Miss Barrett, in a letter, that he admired her work?  Mr Kenyon encouraged the suggestion, and though to love and be silent might on the whole have been more to Browning’s liking, he wrote—­January 10, 1845—­and writing truthfully he wrote enthusiastically.[36] Miss Barrett, never quite recovered from a riding accident in early girlhood, and stricken down for long in both soul and body by the shock of her brother’s death by drowning, lay from day to day and month to month, in an upper room of her father’s house in Wimpole Street, occupied, upon her sofa, with her books and papers—­her Greek dramatists and her Elizabethan poets—­shut out from the world, with windows for ever closed, and with only an occasional female visitor, to gossip of the social and literary life of London.  Never was a spirit of more vivid fire enclosed within a tomb.  The letter from Browning, “the author of Paracelsus and King of the mystics,” threw her, she says, “into ecstasics.”  Her reply has a thrill of pleasure running through its graceful half-restraint, and she holds out a hope that when spring shall arrive a meeting in the invalid chamber between her and her new correspondent may be possible.

[Illustration:  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

From a drawing in chalk by FIELD TALFOURD in the National Portrait Gallery.]

From the first a headlong yet delicate speed was in her pen; from the first there was much to say.  “Oh, for a horse with wings!” Mr Browning, who had praised her poems, must tell her their faults.  He must himself speak out in noble verse, not merely utter himself through the masks of dramatis personae.  Can she, as he alleges, really help him by her sympathy, by her counsel?  Let him put ceremony aside and treat her en bon camerade; he will find her “an honest man on the whole.”  She intends to set about knowing him as much as possible immediately.  What poets have been his literary sponsors?  Are not the critics wrong to deny contemporary genius?  What poems are those now in his portfolio?  Is not AEschylus the divinest of divine Greek spirits? but how inadequately her correspondent has spoken of Dante!  Shall they indeed—­as he suggests—­write something together?  And then—­is he duly careful of his health, careful against overwork?  And is not gladness a duty? to give back to the world the joy that God has given to his poet?  Though, indeed, to lean out of the window of this House of Life is for some the required, perhaps the happiest attitude.

And why—­replies the second voice—­lean out of the window?  His own foot is only on the stair.  Where are the faults of her poems, of which she had inquired?  Yes, he will speak out, and he is now planning such a poem as she demands.  But she it is, who has indeed spoken out in her verse?  In his portfolio is a drama about a Moor of Othello’s country, one Luria, with strange entanglings among his Florentines.  See this, and this, how grandly