ut, at all events, Miss Barrett was as naturally a
scholar, in the fullest significance of the term, as she was a poet. This
splendid equipment was a tremendous factor in that splendor of
achievement, and in that universally recognized success, that has made the
name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning immortal in all ages, as the greatest
woman poet the world has ever known.

The professional literary life is a drama in itself,--comedy, or tragedy,
as may be, and usually a mixture of both. It ranges over wide areas of
experience, from that of the author of "Richard Feverel," who is said to
have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of
the luxurious author whose _seances_ with the Muses are decorously
conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and
ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who
now and then condescends to "dictate" a "best seller," is apt to be
surprised by a local photographer. But as a noted educator defined a
University as "a log,--with Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end," so the
"real thing" in a literary career may not inaptly be typified by Louisa
Alcott sitting on the back stairs, writing on an old atlas; and it was
into actualities somewhat like these that Elizabeth Barrett desired to
plunge. The question that she voiced in later years, in "Aurora Leigh,"--

"My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,--or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?"--

this question, in substance, stirred now in her life, and insisted upon
reply. She must, like all real poets, proceed to "hang her verses in the
wind," and watch if perchance there are

"... the five
Which five hundred will survive."

Elizabeth Barrett was of a simplicity that had no affinities with the
_poseur_ in any respect, and she had an inimitable sense of humor that
pervaded all her days. Wit and pathos are, indeed, so closely allied that
it would be hardly possible that the author of the "De Profundis," a poem
that sounds the profoundest depths of the human soul, should not have the
corresponding quality of the swiftest perception of the humorous. It was
somewhere about this time that Poe sent to her a volume of his poems with
an inscription on the