Suddenly, one day, as the product of one day’s work, she astonished her friends with the rhapsody of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’... This poem had all the faultiness which one might expect of a hundred and three stanzas forced by green-house heat into full bloom in twelve hours; this too by a weak invalid lying on a sofa; but must we spoil the pretty story that the sweet ballad had all the merit of winning for its writer the hand of Robert Browning! Yet the story is only a fiction of the gossip-writers. Nor is it true that the poet with whom she was to mate was then known to her only by his little book of ‘Bells and Pomegranates.’ She had more than a stranger’s reasons for making the wooer of Lady Geraldine speak in this wise: “At times a modern volume--Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie, _Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate,’ which if cut deep down the middle, Showed a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity_.” THEODORE TILTON: _Memorial Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Surprise of Miss Barrett’s friends at her marriage.] When I was ill at Tynemouth, a correspondence grew up between the then bed-ridden Elizabeth Barrett and myself; and a very intimate correspondence it became. In one of the later letters, in telling me how much better she was, and how grievously disappointed at being prevented going to Italy, she wrote of going out, of basking in the open sunshine, of doing this and that; “in short,” said she, finally, “there is no saying what foolish thing I may do.” The “foolish thing,” evidently in view in this passage, was marrying Robert Browning, and a truly wise act did the “foolish thing” turn out to be. HARRIET MARTINEAU: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877. * * * * * It was more like a fairy tale than anything in real life I have ever known, to read, one morning, in the papers, of her marriage with the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ and to learn, in the course of the day, that not only was she married, but that she was absolutely on her way to Italy. The energy and resolution implied were amazing on the part of one who had long, as her own poems tell us, resigned herself to lie down and die. HENRY F. CHORLEY: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Hawthorne’s first impression of Mrs. Browning, in 1856.]