was brightened for her by her joy in the sea at green and bowery Sidmouth, and the return to health it brought her, and also by the appearance of her third book, the first version of the "Prometheus Bound" of Æschylus. It was struck into too rapid English at Sidmouth in twelve days, as she afterwards told Mr. Horne, "and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards, the only way to give it a little warmth." With it were published the miscellaneous poems appearing in the present edition under the title, "Poems, 1833."[1]
The needs and conveniences of her brothers' future careers dictated a removal to 74 Gloucester Place, London, in the summer of 1835. She tells Mrs. Martin, gayly and pluckily as usual, how she is trying, while longing for the sea, to change her taste and her
- ↑ To this Sidmouth interval, or earlier still, belongs, if it belongs anywhere, a time spent in France, according to Mr. Ingram, where, he says, she pursued her studies and "contracted at least one strong friendship." But apart from a conjecture, also of Mr. Ingram's, that the verses in the volume of 1833 addressed "To Victoire on her Marriage" refer to a French girl she met in Paris, there is no evidence of such a sojourn in France, and there is some evidence against it in a letter she wrote in 1838 to Mr. John Kenyon. She speaks in it of a friend (Miss Thomson), who has been in Paris, and then, with lively metaphor, she compares England's barbaric pride in its old-time conventions, its nose rings and tattooing, with the thinner rind and livelier sap she attributes to life on the continent. "That," she says, she can see "in the books and the traditions," and hence can understand people who like living in France and Germany: and she believes she should like it herself. It is not easy to believe that a discrimination so alert as hers would not have added more direct observations if she had had any such even small chance, as Mr. Ingram asserts, to make any at first-hand. Again writing, in 1845, to Robert Browning of the signal disadvantages she labored under in her art through her seclusion in the country and ignorance of aught but books, she calls herself a "blind poet," since her "brothers and sisters of the earth were names" to her, and she "had beheld no great mountain or river, nothing, in fact." Travel, even across the channel, then, seems unlikely; and as for "Victoire," may she not have been known through either Miss Thomson or Mrs. Martin, both of them friends whose travels she could make something of by proxy?
