Elizabeth Barret Browning 
AND
Robert
Browning
Meanwhile the friendship with
Browning had become the chief thing in Elizabeth Barrett's life. The
correspondence, once begun, had not flagged. In the early summer they met. The
allusion to his poetry in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" had doubtless
put an edge to his already keen wish to know her. He became her frequent
visitor and kept her room fragrant with flowers. He never lagged, whether in
friendship or in love. We have the strange privilege, since the publication of
the letters between the two, of following the whole course of this noble love
story from beginning to end, and day by day. Browning was six years younger
than the woman he so passionately admired, and he at first believed her to be
confined by some hopeless physical injury to her sofa. But of his own wish and
resolution he never doubted. Her hesitation, in her regard for his liberty and
strength, to burden him with an ailing wife, she has recorded in the Sonnets
afterwards published under a slight disguise as Sonnets from the Portuguese.
She refused him once "with all her will, but much against her heart",
and yielded at last for his sake rather than her own. Her father's will was
that his children should not marry, and, kind and affectionate father though he
was, the prohibition took a violent form and struck terror into the hearts of
the three dutiful and sensitive girls. Robert Browning's addresses were,
therefore, kept secret, for fear of scenes of anger which the most fragile of
the three could not face. Browning was reluctant to practice the deception;
Elizabeth alone knew how impossible it was to avoid it. When she was persuaded
to marry, it was she who insisted, in mental and physical terror, upon a secret
wedding. Throughout the summer of 1846 her health improved, and on the 12th of
September the two poets were married in St. Marylebone parish church. Browning
visited it on his subsequent journeys to England to give thanks for what had
taken place at its altar. Elizabeth's two sisters had been permitted to know of
the engagement, but not of the wedding, so that their father's anger might not
fall on them too heavily. For a week Mrs. Browning remained in her father's
house. On the 19th of September she left it, taking her maid and her little
dog, joined her husband, and crossed to the Continent. She never entered that
home again, nor did her father ever forgive her. Her letters, written with
tears to entreat his pardon, were never answered. They were all subsequently
returned to her unopened. Among them was one she had written, in the prospect
of danger, before the birth of her child. With her sisters her relations were,
as before, most affectionate. Her brothers, one at least of whom disapproved of
her action, held for a time aloof. All others were taken entirely by surprise.
Mrs. Jameson, who had been one of the few intimate visitors to Miss Barrett's
room, had offered to take her to Italy that year, but met her instead on her
way there with a newly-married husband. The poet's journey was full of delight.
Where she could not walk, up long staircases or across the waters of the stream
at Vaucluse, Browning carried her. In October they reached Pisa, and there they
wintered, Mrs. Jameson keeping them company for a time lest ignorance of
practical things should bring them, in their poverty, to trouble. She soon
found that they were both admirable economists; not that they gave time and
thought to husbandry, but that they knew how to enjoy life without luxuries. So
they remained to the end, frugal and content with little.
For climate and cheapness they
settled in Italy, choosing Florence in the spring of 1847, and remaining there,
with the interruptions of a change to places in Italy such as Siena and Rome,
and to Paris and England, until Mrs. Browning's death. It was at Pisa that
Robert Browning first saw the Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems which his wife
had written in secret and had no thought of publishing. He, however, resolved
to give them to the world. "I dared not", he said, "reserve to
myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's."
The judgment, which the existence of Wordsworth's sonnets renders obviously
absurd, may be pardoned. The sonnets were sent to Miss Mitford and published at
Reading, as Sonnets by E.B.B., in 1847. In 1850 they were included, under their
final title, in a new issue of poems.