While I am writing of the 'New Quarterly,' I take the liberty of making a remark, not of course in relation to myself--I know too well my duty to my judges--but to your view of the Vantage ground of the poetesses of England. It is a strong impression with me that previous to Joanna Baillie there was no such thing in England as a poetess; and that so far from triumphing over the rest of the world in that particular product, we lay until then under the feet of the world. We hear of a Marie in Brittany who sang songs worthy to be mixed with Chaucer's for true poetic sweetness, and in Italy a Vittoria Colonna sang her noble sonnets. But in England, where is our poetess before Joanna Baillie--poetess in the true sense? Lady Winchilsea had an _eye_, as Wordsworth found out; but the Duchess of Newcastle had more poetry in her--the comparative praise proving the negative position--than Lady Winchilsea. And when you say of the French, that they have only epistolary women and wits, while we have our Lady Mary, why what would Lady Mary be to us _but_ for her letters and her wit? Not a poetess, surely! unless we accept for poetry her graceful _vers de société_.
Do forgive me if an impulse has carried me too far. It has been long 'a fact,' to my view of the matter, that Joanna Baillie is the first female poet in all senses in England; and I fell with the whole weight of fact and theory against the edge of your article.
I recall myself now to my first intention of being simply, but not silently, grateful to you; and entreating you to pardon this letter too quickly to think it necessary-to answer it....
I remain, very truly yours, ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_To Mr. Chorley_ 50 Wimpole Street: January 7, 1845.
Dear Mr. Chorley,--You are very good to deign to answer my impertinences, and not to be disgusted by my defamations of 'the grandmothers,' and (to diminish my perversity in your eyes) I am ready to admit at once that we are generally too apt to run into premature classification--the error of all imperfect knowledge; and into unreasonable exclusiveness--the vice of it. We spoil the shining surface of life by our black lines drawn through and through, as if ominously for a game of the fox and goose. For my part, however imperfect my practice may be, I am intimately convinced--and more and more since my long seclusion--that to live in a house with windows on every side, so as to catch both the morning and evening sunshine, is the best and brightest thing we have to do--to say nothing about the justest and wisest. Sympathies are our opportunities of good.