her
devoted father. And it is to this father's devotion that some of Mrs.
Browning's poetical sins are due; for by him she was so pampered and
shielded from every outside touch, that all the woes common to humanity
grew for her into awful tragedies. Her life was abnormal and unreal,--an
unreality that passed more or less into everything she did. Indeed, her
resuscitation after meeting Robert Browning would mount into a miracle,
unless it were realized that nothing in her former life had been quite
as woful as it seemed. That Mrs. Browning was "a woman of real genius,"
even Edward Fitzgerald allowed; and in speaking of Shelley, Walter
Savage Landor said, "With the exception of Burns, he [Shelley] and Keats
were inspired with a stronger spirit of poetry than any other poet since
Milton. I sometimes fancy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning comes next."
This is very high praise from very high authority, but none too high for
Mrs. Browning, for her best work has the true lyric ring, that
spontaneity of thought and expression which comes when the singer
forgets himself in his song and becomes tuneful under the stress of the
moment's inspiration. All of Mrs. Browning's work is buoyed up by her
luxurious and overflowing imagination. With all its imperfections of
technique, its lapses of taste and faults of expression, it always
remains poetry, throbbing with passion and emotion and rich in color and
sound. She wrote because she must. Her own assertions notwithstanding,
one cannot think of Mrs. Browning as sitting down in cold blood to
compose a poem according to fixed rules of art. This is the secret of
her shortcomings, as it is also the source of her strength, and in her
best work raises her high above those who, with more technical skill,
have less of the true poet's divine fire and overflowing imagination.

So in the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,' written at a time when her
woman's nature was thrilled to its very depths by the love of her "most
gracious singer of high poems," and put forth as translations from
another writer and tongue--in these her imperfections drop away, and she
soars to marvelous heights of song. Such a lyric outburst as this, which
reveals with magnificent frankness the innermost secrets of an ardently
loving woman's heart, is unequaled in literature. Here the woman-poet is
strong and sane; here she is free from obscurity and mannerism, and from
grotesque rhymes. She has stepped out from her life of visio