Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five years later, was to tell with such infinite verve?
Browning did not need to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like Alcestis, from the grave.
But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems.
Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was willing to become.

Love had flung upon his life, as upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared.

"My whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short.
Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other.

The same deep sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning of 1846, from an invalid's couch to be married.

That "peculiarity," as she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have postponed.