubtless expensive Barrett family as the head of it feared it would be; but it is of interest to know what the young poet's point of view concerning it was. Did the mature poet of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," wherein she condemned American slavery so forcibly in the Boston Liberty Bell of 1848, now, in her young womanhood, with some prospect of a personal pinch ahead, look upon Jamaican slavery as more excusable?

Her first mention of it in a letter of May 27, 1833, is in relation to her father's uncertainty as to their future abode. If they did leave Sidmouth, her correspondent knew as well as she whither it would be. If the bill passed, the West Indians were "irreparably ruined," and she quotes her father as saying that, in case it passed, nobody in his senses would think of planting sugar, and the administration might as well sink Jamaica into the sea at once; but she adds, for her own score, that she is more sorry for poor Lord Grey "who is going to ruin us, than for our poor selves who are going to be ruined." Evidently she appreciated the difficulties involved in a good measure having trying consequences. Again, early in September, she writes that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. It is settled, and the consternation here is very great, nevertheless she is glad, and "always shall be," that "the negroes are—virtually—free!"

This gray interlude of life, while her household was experiencing the "Pleasures of Doubt," as she says, following upon the sorrows of her illness, her mother's death, and the removal from the old home,