All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me, except by books and my own thoughts; and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank Greek, and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman’s Vision? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighborhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills, they are! And yet, not for the whole world’s beauty, would I stand in the sunshine and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk. From thence we went to Sidmouth for two years; and there I published my translation of Æschylus, which was written in twelve days, and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards--the only means of giving it a little warmth. The next removal was to London.... And then came the failure in my health, which never had been strong (at fifteen I nearly died), and the publication of _The Seraphim_, the only work I care to acknowledge, and then the enforced exile to Torquay, with prophecy in the fear, and grief, and reluctance of it--a dreadful dream of an exile, which gave a nightmare to my life forever, and robbed it of more than I can speak of here; do not speak of that anywhere. _Do not speak of that_, dear Mr. Horne; and for the rest, you see that there is nothing to say. It is “a blank, my lord.” ELIZABETH BARRETT: _Letter to R. H. Horne_, 1843. ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877. * * * * * [Sidenote: Early friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd.] Among her friends at this time [1826] and for years afterward--in fact, until his death in 1848--was Hugh Stuart Boyd, favorably known by his translations from the Greek.... They read their favorite authors together, or, rather, the young student read to her old master, for he was blind. A reminiscence of the happy hours they passed together, communing with the mighty minds of old, may be found in Mrs. Browning’s beautiful poem, ‘Wine of Cyprus,’ dedicated to Mr. Boyd, to whom she was indebted for her knowledge of that dainty vintage. “I think of those long mornings Which my thought goes far to seek, When, betwixt the folio’s turnings, Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek. Past the pane the mountain spreading Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise, While a girlish voice was reading, Somewhat low for ai’s and oi’s.”