lovers determined on a secret marriage. On September 12, 1846, Miss Barrett slipped unperceived from the house, and was married to Browning in Marylebone Church; she returned to her home, but on the 19th of the month she escaped, and crossed over to Paris with her husband. This action, so far as Browning was concerned, was long blamed as clandestine; but the exact facts have lately (1899) been made known in detail, and they prove that he acted throughout in strict adhesion to the principles of honour, delicacy, and good sense. For all practical purposes, Elizabeth Barrett, a woman in her forty-first year, was kept in durance by the odious tyranny of her father, and the only way in which her happiness could be secured was to carry her off, like a captive maiden from an ogre's castle. The old man never forgave her, and to his last hour refused to relent; it is difficult to believe that he was perfectly sane, for

he behaved in exactly the same way to two other of his daughters. The Brownings, having, as Mrs. Jameson said, "married under circumstances such as to render imprudence the height of prudence," passed on from Paris to Italy, not without great anxiety as to Elizabeth's health. But in happy and free conditions this revived in a wonderful way. They settled in Pisa, where, early in the

The Sitting-room in Casa Guidi
(Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)

year 1847, Mrs. Browning showed to her husband the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," which she had written during their engagement; in 1850 these were added to the second edition of her Poems. For the greater part of the rest of her life, the Brownings lived at Florence, in the Palazzo Guidi, and here her son and only child was born in March 1849. On the whole, although these years in Italy she was never strong, brought her happiness and comparative health. Her love for her husband was only equalled by his absorbing devotion for her, and the names of no two persons more exquisitely attached to one another are to be met with in the whole history of literature. When Wordsworth died, Mrs. Browning was mentioned for the Laureateship, before it fell to Tennyson. She was now greatly interested in Italian politics, and they tinctured her next publication, the poem of Casa Guidi Windows, 1851. So far was the health of Elizabeth at this time recovered, that the couple were able to take a lengthy tour in Europe, even revisiting London. The last ten years of the life of Elizabeth Browning were not eventful; she was more and more absorbed in literature and Italian politics, and in correspond

ence with a wide circle of friends. She published Aurora Leigh in the winter of 1856, and Poems before Congress in 1860. Her Last Poems, posthumously published in 1862, contained some of the most admirable of her later lyrics, and among others, "What was he doing, the great God Pan?" In the summer of 1861 she was conscious of increasing weakness, but her actual death, on the 29th of June, at Casa Guidi and in the

revers /

Missuiting a great man most

If such should speak of his own;
Nor will he act, on her side,

From motives baser, indeed,

Than a man of a noble pride

Can avow for himself at need;

Norever, for lucre or laurels,

•Or custom, supposing it rife, though such should be) ng Adapt the smaller morals

ring

To measure the larger life.

Net, though the merchants persuade,

And the soldiers are eager for strife,

Finds not will he find his country in quarrels
/ =

never

Only to find her in trade,

still-seeerd her such honor As not to flinch for her sake

While still he accords,
While still he accords

Where men pict when mankind -put service upon her ^3/

Found heavy to undertake/

And scarcely like to be paid:
Believing a nation may act
Unselfishly-breaking a lance

(As the least of her sons may, in fact)

And not for a cause of finance

Emperor
Evermore.

inance+

shiver/

A page from "Poems before Congress," 1860, with MS. corrections by Mrs. Browning

arms of her husband, came almost as a surprise. She lies buried at Florence, in a sarcophagus designed by Leighton, "a Lyric Love, half angel and half bird." This famous expression of her husband's refers to the extreme fragility of her form; she was a tiny woman, with a head large in proportion to her body; her copious "blue-black" ringlets fell so as half to conceal the mobile and interesting rather than actually beautiful features, which quivered with sensibility and intelligence. No other woman in England has devoted her life so completely to the cultivation of imaginative literature as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

FROM "COWPER'S GRAVE."

It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart's decaying,-
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying:
Yet let the grief and humbleness, as low as silence, languish !
Earth surely now may give her calm to whom she gave her anguish.

O poets! from a maniac's tongue was poured the deathless singing!
O Christians! at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!
O men! this man, in brotherhood, your weary paths beguiling,
Groaned inly while he taught you peace, and died while ye were smiling!

And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell, and darkness on the glory;

And how, when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed, He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted :

He shall be strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation,

And bow the meekest Christian down in meeker adoration :

Nor ever shall he be, in praise, by wise or good forsaken ;

Named softly, as the household name of one whom God hath taken.

With quiet sadness and no gloom, I learn to think upon him,

With meekness, that is gratefulness to God whose heaven hath won him-
Who suffered once the madness-cloud, to His own love to blind him ;
But gently led the blind along where breath and bird could find him ;

And wrought within his shattered brain such quick poetic senses,
As hills have language for, and stars, harmonious influences !
The pulse of dew upon the grass, kept his within its number;
And silent shadows from the trees refreshed him like a slumber.

Wild timid hares were drawn from woods to share his home-caresses,
Uplooking to his human eyes with sylvan tendernesses :
The very world, by God's constraint, from falsehood's ways removing,
Its women and its men became, beside him, true and loving.

But while in blindness he remained unconscious of the guiding,
And things provided came without the sweet sense of providing,
He testified this solemn truth, though frenzy desolated-
Nor man, nor nature satisfy, whom only God created!

FROM "THE DEAD PAN."

Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,

Can ye listen in your silence?

Can your mystic voices tell us

Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore

Keeps you out of sight of shore?

Pan, Pan is dead.

In what revels are ye sunken

In old Æthiopia?

Have the pygmies made you drunken,

Bathing in mandragora

Your divine pale lips that shiver

Like the lotus in the river?

Pan, Pan is dead.