that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable,
and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the
fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her
resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words,
she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she
could still do something for the happiness of another. In another sense
than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese,"
Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death,
and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing,
almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of
that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five
years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? Browning did not need
to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality
of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like
Alcestis, from the grave.

But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems.
Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year
which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the
capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the
diplomatist he was willing to become. Love had flung upon his life, as
upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "My
whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material
wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it
supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But
his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short.
Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such
sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. The same deep
sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the
trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and