[Footnote 90: Her contributions to the essays on Tennyson and Carlyle have recently been printed in Messrs. Nichols and Wise's _Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century_, i. 33, ii. 105.] CHAPTER IV 1844-46 The year 1844 marks an important epoch in the life of Mrs. Browning. It was in this year that, as a result of the publication of her two volumes of 'Poems,' she won her general and popular recognition as a poetess whose rank was with the foremost of living writers. It was six years since she had published a volume of verse; and in the meanwhile she had been gaining strength and literary experience. She had tried her wings in the pages of popular periodicals. She had profited by the criticisms on her earlier work, and by intercourse with men of letters; and though her defects in literary art were by no means purged away, yet the flights of her inspiration were stronger and more assured. The result is that, although the volumes of 1844 do not contain absolutely her best work--no one with the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' in his mind can affirm so much as that--they contain that which has been most generally popular, and which won her the position which for the rest of her life she held in popular estimation among the leaders of English poetry. The principal poem in these two volumes is the 'Drama of Exile.' Of the genesis of this work, Miss Barrett gives the following account in a letter to Home, dated December 28 1843: 'A volume full of manuscripts had been ready for more than a year, when suddenly, a short time ago, when I fancied I had no heavier work than to make copy and corrections, I fell upon a fragment of a sort of masque on "The First Day's Exile from Eden"--or rather it fell upon me, and beset me till I would finish it.'[91] [Footnote 91: _Letters to R.H. Home_, ii. 146.]