Page:Masterpieces of the sea (Morris, Richards, 1912).djvu/47

MASTERPIECES OF THE SEA an ardent, intellectual Quaker girl, who even then had written dramas and published verses. The young people were a part of the group, literary and artistic, that the Pearsall Smiths attracted to their hospitable house, and it was out of the association thus formed that they came to know each other better and to prize each other for likable traits.

Thus, before the young painter went to Europe, they were engaged to be married, though they had agreed to withhold the news from their friends, and concerning this romantic episode Miss Bridges says: "It was their mutual interest in Browning and Tennyson, and all the poets of that day, which drew them together"—a fine start for a household of ideals such as found embodiment in the tranquil home to be.

Its beginning was not long delayed—for on June 30, 1856, very soon after Mr. Richards' return, they were married by Quaker ceremony; not in the home of the bride, because the distaste for artists still 27