The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his credit than anything else in his career.  He never came out so well in all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act of deception.  Having made up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent.  He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against social laws.  We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power of giving dispensations to themselves.  We feel that men without meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and end by being thoroughly anti-social.  One of the best and most striking things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave it really exceptional.  It did not in the least degree break the rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom.  It did not in the least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule.  At a supreme crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and died conventional.  It would be hard to say whether he appears the more thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed it to affect him.

Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the only possible course of action.  Before she finally agreed, however, she did something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs almost to a more primitive age.  The sullen system of medical seclusion to which she had long been subjected has already been described.  The most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room.  On the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject Browning’s proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage.  In this she drove into Regent’s Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at the leaves and the sky.  She then entered the cab again, drove home, and agreed to the elopement.  This was possibly the best poem that she ever produced.