what she thought.[27] There was something of AEschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him; it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself upon the task of rendering the Prometheus Bound in English; they met on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides.  But her power was lyric, not dramatic.  She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was personating some imaginary mind.

[Footnote 26:  The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could not pronounce it.  He said she was testa lunga (Letters of R. and E.B., i. 7).]

[Footnote 27:  Letters, R. and E. B., i. 8.  Cf. her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of “affectation.”  “To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art” (Letters of E. B. B., ii., 200).]

Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English literature, at once began.  Browning, as his way was in telling other men’s stories, burst at once in medias res in this great story of his own.  “I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart,” he assures her in the first sentence of his first letter.  He feels them already too much a part of himself to ever “try and find fault,”—­“nothing comes of it all,—­so into me has it gone and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew.”  It was “living,” like his own; it was also direct, as his own was not.  His frank cameraderie was touched from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by no means prone.  “You do, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem likely now to do for the first time.  You speak out, you,—­I only make men and women speak—­give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try.”  Thus the first contact with the “Lyric Love” of after days set vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning’s nature.  His brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds threatened to check all simple utterance of his own.  The “First Poem” of Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken from his “dancing ring of men and women,”—­the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,—­he meant to write it.  Miss Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her correspondent.  She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like Sibrandus or The Spanish Cloister,