us moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it."

As for Browning's love towards his wife, nothing more tender and
chivalrous has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance. It is
so beautiful a story that one often prefers it to the sweetest or
loftiest poem that came from the lips of either. That love knew no
soilure in the passage of the years. Like the flame of oriental legend,
it was perennially incandescent though fed not otherwise than by
sunlight and moonshine. If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic
fame of either into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as
the uttered song fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams
star-like down the centuries from the high steep of Leucadoe.

It was here, in Pisa, I have been told on indubitable authority, that
Browning first saw in manuscript those "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
which no poet of Portugal had ever written, which no man could have
written, which no other woman than his wife could have composed. From
the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers, and
that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal, she had found
expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems, which she
thinly disguised from 'inner publicity' when she issued them as "from
the Portuguese."

It is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate,
flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan
evenings--with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara, or
quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno
along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays--showed her love-poems to her
husband. With what love and pride he must have read those outpourings of
the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met, vials of lovely
thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against the coming of a golden
day.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.
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 ol