following year she was at work on two series of articles on the Greek Christian poets and on the English poets, written for the Athenaeum under the editorship of Mr C. W. Dilke. In work she found some interest and even some delight: “Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again from under the crushing foot of heavy grief. Be it all as God wills.”
It is in 1842 that we notice the name of Robert Browning in her letters: “Mr Horne the poet and Mr Browning the poet were not behind in approbation,” she says in regard to her work on the poets. “Mr Browning is said to be learned in Greek, especially the dramatists.” In this year also she declares her love for Tennyson. To Kenyon she writes, “I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson.” In 1842, moreover, she had the pleasure of a letter from Wordsworth, who had twice asked Kenyon for permission to visit her. The visit was not permitted on account of Miss Barrett’s ill-health. Now Haydon sent her his unfinished painting of the great poet musing upon Helvellyn; she wrote her sonnet on the portrait, and Haydon sent it to Rydal Mount. Wordsworth’s commendation is rather cool. In August 1843 “The Cry of the Children” appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, and during the year she was associated with her friend Horne in a critical work, The New Spirit of the Age, rather by advice than by direct contribution. Her two volumes of poems (1844) appeared, six years after her former book, under the title of Poems, by Elizabeth Barrett Barrett. The warmest praises that greeted the new poems were H. F. Chorley’s in the Athenaeum, John Forster’s in the Examiner, and those conveyed in Blackwood, the Dublin Review, the New Quarterly and the Atlas. Letters came from Carlyle and others. Both he and Miss Martineau selected as their favourite poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” a violent piece of work. In the beginning of the following year came the letter from a stranger that was to be so momentous to both. “I had a letter from Browning the poet last night,” she writes to her old friend Mrs Martin, “which threw me into ecstasies—Browning, the author of Paracelsus, the king of the mystics.” She is flattered, though not to “ecstasies,” at about the same time by a letter from E. A. Poe, and by the dedication to her, as “the noblest of her sex,” of his own work. “What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the 'noblest of your sex'? 'Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.'” America was at least as quick as England to appreciate her poetry; among other messages thence came in the spring letters from Lowell and from Mrs Sigourney. “She says that the sound of my poetry is stirring the 'deep green forests of the New World'; which sounds pleasantly, does it not?” It is in the same year that the letters first speak of the hope of a journey to Italy. The winters in London, with the imprisonment which—according to the medical practice of that day—they entailed, were lowering Elizabeth’s strength of resistance against disease. She longed for the change of light, scene, manners and language, and the longing became a hope, until her father’s prohibition put an end to it, and doomed her, as she and others thought, to death, without any perceptible reason for the denial of so reasonable a desire.
Meanwhile the friendship with Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett’s life. The correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. The allusion to his poetry in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” had doubtless put an edge to his already keen wish to know her. He became her frequent visitor and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in friendship or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of the letters between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love-story from beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger than the woman he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be confined by some hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and resolution he never doubted. Her hesitation, in her regard for his liberty and strength, to burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the Sonnets afterwards published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portuguese. She refused him once “with all her will, but much against her heart,” and yielded at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father’s will was that his children should not marry, and, kind and affectionate father though he was, the prohibition took a violent form and struck terror into the hearts of the three dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning’s addresses were, therefore, kept secret, for fear of scenes of anger which the most fragile of the three could not face. Browning was reluctant to practise the deception; Elizabeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she was persuaded to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror, upon a secret wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and on the 12th of September the two poets were married in St Marylebone parish church. Browning visited it on his subsequent journeys to England to give thanks for what had taken place at its altar. Elizabeth’s two sisters had been permitted to know of the engagement, but not of the wedding, so that their father’s anger might not fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs Browning remained in her father’s house. On the 19th of September she left it, taking her maid and her little dog, joined her husband, and crossed to the Continent. She never entered that home again, nor did her father ever forgive her. Her letters, written with tears to entreat his pardon, were never answered. They were all subsequently returned to her unopened. Among them was one she had written, in the prospect of danger, before the birth of her child. With her sisters her relations were, as before, most affectionate. Her brothers, one at least of whom disapproved of her action, held for a time aloof. All others were taken entirely by surprise. Mrs Jameson, who had been one of the few intimate visitors to Miss Barrett’s room, had offered to take her to Italy that year, but met her instead on her way thither with a newly-married husband. The poets’ journey was full of delight. Where she could not walk, up long staircases or across the waters of the stream at Vaucluse, Browning carried her. In October they reached Pisa, and there they wintered, Mrs Jameson keeping them company for a time lest ignorance of practical things should bring them, in their poverty, to trouble. She soon found that they were both admirable economists; not that they gave time and thought to husbandry, but that they knew how to enjoy life without luxuries. So they remained to the end, frugal and content with little.
For climate and cheapness they settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there, with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and Rome, and to Paris and England, until Mrs Browning’s death. It was at Pisa that Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems which his wife had written in secret and had no thought of publishing. He, however, resolved to give them to the world. “I dared not,” he said, “reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.” The judgment, which the existence of Wordsworth’s sonnets renders obviously absurd, may be pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at Reading, as Sonnets by E.B.B., in 1847. In 1850 they were included, under their final title, in a new issue of poems. During the Pisan autumn appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine seven poems by Mrs Browning which she had sent some time before, and the publication of which at that moment disturbed her as likely to hurt her father by an apparent reference to her own story. At Pisa also she wrote and sent to America a poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim Point,” which was published in Boston, in The Liberty Bell, in 1848, and separately in England in 1849. In the summer of 1847 the Brownings left their temporary dwelling in Florence and took the apartment in Casa Guidi, near the Pitti Palace, which was thenceforth their chief home. Early in their residence began that excited interest in Italian affairs which made so great a part of Mrs Browning’s emotional life. The Florentines, under the government of the grand duke, were prosperous but disturbed by national aspirations. Mrs Browning, by degrees, wrote Casa Guidi Windows on their behalf and as an appeal to the always impulsive sympathies of England. In 1849 was born
