Her brothers, too, discarded her, and when her two sisters wrote, they did so by stealth, and their letters, meant to be kind, were steel for her heart.  Then her father was rich; and she had always known every comfort that money could buy.  Now, she had taken up with a poor poet, and every penny had to be counted—­absolute economy was demanded.

And Robert Browning, with a certain sense of guilt upon him, for depriving her of all the creature comforts she had known, sought by tenderness and love to make her forget the insults her father heaped upon her.

As for Browning, the bank-clerk, he was vexed that his son should show so little caution as to load himself up with an invalid wife, and he cut off the allowance, declaring that if a man was old enough to marry, he was also old enough to care for himself.  He did, however, make his son several “loans”; and finally came to “bless the day that his son had sense enough to marry the best and most talented woman on earth.”

Browning’s poems were selling slowly, and Mrs. Browning’s books brought her a little royalty, thanks to the loyal management of John Kenyon, and so absolute want and biting poverty did not overtake the runaways.

After the birth of her son, in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, Mrs. Browning’s health seemed to have fully returned.  She used to ride horseback up and down the mountain passes, and wrote home to Miss Mitford that love had turned the dial backward and the joyousness of girlhood had come again to her.

When John Kenyon died and left them ten thousand pounds, all their own, it placed them forever beyond the apprehension of want, and also enabled them to do for others; for they pensioned old Walter Savage Landor, and established him in comfortable quarters around the corner from Casa Guidi.

I intimated a moment ago that their honeymoon continued for two years.  This was a mistake, for it continued for just fifteen years, when the beautiful girl-like form, with her head of flowing curls upon her husband’s shoulder, ceased to breathe.  Painlessly and without apprehension or premonition, the spirit had taken its flight.

That letter of Miss Blagdon’s, written some weeks after, telling of how the stricken man paced the echoing hallways at night crying, “I want her!  I want her!” touches us like a great, strange sorrow that once pierced our hearts.

But Robert Browning’s nature was too strong to be subdued by grief.  He remembered that others, too, had buried their dead, and that sorrow had been man’s portion since the world began.  He would live for his boy—­for Her child.

But Florence was no longer his Florence, and he made haste to settle up his affairs and go back to England.  He never returned to Florence, and never saw the beautiful monument, designed by his lifelong friend, Frederick Leighton.

When you visit the little English Cemetery at Florence, the slim little girl that comes down the path, swinging the big bunch of keys, opens the high iron gate and leads you, without word or question, straight to the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.