[Footnote 4: R.H. Horne, _Letters of E.B. Browning_, i. 158-161.]

So, while the young Robert Browning was enthusiastically declaiming
passages of Pope's Homer, and measuring out heroic couplets with
his hand round the dining table in Camberwell, Elizabeth Barrett was
drinking from the same fount of inspiration among the Malvern Hills,
and was already turning it to account in the production of her first
epic. The fifty copies of the 'Battle of Marathon,' which Mr. Barrett,
proud of his daughter's precocity, insisted on having printed, bear
the date of 1819. Only five of them are now known to exist, and these
are all in private hands; even the British Museum possesses only the
reprint which the hero-worship of the present generation caused to be
produced in 1891. Seven years later, when she had just reached the
age of twenty, her first volume of verse was offered to the world
in general. It was entitled 'An Essay on Mind, and other Poems,' and
included, besides the didactic poem after the manner of Pope which
formed the _pièce de rèsistance_, a number of shorter pieces, several
of which, as she informed Horne,[5] had been written when she was not
more than thirteen.

[Footnote 5: R.H. Horne, _Letters of E.B. Browning_, i. 164.]

It was during the years at Hope End that Elizabeth Barrett was
first attacked by serious illness. 'At fifteen,' she says in her
autobiographical letter, already quoted in part, 'I nearly died;' and
this may be connected with a statement by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to
the effect that 'one day, when Elizabeth was about fifteen, the young
girl, impatient for her ride, tried to saddle her pony alone, in a
field, and fell with the saddle upon her, in some way injuring her
spine so seriously that she was for years upon her back.'[6] The