Let Me Count The Ways
by Pat

O

f all the Love stories deserving of continued
celebration, the romantic odyssey of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning remains alluring and fresh to this day. And why not? It has everything a good romantic Love story should have: an intriguing plot with two beautiful, successful poets, one a shut-away invalid and the other a persistent, passionate suitor; an autocratic, unyielding father; a secret engagement; a kidnapped dog; and finally, a wedding and heart-stopping escape!Poems, drew Robert Browning into her life … which was then changed forever.

...continued in...The Love Of The Fifth Spiritual Paradigm

Moreover, to add first-person luster to their story, Elizabeth and Robert wrote three- to four-page letters to each other almost every day (often twice a day), for nearly two years, starting with the moment they first established contact and ending with their elopement. Because their personal letters were carefully preserved, we may follow this incredible romance as it unfolded –literally, day by day. Not only are we privy to their moments of anguish and ecstasy, we also vicariously live through and feel every emotional element that flows through the timeless, eternal dance of romantic mating.

Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett (1806–1861) was born into the well-todo Barrett family in Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children who were all provided excellent, home-schooled, classical educations by Mr. Barrett, who had made a considerable fortune in Jamaican sugar plantations. Always an eager learner and precocious from an early age, Elizabeth was just eight years old when she began writing poetry. As a young teenager, although in fragile health (some say due to a fall from a horse), Elizabeth easily mastered history, classic literature, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. At the age of twenty, she was publishing mature poetry.

By the time the family moved to the now famous 50 Wimpole Street address in London in 1837, Elizabeth was an internationally celebrated poet. Unfortunately, her health continued to decline, and by 1840, she became areclusive, bed-ridden invalid. She spent the next six years writing in her bedroom, seeing only one or two close family friends besides her immediate family. Her most important contact from the outside world was a wealthy lover of the arts, John Kenyon, with whom she consulted about her writings. In