thor of 'Paracelsus.'" She gave Horne much aid
in the preparation of his "New Spirit of the Age," and he has himself
told us "that the mottoes, which are singularly happy and appropriate,
were for the most part supplied by Miss Barrett and Robert Browning,
then unknown to each other." One thing and another drew them nearer and
nearer. Now it was a poem, now a novel expression, now a rare sympathy.

An intermittent correspondence ensued, and both poets became anxious to
know each other. "We artists--how well praise agrees with us," as Balzac
says.

A few months later, in 1846, they came to know one another personally.
The story of their first meeting, which has received a wide acceptance,
is apocryphal. The meeting was brought about by Kenyon. This common
friend had been a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and so it was
natural that he took a more than ordinary interest in the brilliant
young poet, perhaps all the more so that the reluctant tide of
popularity which had promised to set in with such unparalleled sweep and
weight had since experienced a steady ebb.

And so the fates brought these two together. The younger was already far
the stronger, but he had an unbounded admiration for Miss Barrett. To
her, he was even then the chief living poet. She perceived his ultimate
greatness; as early as 1845 had "a full faith in him as poet and
prophet."

As Browning admitted to a friend, the love between them was almost
instantaneous, a thing of the eyes, mind, and heart--each striving for
supremacy, till all were gratified equally in a common joy. They had one
bond of sterling union: passion for the art to which both had devoted
their lives.

To those who love love for love's sake, who _se passionnent pour la
passion_, as Prosper Merimee says, there could scarce be a more sacred
spot in London than that fiftieth house in unattractive Wimpole Street,
where these two poets first met each other; and where, in the darkened
room, "Love quivered, an invisible flame." Elizabeth Barrett was indeed,
in her own words, "as sweet as Spring, as Ocean deep." She, too, was
always, as she wrote of Harriet Martineau, in a hopeless anguish of body
and serene triumph of spirit. As George Sand says, of one of her
fictitious personages, she was an "artist to the backbone; that is, one
who feels life with frightful intensity." To this too keen intensity of
feeling must be attributed something of that longing for repose, that
deep craving fo