read, think, and live for."

When she was eleven or twelve, she amused herself by writing a great epic
in four books, called "The Battle of Marathon," which possessed her fancy.
Her father took great pride in this, and, "bent upon spoiling me," she
laughingly said in later years, had fifty copies of this childish
achievement printed, and there is one in the British Museum library
to-day. No creator of prose romance could invent more curious coincidences
than those of the similar trend of fancy that is seen between the
childhood of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Her "Battle of
Marathon" revealed how the Greek stories enchanted her fancy, and how
sensitive was her ear in the imitation of the rhythm caught from Pope.
This led her to the delighted study of Greek, that she might read its
records at first hand; and Greek drew her into Latin, and from this
atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to
the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her
interest in thought and dream. The idyllic solitude in which she lived
fostered all these mental excursions. "I had my fits of Pope and Byron and
Coleridge," she has related, "and read Greek as hard under the trees as
some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the
dramatists, and ate and drank Greek.... Do you know the Malvern Hills? The
Hills of Piers Plowman's Visions? They seem to me my native hills.
Beautiful, beautiful they were, and I lived among them till I had passed
twenty by several years."

Mr. Moulton-Barrett was one of the earliest of social reformers. So much
has been said, and, alas! with too much justice, it must be conceded, of
his eccentric tyranny, his monomania,--for it amounted to that, in
relation to the marriage of any of his children regarding which his
refusal was insanely irrational,--that it is pleasant to study him for a
moment in his more normal life. In Ledbury, the nearest village, he would
hold meetings for the untaught people, read and pray with them, and this
at a period when for a man of wealth to concern himself in social
betterment was almost unknown. He was truly "the friend of the unfriended
poor," and by his side, with wondering, upturned, childish eyes, was the
little Elizabeth, an ardent and sympathetic companion. Until quite
recently there were still living those who remembered Mr. Barrett as this
intelligent and active helper; and in the parish church i