In 1837, Miss Barrett’s health broke down. She was taken, by the advice of her physician, to Torquay. During her sojourn there her favorite brother was drowned; she had the horror of seeing his boat go down. She was utterly prostrated by this tragedy, and it was not until the following year that she could be removed to London. A long period of invalidism ensued, during which, however, she continued her studies and literary work. The courage and noble cheerfulness displayed in her letters to Mr. Horne, written at this time, are most remarkable. In 1838 she published _The Seraphim, and Other Poems_; in 1839, _The Romaunt of the Page_, a volume of ballads. In 1842 she contributed to the London _Athenæum_ some essays on the Greek-Christian writers and the English poets. About 1841 she modernized portions of Chaucer’s poetry; Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Horne and others engaging in the same work. Miss Barrett also wrote for Horne’s ‘New Spirit of the Age,’ part of the critique on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and nearly all of the paper on Walter Savage Landor. In 1844, her health having in the meantime gradually improved somewhat, she collected her poems, placing at the head a new composition called _A Drama of Exile_, the fruit of her diligent study of the Hebrew Bible. In 1846, despite the opposition of her father--to whom “a marriage which was to lift his fragile daughter from the couch to which she had been bound as a picture to its frame, must have seemed a rash experiment,”--Elizabeth Barrett was married to Robert Browning. They went at once to Italy, where, the milder climate proving favorable to Mrs. Browning’s health, they continued to reside for fifteen years. They were in the habit of spending their summers in Florence, where their son, Robert Barrett Browning, was born, and their winters in Rome; and occasionally they visited England. Under favorable conditions, Mrs. Browning now produced her greatest works. CASA GUIDI WINDOWS was published in 1851, the SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE being included in the same volume. In 1856 AURORA LEIGH appeared. _Poems before Congress_ were put forth in 1860. Her last poems, written in 1860 and ’61, were collected after her death, which took place at Florence on the 29th of June, 1861. A strange and beautiful life--with its cloistered maidenhood, its pathetic wavering between Death and Love, to fall at last into Love’s most gracious hands, its sequel of perfect wifehood. “She was like the insect that weaves itself a shroud, yet by some inward force, after a season, is impelled to break through its covering, and come out a winged tiger-moth, emblem of spirituality in its birth, and of passion in the splendor of its tawny dyes.”[4] Browning’s ‘By the Fireside’ undoubtedly contains a sketch of her own fireside; we recognize at once the tiny figure of the woman “Reading by firelight--that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it.”