Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius. The appearance of
Paracelsus
had drawn Miss Barrett’s attention to the author; but it was not until January of 1845 that the first letter passed between them, ? a note from Mr. Browning to the poet he had never met, ? which initiated that exquisite series of letters which were written between this date and that of September, 1846. The prefigured friend had come to her from the golden background of dreams; and destiny, divinely ordered, was leading her on.
This was; the rest was to be, as George Eliot somewhere says of these silent movements of fate. Of the first acquaintance between Mr. Browning and Miss Barrett, Mr. Kenyon has said: ?
Their meeting was directly due to the publication of the ‘ Poems ’ in 1844. Chancing to express his admiration of them to Mr. Kenyon, who had been his friend since 1839 and his father’s school-fellow in years long distant, Mr. Browning was urged by him to write to Miss Barrett himself, and tell her of his pleasure in her work.Possibly the allusion to him in ‘ Lady Geraldine’s Courtship ’ may have been felt as furnishing an excuse for addressing her; however that may be, he took Mr. Kenyon’s advice, and in January, 1845, we find Miss Barrett in ‘ ecstasies ’ over a letter (evidently the first) from ‘ Browning the poet, Browning the author of
Paracelsus
and king of the mystics.’
The correspondence, once begun, continued to flourish; and in the course of the same month Miss Barrett tells Mrs. Martin that she is ‘ getting deeper and deeper into correspondence with Robert Browning, poet and mystic; and we are growing to be the truest of friends.’ At the end of May, when the return of summer brought her a renewal of strength, they met face to face for the first time; and from that time Robert Browning was …