And now it seems to me that somewhere in these pages I said that friendship was essentially hygienic.  I wish to make that remark again, and to put it in italics.  The Divine Passion implies the most exalted form of friendship that man can imagine.

Elizabeth Barrett ran up the shades and flung open the shutters.  The sunlight came dancing through the apartment, flooding each dark corner and driving out all the shadows that lurked therein.  It was no longer a darkened room.

The doctor was indignant; the nurse resigned.

Miss Mitford wrote back to the country that Miss Barrett was “really looking better than she had for years.”

As for poor Edward Moulton Barrett—­he raved.  He tried to quarrel with Robert Browning, and had there been only a callow youth with whom to deal, Browning would simply have been kicked down the steps, and that would have been an end of it.  But Browning had an even pulse, a calm eye and a temper that was imperturbable.  His will was quite as strong as Mr. Barrett’s.

And so it was just a plain runaway match—­the ideal thing after all.  One day when the father was out of the way they took a cab to Marylebone Parish Church and were married.  The bride went home alone, and it was a week before her husband saw her; because he would not be a hypocrite and go ask for her by her maiden name.  And had he gone, rung the bell and asked to see Elizabeth Barrett Browning, no one would have known whom he wanted.  At the end of the week, the bride stole down the steps alone, leading her dog Flush by a string, and met her lover-husband on the corner.  Next day, they wrote back from Calais, asking forgiveness and craving blessings, after the good old custom of Gretna Green.  But Edward Moulton Barrett did not forgive—­still, who cares!

Yet we do care, too, for we regret that this man, so strong and manly in many ways, could not be reconciled to this exalted love.  Old men who nurse wrath are pitiable sights.  Why could not Mr. Barrett have followed the example of John Kenyon?

Kenyon commands both our sympathy and admiration.  When the news came to him that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were gone, it is said that he sobbed like a youth to whom has come a great, strange sorrow.  For months he was not known to smile, yet after a year he visited the happy home in Florence.  When John Kenyon died he left by his will fifty thousand dollars “to my beloved and loving friends, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, his wife.”

The old-time novelists always left their couples at the church-door.  It was not safe to follow further—­they wished to make a pleasant story.  It seems meet to take our leave of the bride and groom at the church:  life often ends there.  However, it sometimes is the place where life really begins.  It was so with Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning—­they had merely existed before; now, they began to live.

Much, very much has been written concerning this ideal mating, and of the life of Mr. and Mrs. Browning in Italy.  But why should I write of the things of which George William Curtis, Kate Field, Anthony Trollope and James T. Fields have written?  No, we will leave the happy pair at the altar, in Marylebone Parish Church, and while the organ peals the wedding-march we will tiptoe softly out.