It is said Mrs. Hofland also married off
Miss Edgeworth in the same manner.

Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love. One day
Mr. Kenyon came to see her while she was staying in London, and offered
to show her the Zoological Gardens, and on the way he proposed calling
in Gloucester Place to take up a young lady, a connection of his own,
Miss Barrett by name. It was thus that Miss Mitford first made the
acquaintance of Mrs. Browning, whose friendship was one of the happiest
events of her whole life. A happy romance indeed, with that added
reality which must have given it endurance. And indeed to make a new
friend is like learning a new language. I myself have a friend who says
that we have each one of us a chosen audience of our own to whom we turn
instinctively, and before whom we rehearse that which is in our minds;
whose opinion influences us, whose approval is our secret aim. All this
Mrs. Browning seems to have been to Miss Mitford.

'I sit and think of you and of the poems that you will write, and of
that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before
me.... My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you. At my time
of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body forth
images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to anticipate....'
So wrote the elder woman to the younger with romantic devotion. What
Miss Mitford once said of herself was true, hers was the instinct of
the bee sucking honey from the hedge flower. Whatever sweetness and
happiness there was to find she turned to with unerring directness.

It is to Miss Barrett that she sometimes complains. 'It will help you to
understand how impossible it is for me to earn money as I ought to
do, when I tell you that this very day I received your dear letter and
sixteen others; then my father brought into my room the newspaper to
hear the ten or twelve columns of news from India; then I dined and
breakfasted in one; then I got up, and by that time there were three
parties of people in the garden; eight others arrived soon after.... I
was forced to leave, being engaged to call on Lady Madeline Palmer. She
took me some six miles on foot in Mr. Palmer's beautiful plantations, in
search of that exquisite wild-flower the bog-bean, do you know it? most
beautiful of flowers, either wild--or, as K. puts it,--"tame." After
long search we found the plant not yet in bloom.'

Dr. Mitford weeps over his daughters exh