Elizabeth Barrett to Richard Hengist Horne, 13 December 1843: 'I admired [Richard Monckton Milne's] first volume very much; but his later poetry seems to want fire and imagination, and to strain too much at the didactic [...] And then that exquisite "Lay of the Humble" which I was praising lately, and which affected me very much at the time I read it (it appeared in the first volume), somebody told me the other day that it was not original. Taken from the German I think they said it was. I wish I knew. It is very beautiful in any case.'