Browning, and in the end it became intolerable. Yet while there were
obstructions and winding ways in the shallows, in the depths were
flawless truth and inviolable love. What sentimental persons fancy and
grow effusive over was here the simplest and yet always a miraculous
reality--"He of the heavens and earth brought us together so
wonderfully, holding two souls in his hand."[37] In the most
illuminating words of each correspondent no merely private, or peculiar
feeling is expressed; it is the common wave of human passion, the common
love of man and woman, that here leaps from the depths to the height,
and over which the iris of beauty ever and anon appears with--it is
true--an unusual intensity. And so in reading the letters we have no
sense of prying into secrets; there are no secrets to be discovered;
what is most intimate is most common; only here what is most common
rises up to its highest point of attainment. "I never thought of being
happy through you or by you or in you even, your good was all my idea
of good, and _is_" "Let me be too near to be seen.... Once I used to be
more uneasy, and to think that I ought to _make_ you see me. But Love is
better than sight." "I love your love too much. And _that_ is the worst
fault, my beloved, I can ever find in my love of _you_." These are
sentences that tell of what can be no private possession, being as
liberal and free as our light and air. And if the shadow of a cloud
appears--appears and passes away--it is a shadow that has floated over
many other hearts beside that of the writer: "How dreadfully natural it
would be to me, seem to me, if you _did_ leave off loving me! How it
would be like the sun's setting ... and no more wonder. Only, more
darkness." The old exchange of tokens, the old symbolisms--a lock of
hair, a ring, a picture, a child's penholder--are good enough for these
lovers, as they had been for others before them. What is diffused
through many of the letters is gathered up and is delivered from the
alloy of superficial circumstance in the "Sonnets from the Portuguese."