ell-loved brother
Edward's tragic death, a mysterious disaster, for the foundering of the
little yacht _La Belle Sauvage_ is almost as inexplicable as that of
the _Ariel_ in the Spezzian waters beyond Lerici. Not only through the
ensuing winter, but often in the dreams of after years, "the sound of
the waves rang in my ears like the moans of one dying."

The removal of the Barrett household to Gloucester Place, in Western
London, was a great event. Here, invalid though she was, she could see
friends occasionally and get new books constantly. Her name was well
known and became widely familiar when her "Cry of the Children" rang
like a clarion throughout the country. The poem was founded upon an
official report by Richard Hengist Horne, the friend whom some years
previously she had won in correspondence, and with whom she had become
so intimate, though without personal acquaintance, that she had agreed
to write a drama in collaboration with him, to be called "Psyche
Apocalypte," and to be modelled on "Greek instead of modern tragedy."

Horne--a poet of genius, and a dramatist of remarkable power--was one of
the truest friends she ever had, and, so far as her literary life is
concerned, came next in influence only to her poet-husband. Among the
friends she saw much of in the early forties was a distant "cousin,"
John Kenyon--a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man,
who acted the part of Providence to many troubled souls, and, in
particular, was "a fairy godfather" to Elizabeth Barrett and to "the
other poet," as he used to call Browning. It was to Mr. Kenyon--"Kenyon,
with the face of a Bendectine monk, but the most jovial of good
fellows," as a friend has recorded of him; "Kenyon the Magnificent," as
he was called by Browning--that Miss Barrett owed her first introduction
to the poetry of her future husband.

Browning's poetry had for her an immediate appeal. With sure insight she
discerned the special quality of the poetic wealth of the "Bells and
Pomegranates," among which she then and always cared most for the
penultimate volume, the "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." Two years before
she met the author she had written, in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship"--

"Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate' which, if cut deep down
the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

A little earlier she had even, unwittingly on either side, been a
collaborateur with "the au