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In these sonnets Mrs. Browning laid bare her innermost feelings.

Robert Browning, however, in several poems says the privacy of a poet’s life and feelings should not be bared to the public. Wordsworth had written in 1827:

Scorn not the Sonnet.... With this key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Browning in 1876 (thirty years after the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” were written) wrote in his poem called House:

“With this same key

Shakespeare unlocked his heart”....

Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!

Swinburne comments on these lines: “No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning.”

... Come back with me to the first of all,

Let us lean and love it over again,

Let us now forget and now recall,

Break the rosary in a pearly rain,

And gather what we let fall!...

Hither we walked then, side by side,

Arm in arm and cheek to cheek,

And still I questioned or replied,

While my heart, convulsed to really speak,

Lay choking in its pride.

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross,