e considered as a tribute to Shelley and his
poetry. Tennyson's earliest work, _Poems by Two Brothers_, had been
published and well paid for, five years before; but Browning could find no
publisher who would even consider _Pauline_, and the work was published by
means of money furnished by an indulgent relative. This poem received scant
notice from the reviewers, who had pounced like hawks on a dovecote upon
Tennyson's first two modest volumes. Two years later appeared _Paracelsus_,
and then his tragedy _Strafford_ was put upon the stage; but not till
_Sordello_ was published, in 1840, did he attract attention enough to be
denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style. Six years later, in
1846, he suddenly became famous, not because he finished in that year his
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (which is Browning's symbolic name for "poetry and
thought" or "singing and sermonizing"), but because he eloped with the best
known literary woman in England, Elizabeth Barrett, whose fame was for many
years, both before and after her marriage, much greater than Browning's,
and who was at first considered superior to Tennyson. Thereafter, until his
own work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married
Elizabeth Barrett. For years this lady had been an almost helpless invalid,
and it seemed a quixotic thing when Browning, having failed to gain her
family's consent to the marriage, carried her off romantically. Love and
Italy proved better than her physicians, and for fifteen years Browning and
his wife lived an ideally happy life in Pisa and in Florence. The exquisite
romance of their love is preserved in Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the
Portuguese_, and in the volume of _Letters_ recently published,--wonderful
letters, but so tender and intimate that it seems almost a sacrilege for
inquisitive eyes to read them.

Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861. The loss seemed at first too much
to bear, and Browning fled with his son to England. For the remainder of
his life he lived alternately in London and in various parts of Italy,
especially at the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice, which is now an object of
pilgrimage to almost every tourist who visits the beautiful city. Wherever
he went he mingled with men and women, sociable, well dressed, courteous,
loving crowds and popular applause, the very reverse of his friend
Tennyson. His earlier work had been much better appreciated in America than
in England; but with the