to promise fairly, but a slow and fatal disease had
seized him even before the wedding-day, and darkened around him to the
hour of his death. In the pair of whom I am now to speak, the very reverse
of this sad destiny has happily befallen, and the health of the bride,
which seemed gone forever, has revived under the influence of the climate
of Italy, of new scenes, new duties, a new and untried felicity.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is too dear to me as a friend to be spoken of
merely as a poetess. Indeed such is the influence of her manners, her
conversation, her temper, her thousand sweet and attaching qualities, that
they who know her best are apt to lose sight altogether of her learning
and of her genius, and to think of her only as the most charming person
that they have ever met. But she is known to so few, and the peculiar
characteristics of her writings, their purity, their tenderness, their
piety, and their intense feeling of humanity and of womanhood, have won
for her the love of so many, that it will gratify them without, I trust,
infringing on the sacredness of private intercourse to speak of her not
wholly as a poetess, but a little as a woman. When in listening to the
nightingale, we try to catch a glimpse of the shy songster, we are moved
by a deeper feeling than curiosity.

My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years
ago. She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever
seen. Every body who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely
the impression of my partiality, or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate
figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most
expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a
smile like a sun-beam, and such a look of youthfulness, that I had some
difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to
Chiswick, that the translatress of the "Prometheus" of AEschylus, the
authoress of the "Essay on Mind," was old enough to be introduced into
company, in technical language, was _out_. Through the kindness of another
invaluable friend, to whom I owe many obligations, but none so great as
this, I saw much of her during my stay in town. We met so constantly and
so familiarly that, in spite of the difference of age, intimacy ripened
into friendship, and after my return into the country, we corresponded
freely and frequently, her letters being just what letters ought to