Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/66

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

beat you all—you and Napoleon and all—in ambition; but now I only want to get home."

"I only want to get home!" such had been the burden of Elizabeth Barrett's wishes from month to month; and at last, late in the summer of 1841, she was conveyed to her father's residence in Wimpole Street in safety. All that is known of the journey is told by Miss Mitford—a very imaginative person, be it remembered, in some things. "My beloved Miss Barrett," she says, "accomplished the journey by stages of twenty-five miles a-day in one of the invalide carriages, where the bed is drawn out like a drawer from a table." She had not been home many days before Miss Mitford travelled up to London to visit her, and remarks—"I found her better than I dared to hope."