Page:The complete works of Mrs. E. B. Browning (Volume 1).djvu/49

Rh of the poem, beginning distinctly with line 1133, "I love my own dear land," etc., that there is an outbreak of individual poetic expression. The line of thought is no longer limited to the verse, or to the couplet, but overflows the Popian measure, and breathes and pants with the impetus of a sustained personal idea throbbing towards a form of expression more nearly its own.

It is ill differing from the saints in religion or the poets in poetry, Joubert well cautions, and our poet's criticism of herself as well as of other poets is so acute that it may be dangerous not to follow her when she declares that "The Seraphim," despite its shortcomings and obscurities, is "the first utterance of my own individuality." So, as an unfettered whole, it is, doubtless; yet here, on the edge of her "Essay on Mind," is, seemingly, her very first start aside from leading-strings in pursuit of the starry beckonings of her own poetic personality. The life and light and heat of it can be felt at once, stirring brightlier within the ties of the established metre of the piece up to the end.

Among the miscellaneous poems following the "Essay," "Song," "The Dream," "The Vision of Fame," and, among the poems included in the discarded "Prometheus" volume, "The Tempest," and "The Vision of Life and Death" give out fugitive gleams of that contagious ardor mixed with a subtile exaltation of pure spirit, which characterize Elizabeth Barrett Browning as a poet.

Those who take pride in her genius may descry here, in the lowly pasture-lands of the three early volumes she dared to look down upon, the bulge of the ground where the blind roots of the mountains are feeling their way toward the glittering summits.