mple and lucent vein of humour, which does not
easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under
the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional
wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems,
and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning.
Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort
which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters
may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They
write to each other in a language of their own, an almost
exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting
of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes
of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their
eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always
used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett
have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else
would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a
marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in
their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory
to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his
otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness,"
retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with
mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and
beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each
other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the
world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him
was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing
after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most
splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in
his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to
be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is
something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling,
not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability,
but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability.
Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in
Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of
superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the
fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected