Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/139

Rh think of, as falling to the lot of one who, from a darkened chamber, bad still exercised such a power of delighting others."

Miss Mitford, Horne, and other friends expressed equal surprise, but none of them had the wonder brought home to them so startlingly as Mrs. Jameson. She had left her friend unable to accompany her abroad—"forced to be satisfied with the sofa and silence"—and directly afterwards, almost as soon as she had reached Paris, she received a note from Mr. Browning, telling her that he had just arrived from England, and that he was on his way to Italy with his wife, the same "E.B.B." she had just taken leave of! "My aunt's surprise," says Mrs. Macpherson, "was something almost comical, so startling and entirely unexpected was the news."

Mrs. Jameson, of course, called on the Brownings, and persuaded them to leave the hotel they were staying at for a quiet pension in the Rue Ville l'Evêque, where she was residing. They remained together in Paris for a fortnight, during which period Mrs. Jameson wrote to a friend: "I have also here a poet and a poetess—two celebrities who have run away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world. I think it possible I may go on to Italy with them."

The possibility came about, and the whole party, Mr. and Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Jameson and niece, travelled slowly southwards to Pisa, where the newly-married couple proposed living for a while at least. How Mrs. Browning contrived to endure all the