I take the courage and vanity to send to you a note which a poet [Note by R. H. Horne: Robert Browning, then personally unknown to Miss Barrett, although an intimate friend of my own], whom we both admire, wrote to a friend of mine, who lent him the MS. [of ‘The Dead Pan’]. Mark! No opinion was asked about the rhymes,—the satisfaction was altogether impulsive, from within. Send me the note back, and never tell anybody that I showed it to you—it would appear too vain. Also, I have no right to show it. It was sent to me as likely to please me, and pleased me so much and naturally on various accounts, ... that I begged to be allowed to keep it.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
“Lady Geraldine.”
A pleasing myth.
Suddenly, one day, as the product of one day’s work, she astonished her friends with the rhapsody of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’... This poem had all the faultiness which one might expect of a hundred and three stanzas forced by green-house heat into full bloom in twelve hours; this too by a weak invalid lying on a sofa; but must we spoil the pretty story that the sweet ballad had all the merit of winning for its writer the hand of Robert Browning! Yet the story is only a fiction of the gossip-writers. Nor is it true that the poet with whom she was to mate was then known to her only by his little book of ‘Bells and Pomegranates.’ She had more than a stranger’s reasons for making the wooer of Lady Geraldine speak in this wise:
“At times a modern volume—Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl,
Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie,
Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate,’ which if cut deep down the middle,
Showed a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”
Theodore Tilton: Memorial Preface to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
Surprise of Miss Barrett’s friends at her marriage.