[Illustration:  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.  From the painting by Field Talfourd, National Portrait Gallery._]

Romantic Marriage with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett,—­Her Poetry.—­In 1845, after Browning had published some ten volumes of verse, among which were Paracelsus (1835), Pippa Passes (1841), and Dramatic Lyrics (1842), he met Miss Elizabeth Barrett Barrett (1806-1861), whose poetic reputation was then greater than his own.  The publication in 1898 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett disclosed an unusual romance.  When he first met her, she was an invalid in her father’s London house, passing a large part of her time on the couch, scarcely able to see all the members of her own family at the same time.  His magnetic influence helped her to make more frequent journeys from the sofa to an armchair, then to walk across the room, and soon to take drives.

Her father, who might have sat for the original of Meredith’s “Egoist,” had decided that his daughter should be an invalid and remain with him for life.  When Browning proposed to Miss Barrett that he should ask her father for her hand, she replied that such a step would only make matters worse.  “He would rather see me dead at his feet than yield the point,” she said.  In 1846 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her faithful maid, drove to a church and was married to Browning.  The bride returned home; but Browning did not see her for a week because he would not indulge in the deception of asking for “Miss Barrett.”  Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy, where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years.  She repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health and happy marriage, but he never answered her.

Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had moved her to write The Cry of the Children.  After Edgar Allan Poe had read its closing lines:—­

  “...the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
  Than the strong man in his wrath,”

he said that she had depicted “a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of which Dante himself might have been proud.”

Her best work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, written after Browning had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender, unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman’s heart.  Sympathetic readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could exactly fill their place.  Browning called them “the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s.”  Those who like the simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:—­