A letter from Mrs. Browning describes a visit to Denmark Hill, and ends,—­“I like Mr. Ruskin very much, and so does Robert; very gentle, yet earnest—­refined and truthful.  I like him very much.  We count him one among the valuable acquaintances made this year in England.”  This has been dated 1855; but Ruskin, writing to Miss Mitford from Glenfinlas, 17th August, 1853, says, “I had the pleasure this spring, of being made acquainted with your dear Elizabeth Browning, as well as with her husband.  I was of course prepared to like her, but I did not expect to like him as much as I did.  I think he is really a very fine fellow, and she is the only sensible woman I have yet met with on the subject of Italian politics.  Evidently a noble creature in all things.”  In June, 1850, he had met Robert Browning, on the invitation of Coventry Patmore, and said:  “He is the only person whom I have ever heard talk ration-ally about the Italians, though on the Liberal side.”

In these volumes of “Modern Painters” he had to discuss the Mediaeval and Renaissance spirit in its relation to art, and to illustrate from Browning’s poetry, “unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages, always vital and right and profound; so that in the matter of art there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.”  This was written twenty-five years before the Browning Society was heard of, and at a time when the style of Browning was an offence to most people.  To Ruskin, also, it had been some, thing of a puzzle; and he wrote to the poet, asking him to explain himself; which the poet accordingly did.

That Ruskin was open to conviction and conversion could be shown from the difference in his tone of thought about poetry before and after this period; that he was the best of friends with the man who took him to task for narrowness, may be seen from the following letter, written on the next Christmas Eve: 

     “MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,

“Your note having just arrived, Robert deputes me to write for him while he dresses to go out on an engagement.  It is the evening.  All the hours are wasted, since the morning, through our not being found at the Rue de Grenelle, but here—­and our instinct of self-preservation or self-satisfaction insists on our not losing a moment more by our own fault.

“Thank you, thank you for sending us your book, and also for writing my husband’s name in it.  It will be the same thing as if you had written mine—­except for the pleasure, as you say, which is greater so.  How good and kind you are!

     “And not well.  That is worst.  Surely you would be better if you had
     the summer in winter we have here.  But I was to write only a
     word—­Let it say how affectionately we regard you.

     “ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING