Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her.  In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again “that minute.”  There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open parcels.  Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death describe her as “all a wonder and a wild desire.”

She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous sense.  Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she breathed.  She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek scholar, and read AEschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public questions.  Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her.  He does appear to have felt an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains.  In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination and found the door barred against him.  In that phrase it is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external appearance solidifying.  Miss Barrett replied to his letters with charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else to do.  She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of her life if their relations had always remained a learned and delightful correspondence.  But she must have known very little of Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy and bloodless tie.  At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond of them.  The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on any one else.  This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and doubt.  She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her health and the season of the year and the east winds.  “If my truest heart’s wishes avail,” replied Browning obstinately, “you shall laugh at east winds yet as I do.”