by cushions, writing with pencil on little
scraps of paper, which she would slip under the pillows if any chance
visitor came in. "Elizabeth is lying on the sofa, writing like a spirit,"
Browning wrote to Harriet Hosmer. To Mrs. Browning Ruskin wrote, praising
her husband's poems, which gratified her deeply, and she replied, in part,
that when he wrote to praise her poems, of course she had to bear it. "I
couldn't turn around and say, 'Well, and why don't you praise him, who is
worth twenty of me?' One's forced," she continued, "to be rather decent
and modest for one's husband as well as for one's self, even if it's
harder. I couldn't pull at your coat to read 'Pippa Passes,' for
instance.... But you have put him on your shelf, so we have both taken
courage to send you his new volumes, 'Men and Women,'... that you may
accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both of us." Mrs.
Browning considered these poems beyond any of his previous work, save
"Paracelsus," but there is no visible record left of what she must have
felt regarding that tender and exquisite dedication to her, that "One Word
More ... To E. B. B.," which must have been to her

"The heart's sweet Scripture to be read at night."

These lines are, indeed, a fitting companion-piece to her "Sonnets from
the Portuguese." For all these poems, his "fifty men and women," were for
her,--his "moon of poets."

"There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished!
Take them, Love, the book and me together;
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

* * * * *

I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;

* * * * *

Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in other lives, God willing;
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love!"

So he wrote to his "one angel,--borne, see, on my bosom!" For her alone
were the

"Silent, silver lights and darks undreamed of,"

and while there was one side to face the world with, he thanked God that
there was another,--

"One to show a woman when he loves her!"

It was Rossetti, however, who was the true interpreter of Browning to
Ruskin,--for if it requires a god to recognize a god, so likewise in
poetic recognitions. To Rossetti the poems comprised in "Men and Women"
were the "elixir of life."