Horne — a poet of genius, and a dramatist of remarkable power — was one of the truest friends she ever had, and, so far as her literary life is concerned, came next in influence only to her poet-husband. Among the friends she saw much of in the early forties was a distant "cousin", John Kenyon — a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man, who acted the part of Providence to many troubled souls, and, in particular, was "a fairy godfather" to Elizabeth Barrett and to "the other poet", as he used to call Browning. It was to Mr. Kenyon — "Kenyon, with the face of a Benedictine monk, but the most jovial of good fellows," as a friend has recorded of him; "Kenyon the Magnificent", as he was called by Browning — that Miss Barrett owed her first introduction to the poetry of her future husband.
Browning's poetry had for her an immediate appeal. With sure insight she discerned the special quality of the poetic wealth of the "Bells and Pomegranates", among which she then and always cared most for the penultimate volume, the "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics". Two years before she met the author she had written, in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" —
"Or from Browning some `Pomegranate' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."
A little earlier she had even, unwittingly on either side, been a collaborateur with "the author of `Paracelsus'." She gave Horne much aid in the preparation of his "New Spirit of the Age", and he has himself told us "that the mottoes, which are singularly happy and appropriate, were for the most part supplied by Miss Barrett and Robert Browning, then unknown to each other." One thing and another drew them nearer and nearer. Now it was a poem, now a novel expression, now a rare sympathy.
An intermittent correspondence ensued, and both poets became anxious to know each other. "We artists — how well praise agrees with us," as Balzac says.
A few months later, in 1846, they came to know one another personally. The story of their first meeting, which has received a wide acceptance, is apocryphal. The meeting was brought about by Kenyon. This common friend had been a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and so it was natural that he took a more than ordinary interest in the brilliant young poet, perhaps all the more so that the reluctant tide of popularity which had promised to set in with such unparalleled sweep and weight had since experienced a steady ebb.
And so the fates brought these two together. The younger was already far the stronger, but he had an unbounded admiration for Miss Barrett. To her, he was even then the chief living poet. She perceived his ultimate greatness; as early as 1845 had "a full faith in him as poet and prophet."
As Browning admitted to a friend, the love between them was almost instantaneous, a thing of the eyes, mind, and heart — each striving for supremacy, till all were gratified equally in a common joy. They had one bond of sterling union: passion for the art to which both had devoted their lives.
To those who love love for love's sake, who `se passionnent pour la passion,' as Prosper Merimee says, there could scarce be a more sacred spot in London than that fiftieth house in unattractive Wimpole Street, where these two poets first met each other; and where, in the darkened room, "Love quivered, an invisible flame." Elizabeth Barrett was indeed, in her own words, "as sweet as Spring, as Ocean deep." She, too, was always, as she wrote of Harriet Martineau, in a hopeless anguish of body and serene triumph of spirit. As George Sand says of one of her fictitious personages, she was an "artist to the backbone; that is, one who feels life with frightful intensity." To this too keen intensity of feeling must be attributed something of that longing for repose, that deep craving for rest from what is too exciting from within, which made her affirm the exquisite appeal to her of such Biblical passages as "The Lord of peace Himself give you peace," and "He giveth His Beloved Sleep," which, as she says in one of her numerous letters to Miss Mitford, "strike upon the disquieted earth with such a FOREIGNNESS of heavenly music."
Nor was he whom she loved as a man, as well as revered as a poet, unworthy of her. His was the robustest poetic intellect of the century; his the serenest outlook; his, almost the sole unfaltering footsteps along the perilous ways of speculative thought. A fair life, irradiate with fairer ideals, conserved his native integrity from that incongruity between practice and precept so commonly exemplified. Comely in all respects, with his black-brown wavy hair, finely-cut features, ready and winsome smile, alert luminous eyes, quick, spontaneous, expressive gestures — an inclination of the head, a lift of the eyebrows, a modulation of the lips, an assertive or deprecatory wave of the hand, conveying so much — and a voice at that time of a singular penetrating sweetness, he was, even without that light of the future upon his forehead which she was so swift to discern, a man to captivate any woman of kindred nature and sympathies. Over and above these advantages, he possessed a rare quality of physical magnetism. By virtue of this he could either attract irresistibly or strongly repel.