ck insight as she had perceived Robert Browning's
poetic greatness, Elizabeth Barrett discerned his personal worth. He was
essentially manly in all respects: so manly, that many frail souls of
either sex philandered about his over-robustness. From the twilight
gloom of an aeesthetic clique came a small voice belittling the great man
as "quite too 'loud,' painfully excessive." Browning was manly enough to
laugh at all ghoulish cries of any kind whatsoever. Once in a way the
lion would look round and by a raised breath make the jackals wriggle;
as when the poet wrote to a correspondent, who had drawn his attention
to certain abusive personalities in some review or newspaper: "Dear
Sir--I am sure you mean very kindly, but I have had too long an
experience of the inability of the human goose to do other than cackle
when benevolent and hiss when malicious, and no amount of goose
criticism shall make me lift a heel against what waddles behind it."

Herself one whose happiest experiences were in dreamland, Miss Barrett
was keenly susceptible to the strong humanity of Browning's song, nor
less keenly attracted by his strenuous and fearless outlook, his poetic
practicality, and even by his bluntness of insight in certain matters.
It was no slight thing to her that she could, in Mr. Lowell's words, say
of herself and of him--

"We, who believe life's bases rest
Beyond the probe of chemic test."

She rejoiced, despite her own love for remote imaginings, to know that
he was of those who (to quote again from the same fine poet)

"... wasted not their breath in schemes
Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere,
As if he must be other than he seems
Because he was not what he should be here,
Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams;"

that, in a word, while 'he could believe the promise of to-morrow,' he
was at the same time supremely conscious of 'the wondrous meaning of
to-day.'

Both, from their youth onward, had travelled 'on trails divine of
unimagined laws.' It was sufficient for her that he kept his eyes fixed
on the goal beyond the way he followed: it did not matter that he was
blind to the dim adumbrations of novel byways, of strange Calvarys by
the wayside, so often visible to her.

Their first meeting was speedily followed by a second--by a third--and
then? When we know not, but ere long, each found that happiness was in
the bestowal of the other.

The secret was for