squire. On closer acquaintance you would have been impressed with his
dignity, his perfect poise and his fine reserve. And did you come to know
him well enough you would have seen that beneath that seemingly phlegmatic
outside there was a spiritual nature so sensitive and tender that it
responded to all the finer thrills that play across the souls of men. Yet
if there ever was a man who did not wear his heart upon his sleeve for
daws to peck at, it was Robert Browning. He was clean, wholesome, manly,
healthy, inside and out. He was master of self.

Of course, the gentle reader is sure that the next act will show a tender
love-scene. And were I dealing with the lives of Peter Smith and Martha
the milkmaid, the gentle reader might be right.

But the love of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is an instance of
the Divine Passion. Take off thy shoes, for the place whereon thou
standest is holy ground! This man and woman had gotten well beyond the
first flush of youth; there was a joining of intellect and soul which
approaches the ideal. I can not imagine anything so preposterous as a
"proposal" passing between them; I can not conceive a condition of
hesitancy and timidity leading up to a dam-bursting "avowal." They met,
looked into each other's eyes, and each there read his fate: no coyness,
no affectation, no fencing--they loved. Each at once felt a heart-rest in
the other. Each had at last found the other self.

That exquisite series of poems, "Sonnets From the Portuguese," written by
Elizabeth Barrett before her marriage and presented to her husband
afterward, was all told to him over and over by the look from her eyes,
the pressure of her hands, and in gentle words (or silence) that knew
neither shame nor embarrassment.