7)_.] [Footnote 27: _Letters, R.and E.B._, i.8.Cf.her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E.B.B._, ii., 200).] Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English literature, at once began.

Browning, as his way was in telling other men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his own.

"I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he assures her in the first sentence of his first letter.

He feels them already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find fault,"-- "nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was also direct, as his own was not.

His frank _cameraderie_ was touched from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by no means prone.