"And after all that has been said and mused upon the anxiety experienced by the true artist,--is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil? For my part I sometimes wonder how, without such an object and purpose of life, people contrive to live at all."
And her idea of happiness "lies deep in poetry and its associations." And he replies that what he has printed "gives no knowledge of me," and that he has never begun what he hopes he was born to begin and end--"R. B. a poem."
"Do you know Tennyson?" she asks, "that is, with a face to face knowledge? I have great admiration for him," she continues. "In execution he is exquisite,--and in music a most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine airs." And she asks if he knows what it is to covet his neighbor's poetry,--not his fame, but his poetry. It delights her to hear of his garden full of roses and his soul full of comforts. She finds the conception of his Pippa "most exquisite, and altogether original."
In one of Miss Barrett's letters a few weeks later there seems discernible a forecast of "Aurora Leigh," when she writes that her chief intention is the writing "of a sort of novel-poem," and one "as completely modern as 'Geraldine's Courtship,' running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into drawing-rooms and the like 'where angels fear to tread'; and so meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and speaking the truth, as I conceive of it, out plainly." She is waiting for a story; she will not take one, because she likes to make her own. Here is without doubt the first conception of "Aurora Leigh."
Touching on Life in another letter, she records her feeling that "the brightest place in the house is the leaning out of the window."
Browning replies: "And pray you not to lean out of the window when my own foot is only on the stair."...
"But I did not mean to strike a tragic chord," she replies; "indeed I did not. As to 'escaping with my life,' it was just a phrase ... for the rest I am essentially better ... and feel as if it were intended for me to live and not to die." And referring to a passage relating to Prometheus she asks: "And tell me, if Æschylus is not the divinest of all the divine Greek souls?" She continues: