Her father, who might have sat for the original of Meredith's "Egoist," had decided that his daughter should be an invalid and remain with him for life. When Browning proposed to Miss Barrett that he should ask her father for her hand, she replied that such a step would only make matters worse. "He would rather see me dead at his feet than yield the point," she said. In 1846 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her faithful maid, drove to a church and was married to Browning. The bride returned home; but Browning did not see her for a week because he would not indulge in the deception of asking for "Miss Barrett." Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy, where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years. She repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health and happy marriage, but he never answered her.
Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had moved her to write The Cry of the Children. After Edgar Allan Poe had read its closing lines:—
"…the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath,"
he said that she had depicted "a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of which Dante himself might have been proud."
Her best work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, written after Browning had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender, unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman's heart. Sympathetic readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could exactly fill their place. Browning called them "the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." Those who like the simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:—
"I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was buried in Florence. When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem Prospice (1861) welcoming death as—
"…a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest."
His Later Years.—Soon after his wife's death, he began his long poem of over twenty thousand lines, The Ring and the Book. He continued to write verse to the year of his death.
In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion of his works,—a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime. The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrew's and the presidency of the Wordsworth Society.