Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London chamber.

"Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students, and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being "learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly, like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods and Titans, angels and seraphim.

Then, notwithstanding the _role_ of hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of collocation.

Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"-- quite foreign to the instincts of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to repudiate Byron.

But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense, and often fantastic and quaint.