intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and
alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams
across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with
conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange
loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said
everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that
she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was
something of Æschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him;
it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself
upon the task of rendering the _Prometheus Bound_ in English; they met
on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was
lyric, not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and
passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was
personating some imaginary mind.

[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but
could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and
E.B., i. 7)_.]

[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to
Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say
a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or
unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad
policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).]

Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon,
her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the
memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English
literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other
men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his