Then its voice subsides in wailing, And, ere the dawning of day, Murmuring fainter and fainter, In the distance dies away. SUSPIRIA NOCTIS Reading, and reading--little is the gain Long dwelling with the minds of dead men leaves. List rather to the melancholy rain, Drop--dropping from the eaves. Still the old tale--how hardly worth the telling! Hark to the wind!--again that mournful sound, That all night long, around this lonely dwelling, Moans like a dying hound. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1809-1861) It is interesting to step back sixty years into the lives of Miss Mitford and her "dear young friend Miss Barrett," when the _-esses_ of "authoresses" and "poetesses" and "editresses" and "hermitesses" make the pages sibilant; when 'Books of Beauty,' and 'Keepsakes,' and the extraordinary methods of "Finden's Tableaux" make us wonder that literature survived; when Mr. Kenyon, taking Miss Mitford "to the giraffes and the Diorama," called for "Miss Barrett, a hermitess in Gloucester Place, who reads Greek as I do French, who has published some translations from Æschylus, and some most striking poems,"--"Our sweet Miss Barrett! to think of virtue and genius is to think of her." Of her own life Mrs. Browning writes:--"As to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good a story; most of my events and nearly all my intense pleasure have passed in my thoughts." [Illustration: Mrs. Browning]