d happened. In this arrangement Browning showed
some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a
poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of
things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the
truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired,
therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising
effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth
mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It
has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one
of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth
the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt
the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had
held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual
marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he
would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have
been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a
lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a
terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a
moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a
maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man
for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a
certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to
describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and
more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of
other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that
in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the
action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt
inclined to do it ourselves.

At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs.
Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's
house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just
successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all
probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled
with Browning to Italy.

They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to
them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do
not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a
reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett