Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/27

 several times in these volumes whether it be possible for poets to be good husbands and wives. Mrs. Browning's friends seem to have been inclined to drop little cynical maxims. They think marriage in general is a failure; that the more love there is at starting the less there will be afterwards; and that poets, in particular, are apt to make very bad husbands. A certain number of precedents might be produced in favour of the last doctrine; but these letters prove conclusively that if too often verified it is not necessarily true. Probably one's first reflection is that the love of poets is in substance remarkably like the love of other people; and that is only the other side of the obvious remark that even ordinary people are poets in so far as they are lovers. The difference is that we who are inarticulate owe to the poet the full expression of all that gives the truest happiness and beauty to our commonplace lives. Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese are a concentrated utterance of what she says in prose in these letters; and the letters show how the poetic sentiment brightened every little prosaic detail in the brief drama of the courtship. The feeling on both sides is so pure and intense that every letter increases our affection for