was long ago calculated—­and it supposed you, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible.”  But his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short.  Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other.  The same deep sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial that remained,—­from the apparent degradation of secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning of 1846, from an invalid’s couch to be married.  That “peculiarity,” as she gently termed it, of her father’s, malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have postponed.  His refusal to allow her to seek health in Italy in Oct. 1845 had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in Aug. 1846 drove her to the one alternative of going there as Browning’s wife.  A week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, Mrs Browning left her home, with the faithful Wilson and the indispensable Flush, en route for Southampton.  The following day they arrived in Paris.

[Footnote 30:  R.B. to E.B.B., Sept. 13, 1845.]

II.

There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, for they were never parted.  That is the sufficient outward symbol of their all but flawless union.  After a leisurely journey through France, and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning’s two frustrated journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the Palazzo (or “Casa”) Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti.

Their life—­mirrored for us in Mrs Browning’s vivid and delightful letters—­was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits.  It is possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted means.  All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity.  Their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career.  Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues.  Mrs Jameson laughed at their “miraculous prudence and economy”; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her husband’s punctilious rigour in paying his debts,—­his “horror of owing five shillings for five days”; Browning,