among the first performances of the kind; but, from the abruptness and dryness of the style, it never became very popular. In 1800 Browne again left England, and spent three years in visiting Greece, some parts of Asia Minor, and Sicily. In 1812 he set out on a more extensive journey, proposing to penetrate to Samarkand, and survey the most interesting regions of Central Asia. He spent the winter in Smyrna, and in the spring of 1813 proceeded through Asia Minor and Armenia, made a short stay at Erzeroum, and arrived on the 1st of June at Tabriz, where he met Sir Gore Ouseley. About the end of the summer of 1813 he left Tabriz for Teheran, intending to proceed thence into Tartary; but unhappily he never reached that destination. Near the banks of the Kizil-Ouzen his party were attacked by banditti, and, according to the report of the survivors, Browne was plundered and murdered. Suspicion attached to his companions, and even to the Persian Government, but nothing occurred to confirm these surmises. Some bones, believed to be his, were afterwards found and interred near the grave of Thevenot, the celebrated French traveller. His volume of travels in Africa has already been mentioned. Robert Walpole published in the second volume of his Memoirs relating to European and Asiatic Turkey (4to, 1820), from papers left by Browne, the account of his journey in 1802 through Asia Minor to Antioch and Cyprus; also "Remarks written at Constantinople."
BROWNING, Elizabeth Barrett, the most distinguished poet of her sex that England has produced, was born in London in the year 1809. She was the daughter of Mr Barrett, an English country gentleman. From a very early age, almost before the years of childhood had passed, she exhibited a remarkable preference for the arts, but especially that of the poetic. Previous to attaining her fifteenth year she had written verse upon which was the stamp of true genius—poems eminently worthy of preservation. Whatever she wrote, however, was sacred to all eyes save those of her father, to whom she refers in the first collected edition of her poems as "my public and my critic." Her physical constitution was most fragile and delicate, but nature seemed to have supplemented her deficiency in this respect by bestowing upon her an unusually sensitive mental and spiritual organization. One who knew her intimately, Miss Mitford, has described her as a "slight delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on each side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, and a smile like a sunbeam." All descriptions of Miss Barrett concur in this, that she possessed a grace and a delicacy which defied representation by the artist. Her studies were early directed to the poets of antiquity, and, under the guidance of her blind tutor, Boyd, whose name she always warmly cherished, she mastered the rich treasures of Æschylus. The sublime Grecian possessed for her a charm which was only equalled by the fascination held over her wondering spirit by our own Shakespeare. Her knowledge of Greek literature was most profound; she was intimately familiar with all the Attic writers in tragedy and comedy. Yet this did not prevent her from drinking at the wells of English undefiled. Her correspondence with eminent contemporaries of both sexes proves her to have been thoroughly acquainted with English literature in its progress from Chaucer downwards. The circumstances of her own life, and her lack of robust health, conspired to make her seek, even more than she might have otherwise done, the communion of the great departed in arts and letters. Not being able to pass from place to place without fatigue and danger, the solitude she was compelled to maintain probably threw her still more ardently into those pursuits which, while dear to the mind, were probably injurious to the body. Most frail from her birth, as we have already seen, it was her misfortune further to have her existence endangered in 1837 by the bursting of a blood-vessel in the lungs. By the exercise of extreme care her life was preserved, but the incident was succeeded by a long period of weakness and suffering. Some two years after this first severe shock to her system, and before she had quite recovered from its effects, she was again assailed by misfortune, experiencing the keenest anguish on witnessing the death of her favourite brother, who was drowned at Torquay. As might have been expected from one of her clinging and affectionate disposition, a long period of danger followed this catastrophe, and when at length she was able to be removed to her father's house, it was only to become an invalid, with the prospect of a life couch-ridden to its close. This period of seclusion lasted for seven long years; and the interval was employed by Miss Barrett in eagerly devouring all the books which could be brought within her reach. At this time also she was sedulously cultivating the art that was afterwards to ensure for her immortality. When she was in her thirty-seventh year, that is, in 1846, she was married to Mr Browning, and the union was singularly felicitous. More cannot be said, as the author of The Ring and the Book still lives. Mr Browning bore his wife to Italy, and for some years the sunny skies of the south were instrumental in giving to Mrs Barrett Browning that health which had so long forsaken her in her native land. The villa of the Brownings in Florence was the resort of many noble spirits, eminent either for patriotism or in the arts. Mrs Browning died at Florence in the year 1861, after testifying in many ways her singular devotion to the country of her adoption.
The poetry of this writer is distinguished for its emotional spirit; had her imagination equalled her capacity for feeling she might have taken rank with the highest of our poets. Sensibility and intuition, those endowments of supreme importance to writers of genius, whose greatness is to grow in proportion to their understanding and interpretation of human life, were in her united in a degree seldom witnessed. The aspirations she indulged, and the character she doubtless wished to be impressed upon her own works, were well set forth when she observed on one occasion, "we want the touch of Christ's hand upon our literature as it touched other dead things; we want the sense of the saturation of Christ's blood upon the souls of our poets, that it may cry through them in answer to the ceaseless wail of the sphinx of our humanity, expounding agony into renovation. Something of this has been perceived in art when its glory was at the fullest. Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets, something which would have been much with a stronger faculty." Imbued fully with this idea of the sacredness of poetry, Mrs Browning went to the deepest fount of all inspiration—the human heart—and endeavoured to read clearly its intimate relations with God. A peculiar tenderness breathes through her writings, whether of the humblest or the most ambitious description. Almost her first work bore upon it the traces of her Greek studies, being an excellent translation of the Prometheus. Another very early production, The Drama of Exile, is unquestionably marked by great sublimity of thought, though the conception may lack the mighty outlines of the majestic Milton. Eloquent and sustained, however, the poem made manifest a pure and original writer. Mrs Browning's genius had two sides—the lyric and the dramatic. Her lyrical capabilities were of the highest order; she was greater probably in this particular than either Campbell or Tennyson, though on several occasions Campbell touched the loftiest point such a writer can attain. The heart, which has always given our lyric poets their greatest power, was the strength of Mrs Browning; her song was a living
