ursing,"--her
wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry--

"Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had
for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25]
and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was
finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of
pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in
France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled;
Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of
that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that
Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of
his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.

[Footnote 25: She had at once discerned the "new voice" in _Paracelsus_,
1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in
1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's
wonder" _(R.B. to E.B.B._, Jan. 10, 1845).]

But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear
upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever
experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in
Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience
up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike
his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less
of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a
passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood
and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted
memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London
chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she
said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students,
and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being
"learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly,
like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the
world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his
knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served
to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths
crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods
an