this possible venture. Meanwhile Miss Barrett's
poems won success past her "expectation or hope. _Blackwood's_ high help
was much," she writes, "and I continue to have the kindest letters from
unknown readers.... The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred
copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in
sackcloth."

In another of her letters to Mr. Horne we read that Wordsworth is in a
fever because of a projected railroad through the Lake Country, and that
Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau "quite mad," because of her belief in
Mesmerism. "For my own part," adds Miss Barrett, "I am not afraid to say
that I almost believe in Mesmerism, and quite believe in Harriet
Martineau." She is delighted that Horne's "Orion" is to be published in
New York. "I love the Americans," she asserts, "a noble and cordial
people."

Miss Barrett remained for three years in Torquay, the climate being
regarded as better for her health. But the tragedy of her life took place
there in the drowning of her brother Edward, who went out one day with two
friends in a boat and never returned. Three days later the boat was found
floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were
recovered. This sad event occurred in the August of 1840, and it was more
than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her
correspondence. In the September of 1841 she returned to London, and in a
letter to Mr. Boyd soon after she replied to his references to Gregory as
a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand _De
Virginitate_, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in
prose.

Miss Barrett's delicacy of health through all these years has been so
universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated)
that it needs no more than passing allusion here. So far as possible she
herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with,
yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a
far greater degree than has usually been realized. "My time goes to the
best music when I read or write," she says, "and whatever money I can
spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books."

Elizabeth Barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends,
and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal
life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests
of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with