ection. Mrs
Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells much
of her new friend in a single Swedenborgian word--"selfhood, the
_proprium_, is not in him." Frederick Tennyson, though left in a state
of bewilderment by Browning's poetry, found the writer of the poetry "a
man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling
heart that reverbs no hollowness."[53] Another intimate who charmed them
much was one of the attaches of the English embassy, and a poet of
unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate
and excitable, full of sensibility, "full of all sorts of goodness and
nobleness," but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, "visionary enough,"
writes Mrs Browning, "to suit me," interested moreover in spiritualism,
which suited her well, "never," she unwisely prophesied, "to be a great
diplomatist." It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters,
observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the
future Ambassador at Paris and Viceroy of India.[54]

Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which
reached her--many of these from America--of the "rapping spirits," who
in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in
the way they should not go. "You know I am rather a visionary," she
wrote to Miss Mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of
the present world to try to get out." Her Swedenborgian studies had
prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the
visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being
wholly estranged from the other. A clever person who loves the
marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are
the most natural things in the world. Should we not credit human
testimony? Should we not evict prejudice from our understandings? Should
we not investigate alleged facts? Should we not keep an open mind? We
cannot but feel a certain sympathy with a woman of ardent nature who
fails to observe the bounds of intellectual prudence. Browning himself
with all his audacities was pre-eminently prudent. He did not actively
enter into politics; he did not dabble in pseudo-science; he was an
artist and a thinker; and he made poems, and amused himself with
drawing, modelling in clay, and the study of music. Mrs Browning
squandered her enthusiasms with less discretion. A good dose of
stupidity or an indignant energy of common-s