time before her marriage, and were not shown to her husband until after they were wed. Of course, they are not translations, and the fiction that they were to be found in any language but her own was but the last thin veil with which Elizabeth Barrett faintly concealed the passion she was so proud of.
Miss Barrett, although personally unacquainted with Mr. Browning until a compararatively short time before their marriage, had previously been his admirer and correspondent. Writing to an American correspondent in the spring of 1845, she had said, "Mr. Browning, with whom I have had some correspondence lately, is full of great intentions; the light of the future is on his forehead . . . he is a poet for posterity. I have a full faith in him as poet and prophet."
Their personal knowledge of each other had not, evidently, existed long before they discovered the strength of their regards for one another. To the lady, at any rate, this revelation must have been a startling discovery. Advanced into her thirty-eighth year, she had little prospect and probably little inclination to depart from the course in life she believed marked out for her. Hitherto her personal acquaintances had been so few that love and marriage can scarcely have entered into her schemes for life: as she says in the Sonnets:—
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me. . . .
Then Thou didst come . . . to be,
Belovèd, what they seemed.
Heavy griefs and precarious health had been hers, it is true; but her sorrows, saddening though they were,
