"When some belovèd voice that was to you Both sound and sweetness faileth suddenly, And silence, against which you dare not cry, Aches round you like a strong disease and new,-- What hope? what help? what music will undo That silence to your sense? Not friendship's sigh,-- Not reason's subtle count,--not melody Of viols, nor of pipes that Faunus blew,-- Not songs of poets, nor of nightingales, Whose hearts leap upward through the cypress-trees To the clear moon,--nor yet the spheric laws Self-chanted,--nor the angels' sweet All-hails, Met in the smile of God. Nay, none of these! Speak THOU, availing Christ, and fill this pause!" Thus sang the Muse of a great woman years ago; and now, alas! she, who, with constant suffering of her own, was called upon to grieve often for the loss of near and dear ones, has suddenly gone from among us, "and silence, against which we dare not cry, aches round us like a strong disease and new." Her own beautiful words are our words, the world's words,--and though the tears fall faster and thicker, as we search for all that is left of her in the noble poems which she bequeaths to humanity, there follows the sad consolation in feeling assured that she above all others _felt_ the full value of life, the full value of death, and was prepared to meet her God humbly, yet joyfully, whenever He should claim her for His own. Her life was one long, large-souled, large-hearted prayer for the triumph of Right, Justice, Liberty; and she who lived for others was "poet true, Who died for Beauty, as martyrs do For Truth,--the ends being scarcely two." Beauty _was_ truth with her, the wife, mother, and poet, three in one, and such an earthly trinity as God had never before blessed the world with. This day week, at half-past four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning died. A great invalid from girlhood, owing to an unfortunate accident, Mrs. Browning's life was a prolonged combat with disease thereby engendered; and had not God given her extraordinary vitality of spirit, the frail body could never have borne up against the suffering to which it was doomed. Probably there never was a greater instance of the power of genius over the weakness of the flesh. Confined to her room in the country or city home of her father in England, Elizabeth Barrett developed into the great artist and scholar.