No other handwriting is like hers; it is strong, legible, singularly un-English (that is, not a slanted or running hand), and more like a man’s than a woman’s. THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’ New York: James Miller, 1862. * * * * * [Sidenote: Characteristic fragments from her letters.] More of us, you will admit, do harm by groping along the pavement with blind hands for the beggar’s brass coin, than do folly by clutching at the stars from “the misty mountain-top.” And if the would-be star-catchers catch nothing, they keep at least clean fingers. As to _poetry_, they are all sitting (in mistake), just now, upon Caucasus for Parnassus--and wondering why they don’t see the Muses! It comes to this. If poetry, under any form, be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature be--we are near a blasphemy--I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul. ELIZABETH BARRETT: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Her character sketched by a friend.] I have never seen one more nobly simple, more entirely guiltless of the feminine propensity of talking for effect, more earnest in assertion, more gentle, yet pertinacious in difference, than she was. Like all whose early nurture has chiefly been books, she had a child’s curiosity regarding the life beyond her books, co-existing with opinions accepted as certainties concerning things of which (even with the intuition of genius), she could know little. She was at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument; without any more practical knowledge of social life than a nun might have, when, after long years, she emerged from her cloister and her shroud. HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Her religious faith.] I receive more dogmas, perhaps, than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense--that He was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn’t; in fact, churches, all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING: _Letter to Leigh Hunt_. ‘Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,’ edited by his son. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862. * * * * *