and Wilson, left what had been her home.  Flush was warned to make no demonstration, and he behaved with admirable discretion.  It was “dreadful” to cause pain to her father by a voluntary act; but another feeling sustained her:—­“You only!  As if one said God only.  And we shall have Him beside, I pray of Him.”  At Hodgson’s, the stationer and bookseller’s, they found Browning, and a little later husband and wife, with the brave Wilson and the discreet Flush, were speeding from Vauxhall to Southampton, in good time to catch the boat for Havre.  A north wind blew them vehemently from the English coast.  In the newspaper announcements of the wedding the date was to be omitted, and Browning rejected the suggestion that on this occasion, and with reference to the great event of his life, he should be defined to the public as “the author of Paracelsus.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 35:  Letters of E.B.B., i. 288.]

[Footnote 36:  See Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 281.]

[Footnote 37:  E.B.B. to R.B., March 30, 1846.]

[Footnote 38:  E.B.B. to R.B., Sept. 14, 1846.]

[Footnote 39:  R.B. to E.B.B., Sept. 14, 1846.]

Chapter VI

Early Years in Italy

The letters from which this story has been drawn have from first to last one burden; in them deep answers to deep; they happily are of a nature to escape far from the pedantries of literary criticism.  It cannot be maintained that Browning quite equals his correspondent in the discovery of rare and exquisite thoughts and feelings; or that his felicity in giving them expression is as frequent as hers.  Even on matters of literature his comments are less original than hers, less penetrating, less illuminating.  Her wit is the swifter and keener.  When Browning writes to afford her amusement, he sometimes appears to us, who are not greatly amused, a little awkward and laborious.  She flashes forth a metaphor which embodies some mystery of feeling in an image entirely vital; he, with a habit of mind of which he was conscious and which often influences his poetry, fastens intensely on a single point and proceeds to muffle this in circumstance, assured that it will be all the more vividly apparent when the right instant arrives and requires this; but meanwhile some staying-power is demanded from the reader.  Neither correspondent has the art of etching a person or a scene in a few decisive lines; the gift of Carlyle, the gift of Carlyle’s brilliant wife is not theirs, perhaps because acid is needed to bite an etcher’s plate.  And, indeed, many of the minor notabilities of 1845, whose names appear in these letters, might hardly have repaid an etcher’s intensity of selective vision.  Among the groups of spirits who presented themselves to Dante there were some wise enough not to expect