d Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the _role_ of
hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching
conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive
vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which
in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own
opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling
violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and
sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of
collocation. Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries
by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts
of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to
repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on
occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense,
and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an
intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and
alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams
across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with
conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange
loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said
everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that
she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was
something of AEschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him;
it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself
upon the task of rendering the _Prometheus Bound_ in English; they met
on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was
lyric, not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and
passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was
personating some imaginary mind.

[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but
could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and
E.B., i. 7)_.]

[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to
Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say
a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or
unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad
policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).]

Early in January 1845 the two poets were broug