But such exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs.Browning lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than she had ever known before.

In the light of modern knowledge it is not very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all diseases.

It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least of all of hysterical phenomena.

In our day she would have been ordered air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of which chilled the Barretts with terror.

In our day, in short, it would have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite.