own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he
assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them
already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find
fault,"--"nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of
me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of
which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was
also direct, as his own was not. His frank _cameraderie_ was touched
from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by
no means prone. "You _do_, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only
seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, _you_,--I only
make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and
fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, _but I am going to
try_." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set
vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's
nature. His brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds
threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of
Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken
from his "dancing ring of men and women,"--the Dramatic Lyrics and
Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,--he meant to write it. Miss
Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her
personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her
correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not
least in rollicking pieces, like _Sibrandus_ or _The Spanish Cloister_,
which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly
fragile woman is too rarely credited. _Pippa Passes_ she could find in
her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other
works--a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations
of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845
and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room"
looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him