[Footnote 31:  I had written the above—­and I leave it as I wrote it—­before I noticed the following quoted from the letter of a friend by Mrs Arthur Bronson in her article Browning in Venice:  “Browning seemed as full of dramatic interest in reading ‘In a Balcony’ as if he had just written it for our benefit.  One who sat near him said that it was a natural sequence that the step of the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom, as, with a nature like the queen’s, who had known only one hour of joy in her sterile life, vengeance swift and terrible would follow on the sudden destruction of her happiness.  ’Now I don’t quite think that,’ answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator.  ’The queen has a large and passionate temperament, which had only once been touched and brought into intense life.  She would have died by a knife in her heart.  The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.’  ’But I imagine that most people interpret it as I do,’ was the reply.  ‘Then,’ said Browning, with quick interest, ’don’t you think it would be well to put it in the stage directions, and have it seen that they were carrying her across the back of the stage?’”]

[Footnote 32:  Browning’s eyes were in a remarkable degree unequal in their power of vision; one was unusually long-sighted; the other, with which he could read the most microscopic print, unusually short-sighted.]

[Footnote 33:  See a very interesting passage on Browning’s “odd liking for ‘vermin’” in Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.. i. 370, 371:  “I always liked all those wild creatures God ‘sets up for themselves.’” “It seemed awful to watch that bee—­he seemed so instantly from the teaching of God.”]

[Footnote 34:  Of the first part of Saul Mr Kenyon said finely that “it reminded him of Homer’s shield of Achilles thrown into lyrical whirl and life” (Letters R.B. and E.B.B. i. 326).]

Chapter V

Love and Marriage

In 1841, John Kenyon, formerly a school-fellow of Browning’s father, now an elderly lover of literature and of literary society, childless, wealthy, generous-hearted, proposed to Browning that he should call upon Elizabeth Barrett, Kenyon’s cousin once removed, who was already distinguished as a writer of ardent and original verse.  Browning consented, but the poetess “through some blind dislike of seeing strangers”—­as she afterwards told a correspondent—­declined, alleging, not untruly, as a ground of refusal, that she was then ailing in health.[35] Three years later Kenyon sent his cousin’s new volumes of Poems as a gift to Sarianna Browning; her brother, lately returned from Italy, read these volumes with delight and admiration, and found on one of the pages a reference in verse to his “Pomegranates” of a kind that could not but give him a vivid moment of pleasure.  Might he not relieve his sense of obligation by telling