Another poet, destined to become the friend of Tennyson and Fitzgerald, was Robert Browning, who born May 7, 1812, had entered his twenty-fourth year at the date of Her Majesty's accession. Before that event he had at the expense respectively of an admiring aunt, and of an indulgent father, issued a slender volume of blank verse called Pauline (1833) and a poem Paracelsus (1835), which latter was declared by the New Monthly Magazine to be a work of genius. Browning, a man under middle height, was at this time slight in figure, dark complexioned, with brilliant eyes, and an aquiline nose, which gave him a Hebraic appearance. As one who aimed at being a dandy he dressed with care, wore ringlets falling to his shoulders, and lemon-coloured kid gloves. Very ambitious, somewhat irritable, and often amusing, he had as Harriet Martineau mentions, "some little affectations which were as droll as anything he said." On the evening of May 1, 1837 at Covent Garden Theatre his play Strafford, before a house crowded with the most distinguished men and women of the day, had been produced in a slovenly half-hearted manner; the manager, then facing bankruptcy, refusing to have new scenery painted, or to buy "a rag for the new tragedy," while the disheartened company with one or two exceptions, were indifferent to its fate, inexact in the delivery of their parts, and so ignorant that as the author stated, he had "to

write out the meaning of the word impeachment as some of them thought it meant poaching." It ran for merely five nights, and though Browning's friend John Forster declared in The Examiner that Strafford suggested "the most brilliant career of dramatic authorship which has been known in our times," that suggestion was never realised.

The publication of Paracelsus was the means of introducing Browning to a number of his distinguished contemporaries who considered it a great poem; but the issue in 1840, of Sordello, met with a colder reception by them and the public, by whom it was considered involved and laboured. Pippa Passes; The Blot on the 'Scutcheon; Colombe's Birthday; and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics; did little towards gaining him a wider popularity. Although there were many intellectual persons who like Edward Fitzgerald never could read Browning," yet there were some who considered him a genuine poet. Among them was John Kenyon an old schoolfellow of Browning's father, a verse writer, a bachelor with a taste for literature and art, and ample means of indulging it. A man of affectionate disposition and gentle manner, his interest and sympathy had long been given to his cousin Elizabeth Barrett. This child of small and delicate frame and strong individuality had from infancy almost shewn a strong desire to acquire knowledge. Born March 6, 1809, the same

year as Alfred Tennyson, as Milnes, as Edward Fitzgerald, she might have been seen at the age of eight, nursing a doll and reading Homer in the original with equal delight.

In her twelfth year she had written an epic of the Battle of Marathon in four books, which her father who adored her, and who was a scholar and a lover of books, had printed. Three years later when striving to saddle her black pony Moses, she fell and injured her spine. As a result she was obliged to lie on her back for five years. Such nervous energy as she had recovered was shattered by the drowning of a favourite brother who had come to see her while she was staying at Torquay. Back in her father's home she passed a secluded existence chiefly in her own sitting-room, where she lay on a couch, "a small person scarcely embodied at all," as Nathaniel Hawthorne described her; brilliant dark eyes lighting the pallor of a face framed in black ringlets. Carefully watched over, guarded against the ugly and unhappy sights of the world, her interests were centred in literature. She read the publications of every European country, and she wrote continually. An Essay on Mind and other Poems, had been published in her seventeenth year, and Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek, was issued seven years later (1833). The Seraphim and Other Poems, appeared in 1838, and Poems in 1844.

Among the books brought to her by John Kenyon were those of Robert Browning whose originality striking a new chord among the singers of the day, won her admiration. In one of her own poems she described him as a "pomegranate which if cut deep down the middle, shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of veiled humanity." Coming to him at a period in his career when appreciation was valuable, this tribute from one whose poems he greatly admired was gratifying and stimulating. His natural desire to make her acquaintance was gratified by John Kenyon, who one afternoon late in May 1845, took him to 50 Wimpole Street to call on her. Into this tranquil and secluded room there stepped this memorable day, a young man of exhilarating health, hopeful and smiling as a summer dawn, self-confident, ambitious, and full of a fine chivalry. Both felt from the first the attraction which was to unite them for all time. To him she represented the epitome of all that was noblest, purest, and rarest and best in life; to her he was the sun dispelling the twilight of her days, the source of her happiness, the force which represented all that was free, joyous, vital, in the world shut out from her by the soft closing doors of her sanctum. Letters were exchanged between them, and his visits were repeated unknown to her father, an eccentric and stern man who concealed his affections, was a strict disciplinarian, exacted implicit obedience from

his children, and had forbidden one and all of them to think of marriage.

The day came when Browning pleaded to be allowed to devote his life to the care and protection of this fragile woman; the continuance of whose existence had seemed to depend on the utmost tranquillity, on the endurance of monotony. It was confidently, joyously, gratefully, accepted. Arrangements were hurriedly and secretly made, and on the morning of September 12, 1846, she trembling and anxious left her father's house accompanied by her devoted maid, and stepping into a cab drove to St. Pancras Church, Marylebone, where her ardent bridegroom awaited her. There they were made husband and wife. The ceremony over she returned to Wimpole Street where she remained, her secret unrevealed, until the following Saturday, when after dinner by the contrivance of her maid, she stole out of the house-her little dog Flush, her faithful friend and constant companion, clasped in her arms-to the spot where her husband, no less anxious, expected her. Entering a cab they drove to the railway station, travelled to Southampton, and that night crossed to Havre on their way to Italy.

Though her father in his fury declared he would never forgive, would never see her again, she felt as she confessed, that during the previous thirty-seven years of her life she had never before known happiness.