Association with the Brownings, even though of the slightest nature, made one better in mind and soul.  It was impossible to escape the influence of the magnetic fluid of love and poetry that was constantly passing between husband and wife.  The unaffected devotion of one to the other wove an additional charm around the two, and the very contrasts in their natures made the union a more beautiful one.  All remember Mrs. Browning’s pretty poem on her “Pet Name":—­

“I have a name, a little name,
Uncadenced for the ear,
Unhonored by ancestral claim,
Unsanctified by prayer and psalm
The solemn font anear.

* * * * *

“My brother gave that name to me,
When we were children twain,—­
When names acquired baptismally
Were hard to utter, as to see
That life had any pain.”

It was this pet name of two small letters lovingly combined that dotted Mr. Browning’s spoken thoughts, as moonbeams fleck the ocean, and seemed the pearl-bead that linked conversation together in one harmonious whole.  But what was written has now come to pass.  The pet name is engraved only in the hearts of a few.

  “Though I write books, it will be read
  Upon the leaves of none;
  And afterward, when I am dead,
  Will ne’er be graved, for sight or tread,
  Across my funeral stone.”

Mrs. Browning’s letters are masterpieces of their kind.  Easy and conversational, they touch upon no subject without leaving an indelible impression of the writer’s originality; and the myriad matters of universal interest with which many of them are teeming will render them a precious legacy to the world, when the time shall have arrived for their publication.  Of late, Italy has claimed the lion’s share in these unrhymed sketches of Mrs. Browning in the negligee of home.  Prose has recorded all that poetry threw aside; and thus much political thought, many an anecdote, many a reflection, and much womanly enthusiasm have been stored up for the benefit of more than the persons to whom these letters were addressed.  And while we wait patiently for this great pleasure, which must sooner or later be enjoyed and appreciated, we may gather a foretaste of Mrs. Browning’s power in prose-writing from her early essays, and from the admirable preface to the “Poems before Congress.”  The latter is simple in its style, and grand in teachings that find few followers among nations in these enlightened days.

Some are prone to moralize over precious stones, and see in them the petrified souls of men and women.  There is no stone so sympathetic as the opal, which one might fancy to be a concentration of Mrs. Browning’s genius.  It is essentially the woman-stone, giving out a sympathetic warmth, varying its colors from day to day, as though an index of the heart’s barometer.  There is the topmost purity of white, blended with the delicate, perpetual verdure of hope, and down in the opal’s centre lies the deep crimson of love.  The red, the white, and the green, forming as they do the colors of Italy, render the opal doubly like Mrs. Browning.  It is right that the woman-stone should inclose the symbols of the “Woman Country.”