"Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25] and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled; Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.

[25] She had at once discerned the "new voice" in Paracelsus, 1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in 1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's wonder" (R.B. to E.B.B., Jan. 10, 1845).

But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience up to the time when they met had been in most points [singularly] unlike his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students, and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being "learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly, like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the rôle of hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling violence,—sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of collocation. [Both] poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries by a certain exuberance—"a fine excess"—quite foreign to the instincts of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long,"[26] intense, and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was something of Æschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him; it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself upon the task of rendering the Prometheus Bound in English; they met on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was [lyric], not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was personating some imaginary mind.

[26] The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could not pronounce it. He said she was testa lunga (Letters of R. and E.B., i. 7).
[27] Letters, R. and E.B., i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (Letters of E.B.B., ii., 200).

Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other men's stories, burst at once in medias res in this great story of his own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find fault,"—"nothing comes of it all,—so into me has it gone and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was also direct, as his own was not. His frank cameraderie was touched from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by no means prone. "You do, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's nature. His [brilliant] virtuosity in the personation of other minds threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken from his "dancing ring of men and women,"—the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,—he meant to write it. Miss Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like Sibrandus or The Spanish Cloister, which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly fragile woman is too rarely credited. Pippa Passes she could find in her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other works—a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845 and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and [wellbred] shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And it is clear that before the last plays, Luria and A Soul's Tragedy, were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually becoming adjusted, "seeing all things, as it does, in you."

[28] E.B.B to R.B., 26th May 1846. Cf. R.B., 13th Feb. 1846.

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity applied to herself his unconscious phrase—

"Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold,"

"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]—shows at the same time the keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With the world of society and affairs she had other channels of communication. But no one of her other friends—not Orion Horne, not even Kenyon—bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the [need] for lyrical utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer contact with common things. If she had her part in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, he had his, no less, in Aurora Leigh.