."

The rapture of the poet's dream pervaded every experience.

"O Life, O Poetry,
Which means life in life."

The transmutation of each into the other, both Life and Poetry, as
revealed in their lives, is something as exceptional as it is beautiful in
the world's history.

It is only to those who live for something higher than merely personal
ends, that the highest happiness can come; and the aim of these wedded
poets may well be read in the lines from "Aurora Leigh":

"... Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born."

In the ancestry of Robert Browning there was nothing especially
distinctive, although it is representative of the best order of people; of
eminently reputable life, of moderate means, of culture, and of assured
intelligence. It is to the Brownings of Dorsetshire, who were large
manor-owners in the time of Henry VII, that the poet's family is traced.
Robert Browning, the grandfather of the poet, was a clerk in the Bank of
England, a position he obtained through the influence of the Earl of
Shaftesbury. Entering on this work at the age of twenty, he served
honorably for fifty years, and was promoted to the position of the Bank
Stock office, a highly responsible place, that brought him in constant
contact with the leading financiers of the day. Born in 1749, he had
married, in 1778, Margaret Tittle, the inheritor of some property in the
West Indies, where she was born of English parentage. The second Robert,
the father of the poet, was the son of this union. In his early youth he
was sent out to take charge of his mother's property, and his grandson,
Robert Barrett Browning, relates with pardonable pride how he resigned the
post, which was a lucrative one, because he could not tolerate the system
of slave labor prevailing there. By this act he forfeited all the estate
designed for him, and returned to England to face privation and to make
his own way. He, too, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and in 1811,
at the age of thirty, married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, the daughter of a
ship-owner in Dundee. Mr. Wiedemann was a German of Hamburg, who had
married a Scotch lady; and thus, on his maternal side, the poet had
mingled Scotch and German ancestry. The new household established itself
in Southampton Street, Camberwell, and