but she could not travel alone; and she would not subject either of her
sisters to the heavy displeasure of the ruler of the house. Robert
Browning held strong opinions on the duty of resisting evil, and if evil
assume the guise of parental authority it is none the _less_--he
believed--to be resisted. To submit to the will of another is often
easy; to act on one's own best judgment is hard; our faculties were
given us to put to use; to be passively obedient is really to evade
probation--so with almost excessive emphasis Browning set forth a
cardinal article of his creed; but Elizabeth Barrett was not, like him,
"ever a fighter," and, after all, London in 1845 was not bleak and grey
as it had been a year previously--"for reasons," to adopt a reiterated
word of the correspondence, "for reasons."

On two later occasions Browning sang the same battle-hymn against the
enemies of God and with a little too much vehemence--not to say
truculence--as is the way with earnest believers. His gentler
correspondent could not tolerate the thought of duelling, and she
disapproved of punishment by death. Browning argues that for one who
values the good opinion of society--not for himself--that good opinion
is a possession which may, like other possessions, be defended at the
risk of a man's life, and as for capital punishment, is not evil to be
suppressed at any price? Is not a miscreant to be expelled out of God's
world? The difference of opinion was the first that had arisen between
the friends, and Browning's words carried with them a certain sense of
pain in the thought that they could in any thing stand apart. Happily
the theoretical fire-eater had faith superior to his own
arguments;--faith in a woman's insight as finer than his own;--and he is
let off with a gratified rebuke for preternatural submissiveness and for
arraying her in pontifical garments of authority which hang loose upon
so small a figure. The other application of his doctrine of resisting