It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his publisher and his solicitor obscurely.  In the case of Mrs. Browning it is somewhat more difficult to understand.  For she at least had, beyond all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not easily reconcile itself with this subtlety.  But she was partly under the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning.  Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort which can be pursued very much by the outside public.  Their letters may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private.  They write to each other in a language of their own, an almost exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes of interrogation.  Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always used in speaking of Browning, “So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett have gone off together.  I hope they understand each other—­nobody else would.”  It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a marriage.  Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in their lives and in their correspondence.  “I have a convenient theory to account for Mr. Kenyon,” writes Browning mysteriously, “and his otherwise unaccountable kindness to me.”  “For Mr. Kenyon’s kindness,” retorts Elizabeth Barrett, “no theory will account.  I class it with mesmerism for that reason.”  There is something very dignified and beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the world would never have heard but for them.  Browning’s feeling for him was indeed especially strong and typical.  “There,” he said, pointing after the old man as he left the room, “there goes one of the most splendid men living—­a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as ‘Kenyon the Magnificent.’” There is something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability.  Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of superficial philanthropy.  He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able.