And if you dig down in the mines You never see Him in the gold; Though, from Him, all that's glory shines.
God is so good, He wears a fold Of heaven and earth across His face-- Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that His embrace Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place.
As if my tender mother laid On my shut lids, her kisses' pressure, Half-waking me at night, and said, "Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?"
Round the young life of Elizabeth Barrett was so much of illness and dreariness, that we have accustomed ourselves to thinking joy came to her only with her marriage, and we forget, often, that her childhood was not unhappy. Few children, it would seem, were ever born with greater promise of a bright life. Her father was wealthy and generous; she had brothers and sisters near her in age and congenial in tastes, and she was, at least, a fairly strong, active child.
She was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, in the county of Durham, and when she was but three years old, her father removed to Hope End, in Herefordshire. The estate which he purchased there was a beautiful one, and the house, with its Turkish windows and Oriental-looking decorations, was most picturesque. That the scenery which surrounded her in her youth made on Elizabeth an impression which remained with her all her life is shown clearly in various passages in her poems:
"Green the land is where my daily Steps in jocund childhood played, Dimpled close with hill and valley, Dappled very close with shade; Summer-snow of apple-blossoms running up from glade to glade."
Of all the brothers and sisters, Elizabeth was her father's favorite, and he encouraged her constantly in her precocious studies and in her childish attempts at composition. Long before she was able to read Homer in the original, she came upon Pope's translation of the _Iliad_, and it took a rare hold upon her. She showed its influence and her own bent toward poetry by composing, before she was fourteen, an epic on the "Battle of Marathon," of which her father, to whom it was dedicated, thought so highly that he had it printed and circulated it among his friends. But she also showed the influence of her beloved _Iliad_ in a much more childish way, of which she has written delightfully in a poem called _Hector in the Garden_. A great flower bed, roughly shaped like a man and bordered about with turf, was made for her, and this she named after Hector, the Trojan hero and her great favorite.