together, after what broke my heart at Torquay, I lived on the outside of my own life, blindly and darkly from day to day, as completely dead to hope of any kind as if I had my face against a grave, never feeling a personal instinct, taking trains of thought to carry out as an occupation, absolutely indifferent to the me which is in every human being. Nobody quite understood this of me, because I am not morally a coward, and have a hatred of all the forms of audible groaning. A thoroughly morbid and desolate state it was, which I look back now to with the sort of horror with which one would look at one's graveclothes, if one had been clothed in them by mistake during a trance.”

What followed can only be understood by explaining the character of Mr. Barrett, and the utter hopelessness of trying to move him by any appeals to his reason or his parental love. He had long since constituted himself absolute dictator in his family, and no one ever questioned his will in the smallest matter. The year previous to Mr. Browning's declaration of his love, his daughter Elizabeth for the first time came into something like collision with him on the subject of her own health. She had been told by her physicians, and had long felt herself, that her only hope of betterment .lay in seeking a warmer climate in the winter season. So she desired to go to Italy for the winter, and took all the preliminarysteps for doing so, never once doubting that her father would desire to have her go if she wished. But the mere mention of it, the thought that she had even dared to think of such a thing for herself without his taking the initiative, excited his anger to such an extent that not only did she have to give up the thought of making the journey, but he treated

her with such harshness that it prostrated her for many months. She knew well enough his exaggerated notions of authority, but she had never before doubted his affection. Now he did not come to her room, except for five minutes in the morning, and showed her his displeasure in every way he could. She had always loved him for father and mother both, and she tells us that "he had always had the greatest power over my heart, because I am of those weak women who reverence strong men. By a word he might have bound me to him hand and foot. Never has he spoken a gentle word to me or looked a kind look which has not made in me large results of gratitude, and throughout my illness the sound of his step on the stairs has had the power of quickening my pulse, I have loved him so and love him." Now there was set up against this hardness and coldness, this isolation and despair, the warmth of a great love, the promise of that tenderness which her heart so needed, and that understanding of her nature for which she had always yearned. Her whole impulse was to yield; but the habit of a lifetime was against her, she was so accustomed to yield to her father that she found it almost impossible to resist his will. And she was well aware that he would show her no favor. As soon as he had suspected that Mr. Browning had any special interest in visiting his daughter, he had frowned sternly upon him. It had long been understood in the family that no member of it would ever be allowed to marry, and retain the affection of the father. He considered his children as his property, and never admitted that any one of them had any individual rights. So from the first

there was no thought of taking him into their confidence. It would have been the signal for his casting his daughter off forever, and she was too weak to go through that terrific ordeal. She says in regard to it: "That I was constrained to act clandestinely, and did not choose to do so, God is witness, and will set it down as my heavy misfortune, and not my fault." She was privately married to Mr. Browning on September 10, 1846, and immediately crossed the Channel to Havre, and so on to Paris. Even her sisters did not know of the time of her marriage, though they knew of her engagement. She had kept it from them for their own sakes, fearing to draw upon their heads their father's displeasure. But they entirely approved her action, and one of them, a few years later, was obliged to take similar action in her own case, her father refusing to allow her to be married, after an engagement of several years' standing. He behaved in the same manner to all his children when the time for their marriages came around. From the moment of Elizabeth's marriage he cast her off and disowned her. She wrote to him regularly for years, only to find out in the end that he never opened one of her letters, even those sent in black-bordered envelopes, which might have contained the news of the death of her husband or child. He returned them all to her after many years, when she had made one final appeal to him, in order to have her understand the impossibility of any relenting on his part. This was a life-long grief to her, and one great cause of her never returning to England, except for brief visits. Her father never did relent, but died as he had lived, -harsh and implacable.

The newly married couple met their friend Mrs. Jameson in Paris, and after spending a few weeks there, they journeyed on with her to Pisa. She was the greatest possible comfort to them in that anxious time. Of course there was great anxiety about Mrs. Browning's health at first, but she bore the journey wonderfully well, not suffering from it in the least, except from fatigue. In October they reached Pisa, and settled down there for the winter. The mild climate, as she had anticipated, agreed with her, and she remained permanently much better than she had ever been in England. She was able to go about from the first, guardedly of course, and was never reduced to a state of complete invalidism from that time. Her friends regarded it as a miracle, and she herself called it the miracle of love. She grew to love Italy, and even in the heat of its summers was well and happy. From the first her letters are a record of delight, and that note is never lost through all the long years. In one of the first

letters written from Pisa she says:

"I was never happy before in my life. Ah, but, of course, the painful thoughts recur! There are some whom I love too tenderly to be easy under their displeasure, or even under their injustice. Only it seems to me that with time and patience my poor dearest papa will be melted into opening his arms to us, will be melted into a clearer understanding of motives and intentions; I cannot believe he will forget me, as he says he will, and go on thinking me to be dead rather than alive and happy. So I manage to hope for the best; and all that remains, all my life here, is best already, could not be better or happier."

Again she says:

"I have been neither much wiser nor much foolisher than all the shes in the world, only much happier, the difference is in the happiness. Certainly I am not likely to repent of having given myself to him. I cannot, for all the pain received from another quarter, the comfort for which is that my conscience is pure of the sense of having broken the least known duty, and that the same consequence would follow any marriage of any member of my family with any possible man or woman. I look to time, to reason, and natural love and pity, and to the justification of the events acting through all; I look on so and hope, and in the meanwhile it has been a great comfort to have had not merely the indulgence but the approbation and sympathy of most of my old personal friends oh, such letters!"

The marriage was undoubtedly an ideal one, and the happiness of it very great, as was evidenced by all her letters to the very end of her life, and by all the accounts which friends and relatives have given of it. The situation was rather trying too; the perpetual tête-à-tête, the solitude of a new and strange land, the need of a life of exile, the comparative poverty, the delicate health, all these things offered opportunity for discontent, if the deep feeling had not more than counterbalanced them. The cheapness of living in Italy at that time, was one inducement to live permanently there. For three hundred pounds a year they enjoyed advantages which they could not have had for twice that sum in England, and they always needed to consider the money question. Neither of them made much money by their poems for many years, and it was not until after they received a a legacy of eleven thousand pounds from her cousin Mr. Kenyon, that they were