and was also intimately acquainted with the Garrows and with Theodosia, must have been the first means of bringing the girls together.  There were assuredly very few young women in England at that day to whom Theodosia Garrow in social intercourse would have had to look up, as to one on a higher intellectual level than her own.  But Elizabeth Barrett was one of them.  I am not talking of acquirements.  Nor was my wife thinking of such when she used to speak of the poetess as she had known her at that time.  I am talking, as my wife used to talk, of pure native intellectual power.  And I consider it to have been no small indication of the capacity of my wife’s intelligence, that she so clearly and appreciatingly recognised and measured the distance between her friend’s intellect and her own.  But this appreciation on the one side was in nowise incompatible with a large and generous amount of admiration on the other.  And many a talk in long subsequent years left with me the impression of the high estimation which the gifted poetess had formed of the value of her highly, but not so exceptionally, gifted admirer.

Of course this old friendship paved the way for a new one when the Brownings came to live in Florence.  I flatter myself that that would in any case have found some raison d’etre.  But the pleasure of the two girls—­girls no more in any sense—­in meeting again quickened the growth of an intimacy which might otherwise have been slower in ripening.

To say that amid all that frivolous, gay, giddy, and, it must be owned, for the most part very unintellectual society (in the pleasures and pursuits of which, to speak honestly, I took, well pleased, my full share), my visits to Casa Guidi were valued by me as choice morsels of my existence, is to say not half enough.  I was conscious even then of coming away from those visits a better man, with higher views and aims.  And pray, reader, understand that any such effect was not produced by any talk or look or word of the nature of preaching, or anything approaching to it, but simply by the perception and appreciation of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was; of the immaculate purity of every thought that passed through her pellucid mind, and the indefeasible nobility of her every idea, sentiment, and opinion.  I hope my reader is not so much the slave of conventional phraseology as to imagine that I use the word “purity” in the above sentence in its restricted and one may say technical, sense.  I mean the purity of the upper spiritual atmosphere in which she habitually dwelt; the absolute disseverance of her moral as well as her intellectual nature from all those lower thoughts as well as lower passions which smirch the human soul.  In mind and heart she was white—­stainless.  That is what I mean by purity.