Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous sense.

Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which she breathed.

She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek scholar, and read AEschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind friend, Mr.Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public questions.

Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery artistic curiosity that he felt about her.

He does appear to have felt an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains.
In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous illumination and found the door barred against him.