t had rejected, "rather for
its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit,"
she concludes; and "Ion," which she finds beautiful morally rather than
intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power,
passion, and condensation. Reading Combe's "Phrenology," she refers to his
theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If
this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, "for my pulse is
in a continual flutter," she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd that the
line

"One making one in strong compass"

in "The Poet's Vow," which he found incomprehensible, really means that
"the oneness of God, 'in Whom are all things,' produces a oneness, or
sympathy, with all things. The unity of God preserves a unity in man."

All in all, Miss Barrett is coming to enjoy her London life. There was
the Royal Academy, "and real live poets, with their heads full of the
trees and birds, and sunshine of Paradise"; and she has "stood face to
face with Wordsworth and Landor"; Miss Mitford has become a dear friend,
but she visits London only at intervals, as she lives--shades of benighted
days!--thirty miles from London. A twentieth century residence across the
continent could hardly seem more remote.

The removal to Wimpole Street was decided upon, and to that house (No.
50), gloomy or the reverse, the Barretts migrated. Miss Barrett's new
book, under the title of "The Seraphim and Other Poems," was published,
marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own
name. "I feel very nervous about it," she said; "far more than I did when
my 'Prometheus' crept out of the Greek."

Mr. Kenyon was about to go to Rydal Mount on a visit to Wordsworth, and
Miss Barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of
myrtle or geranium, and send to her--two, that she may be sure of saving
one.

Autographs had value in those days, and in a note to Mr. Bray Miss Barrett
alludes to one of Shakespeare's that had been sold for a hundred pounds
and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own Shakespearean
autograph.

A new poetic era had dawned about the time that "The Seraphim" appeared.
Tennyson had written "Audley Court," and was beginning to be known in
America, owing this first introduction to Emerson, who visited Landor in
Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing
house of C. C. Little and Company (now Li