Twenty-one months passed between Browning’s first letter and their marriage.  The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal “contract” to correspond,—­sudden if not as “unadvised” as the love-vows of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled.  All the winter and early spring her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet pressure of his will they never would have met.  But with May came renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit.  “He has a way of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,—­so he came.”  A few weeks later he spoke.  She at first absolutely refused to entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent.  But in the meantime the letters and the visits “rained down more and more,” and the fire glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but unsuppressed.  Once more his power of “putting aside” compelled her to listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined.  This man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any case have finally “put aside” all obstacles to her consent.  But when he disclosed—­to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him—­that he had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return, that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable, and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the fulfilment of “the brightest dream which should exclude her,” her resistance gave way,—­and little by little, in her own beautiful words, she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she could still do something for the happiness of another.  In another sense than she intended in the great opening sonnet “from the Portuguese,” Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death, and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, almost extinguished, desire to live.  Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five years later, was to tell with such infinite verve?  Browning did not need to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality of his Herakles; he had brought back his own “espoused saint,” like Alcestis, from the grave.

But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems.  Browning, said Kenyon, was “great in everything”; and during the year which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was willing to become.  Love had flung upon his life, as upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared.  “My whole scheme of life,” he wrote to her,[30] “(with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down),