James Parton, Horace Greeley, T. W. Higginson, J. S. C. Abbott, E. M. Hoppin, William Winter, Theodore Tilton, Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood, Mrs. E. C. Stanton, Women of the age; being natives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present gentlemen

“This tragedy,” writes her friend, “nearly killed Elizabeth Barrett. She was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural but most unjust feeling that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery . . She told me herself that, during the whole winter, the sounds of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.” The depth of her anguish may be imagined from the fact that, as another friend tells us, when about to be married ten years after, she exacted from her husband a promise never to refer to her brother's death. So prostrated in body was she by this calamity that a year elapsed before she could be removed by slow stages to her father's house in London. There she lived for seven years, confined to a darkened room, at times so feeble that life seemed almost extinct, but struggling against debility and suffering with almost unexampled heroism. There she continued her studies, having a Plato bound like a novel to deceive her physician, who feared that mental application would react injuriously upon her enfeebled frame. There she wrote, while lying on a couch, unable to sit erect, the poem of “Lady Geraldine's courtship” in twelve hours, in order that the volume of her poems to be published in this country might be completed in season to catch the steamer. From that sick chamber went forth poems sufficient in quantity to be the result of industrious application on the part of one in good health. And though these poems bear marks of the peculiar circumstances in which they were written, in a somewhat morbid tone, they show no trace of debility in thought or imagination. Mrs. Browning has written no “In Memoriam” to tell in melodious notes the story of her grief. No direct allusion to it is made, if we mistake not, in her poems. She does not, like most of the poets of her sex, brood plaintively over her woes, and sing over and over again, in slightly