sion to an opinion concerning
Browning's poetry which is not dissimilar to the one we quoted from
Wordsworth. Miss Mitford was an intimate friend of Elizabeth Barrett:

"The great news of the season is the marriage of my beloved friend
Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning. I have seen him once only, many
years ago. He is, I hear from all quarters, a man of immense
attainment and great conversational power. As a poet I think him
overrated.... Those things on which his reputation rests, _Paracelsus_
and _Bells and Pomegranates_, are to me as so many riddles."

In a later letter she writes to the same correspondent: "I at Miss
Barrett's wedding! Ah, dearest Mr. Bonar, it was a runaway match.
Never was I so much astonished. He prevailed on her to meet him at
church with only the two necessary witnesses. They went to Paris.
There they stayed a week. Happening to meet with Mrs. Jameson, she
joined them in their journey to Pisa; and accordingly they traveled by
diligence, by Rhone boat,--anyhow,--to Marseilles, thence took
shipping to Leghorn, and then settled themselves at Pisa for six
months. She says she is very happy. God grant it continue! I felt just
exactly as if I had heard that Dr. Chambers had given her over when I
got the letter announcing her marriage, and found that she was about
to cross to France. I never had an idea of her reaching Pisa alive.
She took her own maid and her (dog) Flush. I saw Mr. Browning once.
Many of his friends and mine, William Harness, John Kenyon, and Henry
Chorley, speak very highly of him. I suppose he is an accomplished
man, and if he makes his angelic wife happy, I shall of course learn
to like him."

The runaway match proved to be a most happy one. This is in disproof
of the common thought that a poet is of so sensitive and irritable a
disposition that no woman should expect a calm life with a poet. But
in this case we have two distinguished poets joining hands. They
lived in great happiness, nor was this peace and harmony purchased at
the price of servitude and humility of the one. Each respected the
other. Their romantic passion was based on a spiritual affinity. The
love letters of the Brownings may have some degree of obscurity, but
it should be said that the obscurity is one of expression, not the
obscurity of misunderstanding in the sense in which some of the
Carlyle letters are obscure. The list of literary men whose marriages
have proved unhappy is not so long and distingui