ELIZABETH B. BROWNING

I have been in the meadows all the day,
And gathered there the nosegay that you see;
Singing within myself as bird or bee
When such do fieldwork on a morn of May.
_Irreparableness_

[Illustration: ELIZABETH B. BROWNING]


Writers of biography usually begin their preachments with the rather
startling statement, "The subject of this memoir was born"----Here follows
a date, the name of the place and a cheerful little Mrs. Gamp anecdote:
this as preliminary to "launching forth."

It was the merry Andrew Lang, I believe, who filed a general protest
against these machine-made biographies, pleading that it was perfectly
safe to assume the man was born; and as for the time and place it mattered
little. But the merry man was wrong, for Time and Place are often masters
of Fate.

For myself, I rather like the good old-fashioned way of beginning at the
beginning. But I will not tell where and when Elizabeth was born, for I do
not know. And I am quite sure that her husband did not know. The
encyclopedias waver between London and Herefordshire, just according as