Love and Marriage In 1841, John Kenyon, formerly a school-fellow of Browning's father, now an elderly lover of literature and of literary society, childless, wealthy, generous-hearted, proposed to Browning that he should call upon Elizabeth Barrett, Kenyon's cousin once removed, who was already distinguished as a writer of ardent and original verse.

Browning consented, but the poetess "through some blind dislike of seeing strangers"-- as she afterwards told a correspondent--declined, alleging, not untruly, as a ground of refusal, that she was then ailing in health.[35] Three years later Kenyon sent his cousin's new volumes of _Poems_ as a gift to Sarianna Browning; her brother, lately returned from Italy, read these volumes with delight and admiration, and found on one of the pages a reference in verse to his "Pomegranates" of a kind that could not but give him a vivid moment of pleasure.

Might he not relieve his sense of obligation by telling Miss Barrett, in a letter, that he admired her work?
Mr Kenyon encouraged the suggestion, and though to love and be silent might on the whole have been more to Browning's liking, he wrote--January 10, 1845--and writing truthfully he wrote enthusiastically.[36] Miss Barrett, never quite recovered from a riding accident in early girlhood, and stricken down for long in both soul and body by the shock of her brother's death by drowning, lay from day to day and month to month, in an upper room of her father's house in Wimpole Street, occupied, upon her sofa, with her books and papers--her Greek dramatists and her Elizabethan poets--shut out from the world, with windows for ever closed, and with only an occasional female visitor, to gossip of the social and literary life of London.

Never was a spirit of more vivid fire enclosed within a tomb.

The letter from Browning, "the author of _Paracelsus_ and King of the mystics," threw her, she says, "into ecstasics." Her reply has a thrill of pleasure running through its graceful half-restraint, and she holds out a hope that when spring shall arrive a meeting in the invalid chamber between her and her new correspondent may be possible.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.
_From a drawing in chalk by_ FIELD TALFOURD _in the National Portrait Gallery_.] From the first a headlong yet delicate speed was in her pen; from the first there was much to say.