Of her mere literary style we care to say but little, and still less of her faults. She was essentially a self-taught and self-sustained artist. Her correspondence with Mr. John Kenyon, the poet, did not commence till she was thirty years of age, and consequently she owed less to his influences than some of her critics suppose. Her style is strong and clear, but uneven and abrupt. A sentence or paragraph often limps a little after the hastening thought, and a degree of stiffness is sometimes given by a pet word, coined, or obsolete, or picked up in an old book. It would be absurd to deny that certain characteristics of her poetry withhold it from the many and confine it to the few. The true and eternally grateful notes are struck without show of art or self-conscious ambition. Still, following the rule that she ought to be judged by her best, it must be admitted that she is the rose, the consummate crown, the rarer and stronger and more passionate Sappho of our time.
It must have been about 1835 that Miss Mitford first saw Miss Barrett, and to this period the following portrait in the “Recollections of a Literary Life” doubtless referred:—“My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago. She was certainly one of the most interesting persons I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness, that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the “Prometheus” of Æschylus, the authoress of the “Essay on Mind,” was old enough to be introduced into company; in technical language—was out.” But although not strikingly fair to look upon, her nature was so gentle, and her manners so interesting, that they stood her in the stead of health and beauty.
Mrs. Browning was endowed with the highest imaginative and intellectual qualities. In her poems are passages which admit of being compared with those of the few sovereigns of literature; touches which only the mightiest give. We admire and reverence the breadth and versatility of her genius; no sameness; no one idea; no type character; a woman of great acuteness and originality—one of the prime spirits of this century.