persons fancy and grow effusive over was here the simplest and yet always a miraculous reality—­“He of the heavens and earth brought us together so wonderfully, holding two souls in his hand."[37] In the most illuminating words of each correspondent no merely private, or peculiar feeling is expressed; it is the common wave of human passion, the common love of man and woman, that here leaps from the depths to the height, and over which the iris of beauty ever and anon appears with—­it is true—­an unusual intensity.  And so in reading the letters we have no sense of prying into secrets; there are no secrets to be discovered; what is most intimate is most common; only here what is most common rises up to its highest point of attainment.  “I never thought of being happy through you or by you or in you even, your good was all my idea of good, and is” “Let me be too near to be seen....  Once I used to be more uneasy, and to think that I ought to make you see me.  But Love is better than sight.”  “I love your love too much.  And that is the worst fault, my beloved, I can ever find in my love of you.”  These are sentences that tell of what can be no private possession, being as liberal and free as our light and air.  And if the shadow of a cloud appears—­appears and passes away—­it is a shadow that has floated over many other hearts beside that of the writer:  “How dreadfully natural it would be to me, seem to me, if you did leave off loving me!  How it would be like the sun’s setting ... and no more wonder.  Only, more darkness.”  The old exchange of tokens, the old symbolisms—­a lock of hair, a ring, a picture, a child’s penholder—­are good enough for these lovers, as they had been for others before them.  What is diffused through many of the letters is gathered up and is delivered from the alloy of superficial circumstance in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” in reading which we are in the presence of womanhood—­womanhood delivered from death by love and from darkness by; light—­as much as in that of an individual woman.  And the disclosure in poems and in letters being without reserve affects us as no disclosure, but simply as an adequate expression of the truth universal.

One obstacle to the prospective marriage was steadily diminishing in magnitude; Miss Barrett, with a new joy in life, new hopes, new interests, gained in health and strength from month to month.  The winter of 1845-46 was unusually mild.  In January one day she walked—­walked, and was not carried—­downstairs to the drawing-room.  Spring came early that year; in the first week of February lilacs and hawthorn were in bud, elders in leaf, thrushes and white-throats in full song.  In April Miss Barrett gave pledges of her confidence in the future by buying a bonnet; a little like a Quaker’s, it seemed to her, but the learned pronounced it fashionable.  Early in May, that bonnet, with its owner and Arabel and Flush, appeared in Regent’s Park, while sunshine