Marriage

In 1841, John Kenyon, formerly a school-fellow of Browning's father, now
an elderly lover of literature and of literary society, childless,
wealthy, generous-hearted, proposed to Browning that he should call upon
Elizabeth Barrett, Kenyon's cousin once removed, who was already
distinguished as a writer of ardent and original verse. Browning
consented, but the poetess "through some blind dislike of seeing
strangers"--as she afterwards told a correspondent--declined, alleging,
not untruly, as a ground of refusal, that she was then ailing in
health.[35] Three years later Kenyon sent his cousin's new volumes of
_Poems_ as a gift to Sarianna Browning; her brother, lately returned
from Italy, read these volumes with delight and admiration, and found on
one of the pages a reference in verse to his "Pomegranates" of a kind
that could not but give him a vivid moment of pleasure. Might he not
relieve his sense of obligation by telling Miss Barrett, in a letter,
that he admired her work? Mr Kenyon encouraged the suggestion, and
though to love and be silent might on the whole have been more to
Browning's liking, he wrote--January 10, 1845--and writing truthfully he
wrote enthusiastically.[36] Miss Barrett, never quite recovered from a
riding accident in early girlhood, and stricken down for long in both
soul and body by the shock of her brother's death by drowning, lay from
day to day and month to month, in an upper room of her father's house in
Wimpole Street, occupied, upon her sofa, with her books and papers--her
Greek dramatists and her Elizabethan poets--shut out from the world,
with windows for ever closed, and with only an occasional female
visitor, to gossip of the social and literary life of London. Never was
a spirit of more vivid fire enclosed within a tomb. The letter from
Browning, "the author of _Paracelsus_ and King of the mystics," threw
her, she says, "into ecstasics." Her reply has a thrill of pleasure
running through its graceful half-restraint, and she holds out a hope
that when spring shall arrive a meeting in the invalid chamber between
her and her new correspondent may be possible.

[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

_From a drawing in chalk by_ FIELD TALFOURD _in the National Portrait
Gallery_.]

From the first a headlong yet delicate speed was in her pen; from the
first there was much to say. "Oh, for a horse with wings!" Mr Browning,
who had praised her poems, must tell her their