[In the following excerpt, Blainey explores Horne's epic poem Orion, its plot, the unique requirements for its purchase, and its reception.]

A year later Horne would feel exhausted and written out; for the present that unusual poetic facility which had produced his religious epic continued undimmed. If anything, it glowed more brightly. He had finished “Ancient Idols” on the twentieth day of July 1842, a day he felt sufficiently important to record exactly for posterity; and for four months thereafter he picked at desultory literary tasks—petty journalism, the reconstruction of some Jacobean plays, the revision of educational tales Mary was writing for children. In November, however, his aimless scribblings began to form themselves into order, and produce the plan of another poem; an epic like the last and concerned with a struggle hardly less important and personal.

Like its predecessor, its most likely sources were those absorbing conversations with the Hunts and Leonhard Schmitz on poetry, philosophy and persecution. For his new epic was almost certainly based on ideas from the German philosopher Hegel, and one assumes that it must have been through Schmitz, or possibly Thornton Hunt's friend George Henry Lewes, a German scholar and amateur philosopher, that Horne first encountered Hegel's work. It would seem to have been Hegel's celebrated theory of history—the Hegelian dialectic—involving two contradictory stages reacting against one another, followed by a third reconciling the best in both—that ignited the poetic spark in Horne that November. Suddenly he saw anew those contradictory energies that had plagued him since he knew he was a poet, and never more than in the fact-ridden eighteen-forties. In the light of the Hegelian interpretation, the divided forces in his nature and in the society around him—the poet against the man, imagination and thought against action and the senses—were not, as he had always presumed, engaged in a destructive and perpetual struggle but part of a process of human development. Their reconcilement was inevitable and essential: a law of human progress. He need no longer deny the man within himself: the man was as necessary as the poet. The effect of such a discovery on one as deeply implicated in that struggle as Horne can be imagined. It was a revelation comparable with that other religious revelation which had inspired “Ancient Idols”, its inspiration, if anything, more effective. Many times in the next ten years he would write on the dialectical unity of art and life, but never as well as in that winter and spring of 1843.

He used as vehicle for his complicated theme the old Greek star myth of Orion, a choice inspired by a vision which had haunted him for years, first come upon in Hazlitt's description of a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the seventeenth-century French painter beloved of the Cockney Romantics. Hazlitt had called it ‘Blind Orion hungering for the Dawn’. Horne's reaction to the painting had been no less enthusiastic than Hazlitt's, his fascination with mutilation and his adoration for Hazlitt reinforcing his aesthetic appreciation. The giant hunter, beloved of the Moon, blinded for loving a mortal and now in search of sight, his great arms outstretched and groping, remained a vivid impression in his memory for almost twenty years, to be mentioned several times in his writings. Now combining and altering the fragments of myth concerning Orion in Homer and Ovid, he and Schmitz produced a coherent tale containing the symbolic machinery to express his message and one, in addition, impregnated with personal feeling.

Few of Horne's poems are so unrestrainedly or consciously autobiographical. His hero is so clearly a self-portrait: the ‘physical man’, awakened to the ‘noble dreams’ of genius, and dedicated ‘to be and to do … feeling and acting nobly for the service of the world’; a man, moreover, torn by his ‘duality of nature’, and the perpetual ‘struggle between the intellect and the senses when both energies are powerfully balanced’. His hero's experiences, too, are so clearly their author's own: Orion's first love for cold chaste Artemis, deriving, one cannot doubt, from Horne's own love for A., even to its destructive aftermath; and his last love with Eos, the goddess of the Dawn—the ‘perfect’ and ‘intense sympathy’ that resolves his inner contradictions—springing almost certainly from the relationship with Mary Gillies.

Horne believed his new epic was a hopeful poem, dedicated to that idea that conflict and eventual reconciliation led to progress, that a life balanced between thought and action and between the spirit and the senses was desirable and possible. Certainly Orion is more serene than the previous epic. The tone is less tortured: the verse soars with ease and grace. Nevertheless, though he advocated the right of all men to normal happiness, he could not dispel the belief that genius must suffer. (And curiously, just as in Hegel he found the intellectual justification for developing the man as well as the poet, he also found in Hegel a theory similar to his own, of the poet's inevitable martyrdom.) So Orion must be punished: rejected sexually by his first lover and blinded (in a scene recalling the mutilated doll of Horne's childhood) for daring to love his second. Through blindness and pain he must find purification and truth. But even then he cannot be left in peace. Restored to sight and insight by his last, reconciling love, he must still be snatched from happiness to martyrdom. Only when dead and raised to the stars can Orion enjoy either happiness or reward: the reward of inspiring mankind to progress. The conclusion is not comforting. The only consolation of Genius is fame after death:

Yet lives he not in vain; for if his soul
Hath entered others, though imperfectly,
That circle widens as the world spins round—
His soul works on while he sleeps 'neath the grass.

By April 1843 he had produced a draft of the poem. Then came troubles that might have dampened energy and creative powers less inflamed than his. He fell ill with a liver complaint which persisted for months, inflicting weakness and vexation in the midst of his greatest triumph. Suffering miserably, he took off for Brighton to join his mother on one of her frequent seaside holidays in the hope that the sea air might invigorate his body and his poetic skill. Early in May he wrote to Leigh Hunt from Brighton, telling him that he had almost forgotten his ill health in ‘the pleasant toils of paternity’. He had adopted, he went on, almost all Hunt's suggestions for revision of the new poem, and he hoped to publish it within a few weeks. To Elizabeth Barrett he wrote from New Broad Street on May 26 to apologize for his silence: he had been so busy and wretchedly unwell. She must watch the literary advertisements next day for advice of his new poem, adding she might be in for a surprise and would think him mad.

Horne had returned from Brighton with a plan which he believed would set literary London by its ears. He had always had definite and unorthodox ideas on literary publicity; often in those months when he edited The Monthly Repository he had delivered attacks on the bad publicising of a recent book. His own personal publicity of late also caused him much disquiet. He was becoming, he suddenly realized, universally unpopular. He must adopt a new public role, stand aloof no longer in self-satisfied isolation and complaint, assume forbearance and hopeful attitudes and cultivate influential friends. He must make ‘a personal impression on contemporaries’. He determined to act drastically. At first he considered giving his poem away, but he was reluctant to see his beloved poem end as waste paper. At last, revealing a surprisingly shrewd sense of the exotic and its effect on mass psychology, he drew up a set of most unusual conditions of sale. It would be, he argued, ‘an experiment on the mind of a nation’, as well as a most satisfying way of placing himself in the public eye and at the same time affirming his contempt of public response. He proposed to sell the poem at a farthing a copy, selling no more than one copy to each buyer, and selling no copy to anyone mispronouncing its title. His plan he justified excitedly and with rather self conscious satisfaction:

36 New Broad St.

June 3/43

My dear Hunt,

I am greatly pleased at receiving your cordial note ‘to the tune of’ Orion. I thought the price would amuse you, and it has. You are aware that it is no hoax, no joke? Anybody who ought to have the poem can buy it for a farthing. The proof that he ‘ought’, which I have directed the Publisher to require, is that the applicant should have a good face and proper accent. A man with a horse-nose and boar's mouth who asked for ‘Horion’ would certainly not obtain it. And very rightly not, I think. The book is refused, in numbers, to the ‘trade’ and to ‘unlikely’ messengers; and no friend can obtain two copies for his halfpenny. Other things I have ‘ordained’ as check to rapacity. You see, this was necessary, for as the poem is published at less than the price of waste paper I had to protect myself from people sending five shillings and a sack, with an eye to trunks and pie-bottom. But, as I said, any proper person can have a copy for a farthing.*

I am, dear Hunt,

Yours truly,

R. H. Horne.

* A peculiar mode of expressing my idea of public taste.

He was right when he believed it would shake literary society to its foundations. Even Horne was unprepared for the furore that followed. Everyone he knew—and many, he complained, he did not—seemed to be affected strongly by the release of the poem. The sales were phenomenal. The poem appeared at the beginning of June: by the start of the third week the first two editions of 500 copies each were sold and a third edition was coming from the presses. Miller, the bookseller and publisher, was nearly torn to pieces and inundated with written orders which Horne now agreed to sanction. The price went up and still the sales went on as extraordinarily as ever. By the fourth edition in July it was a shilling, with ninepence for postage, and Miller was still selling, by Horne's estimation, between twenty-five and thirty copies a day. By the sixth edition at the end of the year the price was half a crown and still it sold. It had become a fashionable rage. References to it in conversation needed no explanation. Apocryphal stories circulated about it; the favourite one of W. J. Fox told of the small boy who went into Miller's to ask for ‘a pennorth’ of epics.

Down at the bookshop, a journalist Horne would later know in Australia, James Hingston, recorded the confusion and excitement and the figure of Horne, taking notes on the customers—short, beringletted, every inch the poet, ‘romantic, restless, adventurous’. Horne's friends were incredulous, doubtful, alternately admiring. Elizabeth Barrett had been rather disapproving, telling him how Papa had asked was he planning to shoot the Queen? Hunt, on the other hand, ‘laughed immensely—Not at you, of course, but with you’. There was, Hunt noted approvingly, ‘a grand epic unsordiness in the pettiness of the sum’. He only hoped Horne had not been too rash and ‘overwrought the very object’ at which he aimed. Of its poetry, he rejoiced ‘in the thick of its words and the loftiness of its mountain tops’. Carlyle, opponent of most poetry, placed it in a different class to most poetry, and considered it great: certainly many Carlylean beliefs burned in it. Elizabeth Barrett praised it extravagantly. She had been distressed at finding herself unable to obtain a copy in the rush so Horne had presented her with his own copy of the first edition. The very first copy of that first edition he had already presented to the poem's most devoted admirer, Mary Gillies; a fitting tribute to the woman who had almost certainly inspired the Goddess of the Dawn and had given him the nearest to normal happiness allowed the doomed Poet. Mary herself was enchanted by the poem and relieved and enchanted by its success: so often she had had to comfort him in his disappointments. There were few lines more beautiful, in her estimation, than that one line of Horne's—taken aptly from his description of Eos—that has stood the tests of quotability and proved immortal:

'Tis always morning somewhere in the world

Later, with quaint appropriateness, this line would be inscribed on a sundial on the pier at Brighton, the town in which the poem had been partially written. Orion was a sensation. Horne was famous.

It was a success, which, though he might often in fantasy have anticipated, in real life was unbelievable, exhilarating and disturbing. Even the reviews, when they began to appear, were scarcely less rapturous than the opinions of the author's friends. In the most immoderate terms the critics praised its beauty, its power, its philosophy. It was an ‘enchanted web of forms and colours, exquisite in symmetry and harmony’; it had more ‘imagination, passion, and ethical philosophy, than can be found in any other production of the present age’. The Westminster Review found it ‘classic in its own way as Keats's Endymion, burning with a Shakespearian wealth of imagery, full of clear cut-scenes from nature, and idealized with lofty thoughts’.

In The Athenaeum, Elizabeth Barrett reviewed it—unknown even to Horne—anonymously and with as much impartiality as she could manage, spending much of her time anticipating and answering objections that might be made. She admitted it had faults: ‘The personal may trench too closely on the allegorical, and fades too closely away into the more symbolical, and the action becomes contemplation, the epos a vision, the reader a riddle guesser unstartled by meeting Father Time upon the sands.’ The answer to such criticism, she contended, was that Horne had written a ‘spiritual epic’ suited to such concerns. One must not look in the mouth a gift horse of the ‘Divine Breed of Pegasus’. In contrast, in The Illuminated Magazine, Douglas Jerrold was delighted to find that Horne had written a social epic, charged with concern for social justice and progress. He commended the thinly veiled attack on the Corn Laws and episodes suggesting the struggle of man to rise over barriers of class and abject poverty, views inspired no doubt by Horne's Wolverhampton experiences. Horne was as much pleased with Jerrold's review as he was displeased by The Athenaeum's, an opinion he unwarily passed on to Elizabeth Barrett. That The Athenaeum should have seen only the spiritual implications, when he believed he had shown quite as clearly the social implications of his message, infuriated him. That their contradictory impressions were the result of his own mental ambivalence he could not recognize.

In America, in Graham's Magazine, its brilliant, unbalanced editor, Edgar Allan Poe, himself the devoted disciple of late Romanticism and, on his own admission, ‘among the earliest readers of Mr Horne—among the most earnest admirers of his genius’, apologised for his ‘imperfect and cursory’ treatment and went on to give it five eulogistic pages, vowing that its beauties were never excelled and indeed never equalled in English poetry. He regretted that Horne had been so misguided as to attempt to impart to the simple fable a deeper, intellectual meaning (much of which he misinterpreted, as Horne would later try to point out to him), but he still proclaimed it to be ‘one of the noblest, if not the very noblest poetical works of the age’. Its defects were ‘trivial and conventional—its beauties intrinsic and supreme’. Critics were everywhere unanimous: Horne had written a masterpiece.

And why, one is tempted to wonder, is a poem once so praised forgotten today? Were all critics literary fools? To find the answer it must be remembered what doldrums poetry was then in, awaiting still the mid-century messiahs of Browning and Tennyson. Lovers of poetry were liable to seize hopefully on anything they thought might resemble genuine poetry. Their aesthetic tenets put great value on beauty and emotion and Orion had those in abundance. It also had recognizably more intellectual control than that other praised Spasmodic masterpiece Festus, which had appeared several years before. Critics were right in realizing that of the Spasmodic poetry then appearing, Orion was amongst the best. Where they most erred was in the value they gave to that Spasmodic type of poetry. The poetic desert in which they lived had warped their judgment. The emergence of Spasmodism in a truer perspective has rendered them foolish in a way that is not fair to them, and has held Orion also up to a contempt that is not entirely fair to it. One suspects that in its reassessment the twentieth century may have gone a little too far in the opposite direction.

For six months Horne was a literary wonder, thanks to the publicity of his farthing and, to a lesser extent, the praises of the critics. Six months' praise set against twenty years of neglect and self-doubts! The habits of twenty years are not easily sloughed off and by now for Horne a sense of failure had become a habit. Even he who, despite his penchant for suffering, had always longed for success and loved and craved publicity could not grasp success quickly. At first it was a prank: he was incredulous, amused, candidly self-delighted, ingenuously excited—like a child at a treat. He found himself savouring every drop of attention. He shamelessly indulged his vanity, his affectation, his long-standing love of being centre of the stage. It was exhilarating to go to Miller's bookshop and watch the bustling customers and hear the praising comments, leaf through the enormous pile of written orders, and then go home and write exuberantly to Elizabeth Barrett that the publisher was being torn apart and forced to store spare copies of Orion under his bed. Yet it must be admitted that he clung to it from the start as a sign that he had not been mistaken in himself; that he did in fact have genius. And as such it was a considerable comfort, for the fear of self-delusion was never far absent. Too often he found himself recalling how many people laboured their whole lives under ‘a delusion—a false estimate of their own powers’. Underneath, fame had not yet substantially changed him. It was play-acting, ephemeral excitement, passing intoxication: an interval in poetic suffering. It had not yet acquired that dangerous and false sense of permanence one would see in him in a few months.

The dreamlike sensation was possibly heightened by his illness, which eventually began to reduce his exuberance and which continued, despite a temporary easing, into August. He longed to rejoin his mother by the sea and effect a permanent cure through sea air, rest and exercise, but he did not dare to leave London until August. Smith, Elder, the publishers, were demanding a new book and he was too seriously worried by the state of his finances to refuse. The money he had lost in the Author's Theatre had been a blow from which he had never recovered and, to make his anxiety worse, at the start of August the copper-mining company in which so much of his money was invested unexpectedly reduced dividends. Despite the fantastic sales, he was getting very little money from Orion. It was ironic, but perhaps only to be expected of the poetic destiny, that in the very moment of triumph he should be plagued by that old, terrifying fear of poverty.

Meanwhile to restore his health and spirits, he definitely decided on a holiday. Combining his new fame with his need for convalescence, he accepted the invitation of the authoress Miss Mitford to visit her home near Reading. Mary Russell Mitford was fifty-four, a starchy, snobbish spinster, the author of rural sketches called Our Village and poetic dramas of twenty years before, her literary success well behind her. She was the close friend, by correspondence, of Elizabeth Barrett with whom she regularly exchanged literary opinions and cosy gossip, and was familiar with the radiant feelings Horne excited in the heart of her dear Miss Barrett. Though known to be generous and affectionate, she was also finicky and querulous, worn out with the strain of supporting a profligate and demanding father who had recently died, leaving her a pile of debts that a subscription raised by literary friends, including Horne, had helped to pay.

Horne never met her personally but had been in communication with her at various times since 1839 over contributions to magazines, and numerous messages had passed between them through the letters of their mutual friend Elizabeth. Horne had even, out of kindness, allowed her twenty-five copies of Orion, waiving the rule of one copy per person, at which Elizabeth had been slightly jealous. It would seem to have been this kindness over Orion, together with his new literary fame and Elizabeth's enthusiasm, which prompted Miss Mitford to issue the invitation. Elizabeth hoped keenly for friendship at first sight between these two dearest of her correspondents. In fact Elizabeth should have shown sounder judgment. Anticipating the visit with intense excitement, as her letters so touchingly reveal, she should, knowing Miss Mitford's temperament, have also anticipated the disaster.

Horne was nervous. He was cast in a role which, though he had played it often enough in imagination, he was still unused to in real life: he was a literary lion. Ill-at-ease, still unwell, he travelled in warm autumn weather down to the small Berkshire village of Three Mile Cross where Miss Mitford had her tiny cottage to be greeted by what he would later describe as ‘a venerable little gentlewoman in a garden bonnet and shawl, with silver hair, very bright hazel eyes and a rose-red smiling countenance’, whose chief pleasures were country rambles, her garden and the society of the country gentry whom she regarded as ‘the best class’ in the world. Poetic affection she could not abide. Professional writers she regarded with suspicion; years later it would be a great sadness to Elizabeth that her dear friend regarded Robert Browning with extreme distaste, pronouncing him affected and effeminate. Her thoughts as she set eyes on the determinedly poetic appearance and manner of the author of Orion can well be imagined.

Horne, for his part, turned himself inside out to be agreeable. He sat in the tiny garden ablaze with honeysuckle and geraniums and graciously consented to having a geranium named after him, ‘Horned Orion’. He went on country rambles and rode in a pony cart; he played his guitar sitting beneath the huge apricot tree in the garden and took part in outdoor poetry readings, hearing for the first time Elizabeth Barrett's House of Clouds. He did what he felt was expected of him to the extent of neglecting the pressing literary work he had taken down with him, and though one imagines he was often ill-at-ease, one also imagines he probably did enjoy himself. He loved, after all, to be the centre of attention.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, immured at Wimpole Street, waited tremblingly for Miss Mitford's impressions. Never having seen Horne herself, except in Margaret Gillies's miniature, she was both eager and vulnerable in her determination to see him through Miss Mitford's eyes. The report that came back threw her into confusion. As soon as he arrived, Horne had put the frugal little household at Three Mile Cross into chaos. He wantonly set out, complained Miss Mitford, to be a nuisance. He was ‘self-engrossed, and indifferent to all talents but his’; he was uneducated, unpolished, lacking wit, and conversation and breeding. He outstayed his welcome, ignored hints to go home, and disrupted domestic arrangements by demanding ‘a bath three times a day’. In all, in his hostess's estimation, that week spent under her roof was a great mistake.

Horne was unconcerned. Oblivious to the hubbub he had caused, he wrote to tell Elizabeth now much he had enjoyed himself, and went on to Brighton, and then to Shoreham with his mother where his health became much better. Elizabeth, however, was aghast. She rushed to Horne's defence, prepared to attack even dear Miss Mitford rather than accept that her own feelings had been so misplaced. Desperately she produced examples of his generosity, sensitivity, learning, shyness—his diffidence, for example, in approaching her—her father's opinion that he might not be a polished but he was certainly not a ‘pushing man—that is certain!’ ‘And that is certain,’ she added ‘as far as our experience goes.’ Even Miss Mitford's grudging allowance that despite his faults she liked him and that he sang and played the guitar and double-flute exquisitely could not mollify Elizabeth, who retorted: ‘we do not look to Orions for cachuchas … but for a high-sphere music. …’ Indeed her unhappiness was so extreme that she could not leave the subject alone, and from Horne himself, indirectly and rather transparently, she began to try to discover how Miss Mitford could be so mistaken. Poor Elizabeth! But her tentative explorations did elicit one explanation. He told her that he detested a display of poetic learning and was unable to discuss poetic views with any but the closest or most sympathetic. Since Miss Mitford was obviously neither, Elizabeth was reassured.

A biographer would like to be similarly reassured. But even allowing for Miss Mitford's incompatibility and prejudices, her criticism rings true. In years to come Horne's behaviour would too often follow similar patterns. Yet there was truth also in what Elizabeth said in his defence. However much they had been overlaid by experience or usage, the origins of Horne's arrogance and insensitivity lay deeply in his shyness and that persistent feeling that had been with him since childhood that he did not belong. More easily recognizable perhaps in an adolescent, or even in the brash young man of thirty who had gone to Craven Hill, than in the forty-year-old author of Orion, the traits resisted his attempts to combat them. Invariably when he wanted desperately to be successful and was ill-at-ease—as he clearly was at Three Mile Cross—he overplayed his part. He tried too hard to be witty and only succeeded in being ponderous; he tried to be eccentric and only made himself objectionable; he tried to appear self-confident and only managed to be bumptious. Had he been simply over-eager he would have been pathetic, or even endearing, and therefore forgivable. Unfortunately Horne adored being taken notice of, so that in his determination to be the centre of the stage his natural sensitivity was swallowed up. On these occasions, once he was warmed to his role, he was often very happy and usually managed to convince himself he had been a huge success. He lacked any sense of the impression he was making on other people. This, allied to his bitterness—to which, since they were both facets of his insecurity, it was related—would earn Horne many enemies in years to come.

He had changed, too, in another way within those few weeks preceding his visit to Three Mile Cross. Orion had ceased to be a prank. Whereas previously his sense of perspective had prevented him losing his head at the acclaim and ensured an amused and relatively detached enjoyment, the perspective seemed to have receded. In June he had been master of his success, but by his behaviour at Three Mile Cross he proclaimed it had become master of him. Mismanaged as his play-acting was, one cannot doubt it was in earnest. He had convinced himself that he was a literary lion. The publicity, the phenomenal sales, the attention he was receiving were his not by right of a farthing prank but by right of his talents; his rightful reward from destiny. This would not have mattered if, when the furore was over and the literary lion was no longer at large, he had been able to go back to his old cage of neglect. Tragically, however, Horne would not go back. He would continue to be ‘Orion’ Horne—the title by which he was now increasingly called—long after it had ceased to have meaning to anyone but himself.

Notes

Genesis of ‘Orion’: The most stimulating discussion of Orion and the Spasmodics is Jack Lindsay, George Meredith (London, 1956), pp. 43ff; RH [Richard Horne] article discussing conversations with the Hunts and Lewes, in Thornton Hunt's journal The Leader, September 1850, cited by E. J. Shumaker's thesis, Ohio State University; Ian Jack, ‘The Realm of Flora in Keats and Poussin’, Times Literary Supplement, April 10, 1959; RH, ‘Disquisition on Genius, Writings and Character of William Hazlitt’, Monthly Repository, new series, 9 (1835), 629.

Interpretation of ‘Orion’: RH, ‘Brief Commentary’, prefacing Orion: An Epic Poem in Three Books (London, 1874); RH, ‘Preface’ to projected volume of poems, 1852, ML (the preface, never published, gives his clearest explanation of Orion and of his preoccupation with the struggle between the intellectual and practical).

Brighton Interlude: RH to Hunt, letter May 8, 1843, Hunt mss, British Museum; RH to Elizabeth Barrett, letter May 26, 1843, Pierpont Morgan Library.

Choice of a Farthing: RH, letter in Home News, May 20, 1870, p. 5; RH to Hunt, letter June 3, 1843, Hunt mss, British Museum; RH, ‘The Dreamer and The Worker’, Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine, 6 (1847), 492, for his advice to unpopular poets.

The Furore: this is graphically described in letters from Horne to Elizabeth Barrett, Pierpont Morgan Library, esp. June 9, 15, 22, July 3, 1843; J. H. (James Hingston) in Once a Month (Melbourne), 1 (June 15, 1884), 177; Richard Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox (London, 1910), p. 198, for story of ‘penn'orth of epics’.

His Friend's Opinion of ‘Orion’: RH to Elizabeth Barrett, June 15 and 19, 1843, Pierpont Morgan Library; B-H, vol. 1, 57-63; Hunt to RH, June 1, 1843, Leigh Hunt Collection, Iowa State University Library; Mary Gillies, ‘Things Present and Things Unseen’, Howitt's Journal, 3 (1848), 88; Thomas Carlyle's opinion quoted in R. Owen, The Life of Richard Owen, vol. 1 (London, 1895), 283.

Reviews of ‘Orion’: Westminster Review, June 1843, cited Eric Partridge, Orion (Scholartis Press edn, London, 1928), p. xxix; Athenaeum (anon., in fact Elizabeth Barrett), June 24, 1843, p. 583; Douglas Jerrold's Illuminated Magazine, 1 (1843), 119-21; Graham's Magazine (E. A. Poe), 24 (March 1844), 136-41; RH, ‘Preface’ to projected volume of poems, ms, ML, for his dissatisfaction with Athenaeum review.

Illness and Financial Trouble: RH to Elizabeth Barrett, June 19, August 2, 1843, Pierpont Morgan Library.

Visit to Miss Mitford: B-H, vol. 1, 71-9; B-M, vii-xv, 188, 190-1, 193-6; RH to Elizabeth Barrett, August 27, 1843, Pierpont Morgan Library.