[Illustration: COXHOE HALL, COUNTY OF DURHAM. THE BIRTHPLACE OF MRS. BROWNING.] Dedication _TO MY FATHER_ _When your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time far off when I was a child and wrote verses, and when I dedicated them to you who were my public and my critic. Of all that such a recollection implies of saddest and sweetest to both of us, it would become neither of us to speak before the world, nor would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another, with voices that did not falter. Enough, that what is in my heart when I write thus, will be fully known to yours._ _And my desire is that you, who are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day,--that you, who have shared with me in things bitter and sweet, softening or enhancing them, every day,--that you, who hold with me, over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one Name,--may accept from me the inscription of these volumes, the exponents of a few years of an existence which has been sustained and comforted by you as well as given. Somewhat more faint-hearted than I used to be, it is my fancy thus to seem to return to a visible personal dependence on you, as if indeed I were a child again; to conjure your beloved image between myself and the public, so as to be sure of one smile,--and to satisfy my heart while I sanctify my ambition, by associating with the great pursuit of my life, its tenderest and holiest affection._ _Your_ _E. B. B._ LONDON: 50 WIMPOLE STREET, 1844. PREFACE TO THE FIRST COLLECTED EDITION OF MRS. BROWNING'S POEMS. The collection here offered to the public consists of Poems which have been written in the interim between the period of the publication of my "Seraphim" and the present; variously coloured, or perhaps shadowed, by the life of which they are the natural expression,--and, with the exception of a few contributions to English or American periodicals, are printed now for the first time.