Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the Italian tricolor.  She often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous:  but to take this step one must reach the sublime.  Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness.  Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning’s own, and very nearly as clever.  The difference between their natures was a difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light shades of the same colour.

Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private life of this lady from his father’s friend Kenyon.  The old man, who was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her “fairy godfather.”  He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents.  And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of Miss Barrett.  She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part in the same social system which stung Browning’s father into revolt and renunciation.  The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different.  He was a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his conceptions prevail.  He was an able man, capable in his language of a certain bitter felicity of phrase.  He was rigidly upright and responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection.  But selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of all despots.  His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad ones.  He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that nothing should stand in the way of its amiability.  His daughters must be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten or caressed.  During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett’s life, the family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know