In the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as Browning expected his readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"-- her wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry-- "Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25] and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was finally to draw them together.

A few years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in France, and she laughingly accepted the omen.

The omen was fulfilled; Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.
[Footnote 25: She had at once discerned the "new voice" in _Paracelsus_, 1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in 1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's wonder" _( R.B.to E.B.B._, Jan.

10, 1845).] But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life.

Her experience up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike his own.