iately
afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth." Combined with a
few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in 1832,
and received from the _Athenaeum_ the edifying verdict that "those who
adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any
one rather than Aeschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before
us."

The quiet life at Sidmouth goes on,--goes on, in fact, for three
years,--and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. "I like the
greenness and the tranquillity and the sea," she writes to a friend.
"Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow
of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in
the country. The grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning
to have anything to do with the earth...."

In the summer of 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth for London, locating at
first in Gloucester Place (No. 74) where they remained for three years.
Hugh Stuart Boyd had, in the meantime, removed to St. John's Wood; Mr.
Kenyon and Miss Mitford became frequent visitors. Miss Barrett's literary
activity was stimulated by London life, and she began contributing to a
number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more
voluminous. To Mr. Boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in London:

"As George is going to do what I am afraid I shall not be able to do
to-day,--to visit you,--he must take with him a few lines from me, to
say how glad I am to feel myself again only at a short distance from
you; and gladder I shall be when the same room holds both of us. But I
cannot open the window and fly.... How much you will have to say to me
about the Greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the Romans.
If you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my
being turned out of your doors. Such is my prophecy.

"Papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on Mrs. Hemans's
death. I had a presentiment that you would...."

If the classic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted Mr. Boyd to feel
the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find
some compensation for not being great classicists. It is in this poem that
the lines occur,--

"Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet's fire, for anguish of the burning?

* * *