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is preserved to-day an autograph copy of the first volume of Elizabeth
Barrett's poems, published when she was twenty, and containing that
didactic "Essay on Mind" written when she was but seventeen, and of which
she afterward said that it had "a pertness and a pedantry which did not
even then belong to the character of the author," and which she regretted,
she went on to say, "even more than the literary defectiveness." This
volume was presented by her to a member of the Somerset family whose name
is inscribed over that of her own signature.

During these years Hugh Stuart Boyd, the blind scholar, was living in
Great Malvern, and one of Miss Barrett's greatest pleasures was to visit
and read Greek with him. He was never her "tutor," in the literal sense,
as has so widely been asserted, for her study of Greek was made with her
brother Edward, under his tutor, a Mr. MacSweeney; but she read and
talked of Greek literature (especially of the Christian poets) with him,
and she loved to record her indebtedness to him "for many happy hours."
She wrote of him as one "enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and
one of the most simple and upright of human beings." The memory of her
discussions with him is embalmed in her poem, "Wine of Cyprus," which was
addressed to him:

"And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio's turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek."

Elizabeth Barrett was more than a student, however scholarly, of Greek.
She had a temperamental affinity for the Greek poets, and such
translations as hers of "Prometheus Bound" and Bion's "Lament for Adonis,"
identify her with the very life itself of Aeschylus and Bion. In her essay
on "The Greek Christian Poets" we find her saying: "We want the touch of
Christ's hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things ...
Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian
poets,... religious poets of whom the universal church and the world's
literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either."

All her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic
handwriting of her later life. She laughingly professed a theory that "an
immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense,
sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons." She instanced that of
Landor, "who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted hi