even Kenyon--bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of
society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of
poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the need for lyrical
utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer
contact with common things. If she had her part in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_, he had his, no less, in _Aurora Leigh_.

[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.]

Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their
marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal
"contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows
of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security
of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring
her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet
pressure of his will they never would have met. But with May came
renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "He has a way
of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,--so he
came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first absolutely refused to
entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. But in the meantime
the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire
glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but
unsuppressed. Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to
listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point
which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a
love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. This
man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any
case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. But when he
disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he
had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return,