incalculable disposition of her father,
who, while he loved her, was singularly autocratic in his treatment, the
plan was abandoned. All this sorrow may have contributed to her confession
to Browning that no man had ever been to her feelings what he was; and
that if she were different in some respects she would accept the great
trust of his happiness.... "But we may be friends always," she continues,
"and cannot be so separated that the knowledge of your happiness will not
increase mine.... Worldly thoughts these are not at all, there need be no
soiling of the heart with any such;... you cannot despise the gold and
gauds of the world more than I do,... and even if I wished to be very
poor, in the world's sense of poverty, I could not, with three or four
hundred a year, of which no living will can dispossess me. And is not the
chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it?" But
he, perfect in his beautiful trust and tenderness, was "joyfully
confident" that the way would open, and he thanks God that, to the utmost
of his power, he has not been unworthy of having been introduced to her.
He is "no longer in the first freshness of his life" and had for years
felt it impossible that he should ever love any woman. But he will wait.
That she "cannot dance like Cerito" does not materially disarrange his
plan! And by the last of those September days she confesses that she is
his "for everything but to do him harm," he has touched her so profoundly,
and now "none, except God and your own will, shall interpose between you
and me." And he answered her in such words as these:

"When I come back from seeing you and think over it all, there is
never a least word of yours I could not occupy myself with...."

In a subsequent letter Elizabeth Barrett questions: "Could it be that
heart and life were devastated to make room for you? if so it was well
done." And she sends thanks to Browning's sister, Sarianna, for a copy of
Landor's verses.

And with all these gracious and tenderly exquisite personal matters, the
letters are yet brilliant in literary allusion and criticism.

During these three years from 1844 to 1847 were written the greater number
of Miss Barrett's finest lyrics. Those two remarkable poems, "A Rhapsody
of Life's Progress" and "Confessions"; "Loved Once"; "The Sleep" (the poem
which was read at her burial in the lovely, cypress-crowned cemetery in
Florence, and whose stanzas, set to music,