with all that music in you, only your own personality should be
dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the
dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she
regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic
scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And
it is clear that before the last plays, _Luria_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_,
were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not
altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious)
when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually
becoming adjusted, "_seeing all things, as it does, in you._"

[Footnote 28: _E.B.B to R.B._, 26th May 1846. Cf. _R.B._, 13th Feb.
1846.]

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a
woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical
penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the
hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity
applied to herself his unconscious phrase--

"Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold,"

"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]--shows at the same time the
keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the
masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough
and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With
the world of society and affairs she had other channels of
communication. But no one of her other friends--not _Orion_ Horne, not
even Kenyon--bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of
society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of
poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the need for lyrical
utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer
contact with common things. If she had her part in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_, he had his, no less, in _Aurora Leigh_.

[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.]

Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their
marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal
"contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows
of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security
of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring
her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet