her earlier days. It became impossible that she should
share the more active side of her husband's existence. It had to be
alternately suppressed and carried on without her. The deep heart-love,
the many-sided intellectual sympathy, preserved their union in rare
beauty to the end. But to say that it thus maintained itself as if by
magic, without effort of self-sacrifice on his part or of resignation on
hers, would be as unjust to the noble qualities of both, as it would be
false to assert that its compensating happiness had ever failed them.

* Her family at that time lived in the country. She was a
constant rider, and fond of saddling her pony; and one day,
when she was about fourteen, she overbalanced herself in
lifting the saddle, and fell backward, inflicting injuries
on her head, or rather spine, which caused her great
suffering, but of which the nature remained for some time
undiscovered.

Mr. Browning's troubles did not, even for the present, exhaust
themselves in that week of apprehension. They assumed a deeper reality
when his delicate wife first gave herself into his keeping, and the long
hours on steamboat and in diligence were before them. What she suffered
in body, and he in mind, during the first days of that wedding-journey
is better imagined than told. In Paris they either met, or were joined
by, a friend, Mrs. Anna Jameson (then also en route for Italy), and Mrs.
Browning was doubly cared for till she and her husband could once more
put themselves on their way. At Genoa came the long-needed rest in
southern land. From thence, in a few days, they went on to Pisa, and
settled there for the winter.

Even so great a friend as John Forster was not in the secret of Mr.
Browning's marriage; we learn this through an amusing paragraph in a
letter from Mr. Fox, written soon after it had taken place:

'Forster never heard of the Browning marriage till the proof of the
newspaper ('Examiner') notice was sent; when he went into one of his
great passions at the supposed hoax, ordered up the compositor to have a
swear at him, and demanded to see the MS. from which it was taken: so it
was brought, and he instantly recognised the hand of Browning's sister.
Next day came a letter from R. B., saying he had often meant to tell him
or write of it, but hesitated between the two, and neglected both.

'She was better, and a winter in Italy had been recommended some months
ago.

'It