Browning’s desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as has been stated, with a variety of objections.  The chief of these was the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be permitted to form his own opinion.  “There is nothing to see in me; nor to hear in me.—­I never learned to talk as you do in London; although I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and others.  If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of me.  I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and dark.”  The substance of Browning’s reply was to the effect, “I will call at two on Tuesday.”

They met on May 20, 1845.  A short time afterwards he had fallen in love with her and made her an offer of marriage.  To a person in the domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have been paralysing.  “I will tell you what I once said in jest ...” she writes, “If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the other!—­’Why, even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ’it would not do.’  And she was right; we all agreed that she was right.”

This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state of Mr. Barrett’s mind on one subject.  It is illustrative of the very best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett’s character that she could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human mind.

Browning’s proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett.  It was not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father.  The whole of her family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth.  Almost alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous view of her condition, stood Browning himself.  “But you are better,” he would say; “you look so and speak so.”  Which of the two opinions was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like this has neither the right nor the need to enter.  But this much may be stated as a mere question of fact.  In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth Barrett was still living under the great family convention which provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest the shock should destroy her suddenly.  A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in