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The invalid was at first very unwilling to receive a visit from the new friend thus acquired. His letters were a pleasure to her in her seclusion, but she was alarmed by the thought of receiving a stranger., But when this reluctance was broken through, the two spirits leaped together with a rush of mutual sympathy. It seems quite unnecessary that we should be told how much pity there was in Mr Browning’s sentiment for his wife, Their union was perfect and unbroken, although unusual in every circumstance. Perhaps had it not been that she was ordered to spend the winter in Italy, and that a most eccentric father, though eager to surround her with every luxury at home, would not permit that necessary removal, even this ardent young man might have shrunk from the responsibility of marrying and carrying off so fragile a creature (notwithstanding that the experiment of marrying a delicate woman had been so signally successful in his father’s case). But the doctor’s order made a great difference, and the result was that the invalid rose from her sofa, and with scarcely an interval stood up to be married in the prosaic interior of St Pancras Church. Talk of romance in real life! Of all places in the world to look for it, the smiling middle-class precincts of Regent’s Park, sacred to nursery-maids, where in the excitement of the approaching extraordinary crisis in her life Elizabeth Barrett got out of her carriage and stood upon her feet on the grass for one thrilling moment to make sure that it was possible—would be about the last. Nor is St Pancras Church, with its grim caryatides and awe-inspiring classicism, a likely spot for the marriage, which should have been accompanied by all manner of heavenly harpings silver trumpets, of two poets. Nobody knew of it save the bride and bridegroom and one faithful maid, with whose attendance a few days after the new wife stole out of her father’s home in the twilight of a September evening when “the family were at dinner.” Nay, she had another companion, her dog, the Flush of her tender verses, who, having the circumstances explained to him, stole out with his mistress in strict silence, resisting all temptations to bark. The young husband, thirty-two, no alien troubadour, but a sturdy Englishman with an excellent hold upon life, and understanding of its practical requirements in addition to his genius—met and took charge of this helpless and tremulous group, in no more romantic scene than a London street: and thenceforward guarded them faithfully and tenderly till death did them part.

We remember to have heard from an enthusiastic girl, a niece of Mrs Jameson, who met them at Paris and travelled southward with them, an account of this wonderful journey, upon which Mrs Orr does not linger. How they went to Vaucluse, the home of poetry, and how the poet-husband placed the poet-wife in Petrarch’s seat, and crowned her with the delicate sprays of the poet’s laurel—all poetry, love, and a dazzling glow of sentiment, which to the narrator illuminated for ever that most brilliant moment of her own fresh and beautiful youth. The whimsical father at home thought his daughter “should have been thinking of another world,” when she thus stepped trembling into the Paradise of this; and with a grim obduracy, which is more like the theatre than actual life, never forgave her, and never saw her again—a tragic piece of cruelty which however, does not