matter, and throughout maintains the most unimpeachable attitude. He had the reward which he deserved; and one of the great charms in the letters is the gradual brightening of Miss Barrett's life—the wakening to real, vivid happiness of the poor, broken, tremulous invalid who is revealed in the opening passages. A little sign of excessive sensibility remains in her superfluous apologies for apparently 'light words'; for phrases in which she has permitted herself to speak as though it were conceivable that he might some day see through some of his illusions about her, or that he might doubt her readiness to agree to all his plans; phrases in which a duller insight than Browning's might read clearly enough only an appeal for delightful utterances of absolute confidence. It is 'wonderful to me,' so she sums up the situation, 'to look back on my life and my old philosophy of life, made of the necessities of sorrow and the resolution to attain to something better than a perpetual moaning and complaint—to that state of neutralised emotion to which I did attain—that serenity which meant the failure of hope! Can I look back to such things and not thank you next to God? For you, having the power to stoop and having the will, is it not
