Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of prudence and knowledge of human nature.  Early one morning in September 1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father’s house, became Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home again as if nothing had happened.  In this arrangement Browning showed some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a poet the most practical of all men.  The incident was, in the nature of things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising effect of familiar scenes and faces.  One trifling incident is worth mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning.  It has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth the actual ground-plan of their moral sense.  Browning would have felt the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had held.  During the brief and most trying period between his actual marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged.  He was acting a lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a maidservant.  Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to describe or to justify.  Browning’s respectability was an older and more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of other men.  If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt inclined to do it ourselves.

At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over.  Mrs. Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father’s house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just successfully prevented from barking.  Before the end of the day in all probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled with Browning to Italy.

They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them.  They do not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a reconciliation.  Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, even a man to be blamed.  She knew to all intents and purposes that she had grown up in the house of a madman.