y.

Health came back, and joy and peace and perfect love were theirs. But it
was joy bought with a price--Elizabeth Barrett Browning had forfeited the
love of her father. Her letters written him came back unopened, books
inscribed to him were returned--he declared she was dead.

Her brothers, too, discarded her, and when her two sisters wrote, they did
so by stealth, and their letters, meant to be kind, were steel for her
heart. Then her father was rich; and she had always known every comfort
that money could buy. Now, she had taken up with a poor poet, and every
penny had to be counted--absolute economy was demanded.

And Robert Browning, with a certain sense of guilt upon him, for
depriving her of all the creature comforts she had known, sought by
tenderness and love to make her forget the insults her father heaped upon
her.

As for Browning, the bank-clerk, he was vexed that his son should show so
little caution as to load himself up with an invalid wife, and he cut off
the allowance, declaring that if a man was old enough to marry, he was
also old enough to care for himself. He did, however, make his son several
"loans"; and finally came to "bless the day that his son had sense enough
to marry the best and most talented woman on earth."

Browning's poems were selling slowly, and Mrs. Browning's books brought
her a little royalty, thanks to the loyal management of John Kenyon, and
so absolute want and biting poverty did not overtake the runaways.

After the birth of her son, in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, Mrs.
Browning's health seemed to have fully returned. She used to ride
horseback up and down the mountain passes, and wrote home to Miss Mitford
that love had turned the dial backward and the joyousness of girlhood had
come again to her.

When John Kenyon died and left them ten thousand pounds, all their own, it
placed them forever beyond the apprehension of want, and also enabled them
to do for others; for they pensioned old Walter Savage Landor, and
established him in comfortable quarters around the corner from Casa
Guidi.

I intimated a moment ago that their honeymoon continued for two years.
This was a mistake, for it continued for just fifteen years, when the
beautiful girl-like form, with her head of flowing curls upon her
husband's shoulder, ceased to breathe. Painlessly and without apprehension
or premonition, the spirit had taken its flight.

That letter of Miss Blagdon's, written some weeks afte