in exaggeration, but from very clear and positive conviction--I do
believe that I should be _mad_ at this moment, if I had not forced
back--dammed out--the current of rushing recollections by work, work,
work.' One of the projects in which she was concerned was 'Chaucer
Modernised,' a scheme for reviving interest in the father of English
poetry, suggested in the first instance by Wordsworth, but committed
to the care of Horne, as editor, for execution. According to the
scheme as originally planned, all the principal poets of the day were
to be invited to share the task of transmuting Chaucer into modern
language. Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Horne, and others actually executed
some portions of the work; Tennyson and Browning, it was hoped, would
lend a hand with some of the later parts. Horne invited Miss Barrett
to contribute, and, besides executing modernisations of 'Queen
Annelida and False Arcite' and 'The Complaint of Annelida,'[56] she
also advised generally on the work of the other writers during its
progress through the press. The other literary project was for a
lyrical drama, to be written in collaboration with Horne. It was to be
called 'Psyché Apocalypté,' and was to be a drama on the Greek model,
treating of the birth and self-realisation of the soul of man.

[Footnote 56: These versions are not reprinted in her collected
_Poetical Works_, but are to be found in 'Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer
modernised,' (1841).]

The sketch of its contents, given in the correspondence with Horne,
will make the modern reader accept with equanimity the fact that it
never progressed beyond the initial stage of drafting the plot. It is
allegorical, philosophical, fantastic, unreal--everything which was
calculated to bring out the worst characteristics of Miss Barrett's
style and to intensify her faults. Fortunately her removal from