for "Miss
Barrett." Seven days after the marriage, they quietly left for Italy,
where Mrs. Browning passed nearly all her remaining years. She
repeatedly wrote to her father, telling him of her transformed health
and happy marriage, but he never answered her.

Before Miss Barrett met Browning, the woes of the factory children had
moved her to write _The Cry of the Children_. After Edgar Allan Poe
had read its closing lines:--

"...the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath,"

he said that she had depicted "a horror, sublime in its simplicity, of
which Dante himself might have been proud."

Her best work, _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, written after Browning
had won her affection, is a series of love lyrics, strong, tender,
unaffected, true, from the depth of a woman's heart. Sympathetic
readers, who know the story of her early life and love, are every year
realizing that there is nothing else in English literature that could
exactly fill their place. Browning called them "the finest sonnets
written in any language since Shakespeare's." Those who like the
simple music of the heart strings will find it in lines like these:--

"I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,
I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."

After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was
buried in Florence. When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem
_Prospice_ (1861) welcoming death as--

"...a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest."

His Later Years.--Soon after his wife's death, he began his long
poem of over twenty thousand lines, _The Ring and the Book_. He
continued to write verse to the year of his death.

In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion
of his works,--a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime.
The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected
life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of
the Univers