HOW DO I LOVE THEE: The Love-Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett

A brand new selection from the 573 letters which blazed back and forth between 30 Wimpole Street and Hatcham, Surrey, during the twenty month courtship of the Brownings. ""I love your verse with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,"" wrote Robert Browning in September, 1845, beginning a correspondence which was to encompass an incredible variety in the expression of affinity and love. Mr. Browning pressed forward with a rugged masculine insistence, perhaps too insistent--"". . . you do not know what pain you give me in speaking so wildly,"" protested Elizabeth after one of Browning's missives, which she later destroyed, reached its mark. The strenuous intellectual acuity (which made bearable Elizabeth's something confinement previous to her acquaintance with Browning) continued to be exercised in relentless Victorian self-exploration, but Browning's love drove her inward consciousness into extremes of self-abasing doubt and finally joyful acceptance. For a less exalted, touchingly human view, the editor has included the brief comic-opera exchanges after the secret marriage and before the flight in which the two poets are almost completely flummoxed by hard matters like train and ship schedules. An appendix contains ""Sonnets from the Portuguese"" and two poems by Robert Browning. Two lives in a love.