Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience
up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike
his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less
of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a
passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood
and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted
memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London
chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she
said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students,
and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being
"learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly,
like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the
world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his
knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served
to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths
crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods
and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the _rôle_ of
hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching
conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive
vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which
in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own
opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling
violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and
sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of
collocation. Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries
by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts
of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to
repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on
occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense,
and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an