Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/134

118 personally what Elizabeth Barrett had only read of or dreamed about. It is no wonder that a feeling stronger and deeper than had as yet stirred the depths of her heart should grow up and impel the poetess towards the poet. With so many themes and thoughts in common as they had, it is no matter for surprise that the correspondence which they commenced, and for a long time continued, should grow and deepen into something warmer and more sympathetic than the usual interchange of literary manuscripts arouses.

How their friendship waxed, how their affection intensified, and how, finally, they cast in their lots together is a sweet romance the world knows not, and never can know, the record of, beyond what they, the two dramatis personæ, chose to tell themselves. "If you would know what she was," says a friend, "read 'One Word more.' He made no secret of it; why should another?" In that piece, originally appended to his collection of poems styled Men and Women, Browning so far took the world into his confidence as to tell it, as if the telling had been needed, who his "moon of poets" was. And, indeed, through many of his works from that time henceforth does the thought of one beloved wind like a golden thread through the woof of his multi-coloured imagination.

The time has not come—can scarcely ever come—when their story may be told fully; but Robert Browning has told, in his poet-speech, how his heart had realised an ideal, and Elizabeth Barrett has contributed her share towards the glorification of eternal Love in her exquisitely beautiful Sonnets from the Portuguese. These sonnets, this delicate confession of a pure woman's love, were written, it is averred, some