grow from those seeds, thoughts of you and the great poet may not grow from them besides."
A page or two more of such innocent chatter follows, and would seem to imply that the invalid's case was not deemed so hopeless, at least by herself, as had been imagined. Turning to more personal affairs, Miss Barrett says:—
My beloved father has gone away; he was obliged to go two days ago, and took away with him, I fear, almost as saddened spirits as he left with me. The degree of amendment does not, of course, keep up with the haste of his anxieties. It is not that I am not better, but that he loves me too well; there was the cause of his grief in going, and it is not that I do not think myself better, but that I feel how dearly he loves me; there was the cause of my grief in seeing him go. One misses so the presence of such as dearly love us. His tears fell almost as fast as mine did when we parted, but he is coming back soon—perhaps in a fortnight—so I will not think any more of them, but of that. I never told him of it, of course, but, when I was last so ill, I used to start out of fragments of dreams, broken from all parts of the universe, with the cry from my own lips, "Oh, papa! papa!" I could trace it back to the dream behind, yet there it always was very curiously, and touchingly too, to my own heart, seeming scarcely of me, though it came from me, at once waking me with, and welcoming me to, the old straight humanities. Well! but I do trust I shall not be ill again in his absence, and that it may not last longer than a fortnight.
This exposure of her inmost thoughts is thoroughly characteristic of Elizabeth Barrett: the words not only show what intense affection existed between her and her father, but are representative of that semimesmeric state which illness, confinement, and overstudy appear to have cast her into. Her religion was so real, so intense, so much a part of her existence at this period of her life, that it coloured everything about her and caused, her to regard every incident for good or ill as if it were a direct interposition of the Deity. Seraphim and Cherubim, of whom she had recently
