e later he
suggested that he would like to call on her. This commonplace and
altogether natural suggestion threw the invalid into a state of
tremulous disapproval. With robust insistence Robert replied, "If my
truest heart's wishes avail, you shall laugh at east winds yet as I
do." Miss Barrett replied, "There is nothing to see in me nor to hear
in me. I never learned to talk as you do in London, although I can
admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others. If
my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me. I have
lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colors. The
rest of me is nothing but a root fit for the ground and dark." A reply
such as this would be construed by any gentleman as a challenge. The
substance of Browning's reply was, "I will call at two on Tuesday."

On May 20, 1845, they met. In September, 1846, Miss Barrett walked
quietly out of her father's house, was married in a church, and
afterwards returned to her father's house as though nothing had
happened. Between the marriage and the elopement Robert Browning did
not call at the Barrett house on Wimpole Street. One of his
biographers says that this absence was due to an inability of
Browning to ask the maid at the door for Miss Barrett when there no
longer was a Miss Barrett whom he wished to see.

In passing judgment upon the elopement of this remarkable couple one
must remember that they were no longer giddy and rash youth. Browning
was thirty-four and the romantic Juliet was three years older. Again
it must be remembered that the objecting father was a most
unreasonable and selfish man. The climax of his selfishness was
reached when in opposition to the advice of the physicians Mr. Barrett
refused to allow his daughter to go to Italy. "In the summer of 1846,"
writes Mr. Chesterton, "Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the
great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant
deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight,
forbidden to see a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly.
A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged
up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up the crests of mountains at four
o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on to what she calls 'an
inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars.'"

Miss Mitford, the literary gossip of the period, writes a letter to
Charles Bonar, in which she gives expres