which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly fragile woman is too rarely credited. Pippa Passes she could find in her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other works—­a preference in which he agreed.  Few more brilliant appreciations of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845 and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the “old room” looking out on the garden at New Cross.  But she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek “the other crown” also.  “I do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room.  And it is clear that before the last plays, Luria and A Soul’s Tragedy, were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished.  It was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually becoming adjusted, “seeing all things, as it does, in you.”

[Footnote 28:  E.B.B to R.B., 26th May 1846.  Cf. R.B., 13th Feb. 1846.]

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a woman’s more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical penetration.  The “poor tired wandering singer,” who so humbly took the hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity applied to herself his unconscious phrase—­

     “Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
      Though thou’rt match’d with cloth of gold,”

“That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]—­shows at the same time the keenest insight into the qualities of his work.  She felt in him the masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music.  With the world of society and affairs she had other channels of communication.  But no one of her other friends—­not Orion Horne, not even Kenyon—­bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of poetry in which she lived.  If she quickened the need for lyrical utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer contact with common things.  If she had her part in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, he had his, no less, in Aurora Leigh.

[Footnote 29:  E.B.B. to R.B., 9th Jan. 1846.]