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In 1859 she was thinking of becoming a Sister of Charity. She had not heard from Burton in a long time. He had left her without much ceremony to search for the sources of the Nile with Speke. Speke had returned alone, Burton remained at Zenzibar, and she says, “I was very sore “because Burton, according to report, was not thinking of coming home, to his love, but of going for the source of the Nile once more. She called on a friend. The friend was out. She waited, and while waiting Burton popped in upon her. He had come to see the friend to get her address. Her description of the meeting is a pitifully exact reproduction of her emotions over the reunion. He was weakened by African fevers. Her family, ardent Catholics, opposed the idea of marriage. The lovers used to meet in the Botanical Gardens, whence she often had to escort him fainting, to the house of sympathetic friends, in a cab. He was poor. He was out of favor with the government. Speke had pre-empted the honors of the expedition. But she was happy.

Then one day, in April, 1860, she was walking with some friends when “a tightning of the heart” came over her, that “she had not known before.” She went home, and said to his sister, “I am not going to see Richard for some time.” Her sister re-assured her. “No, I shall not,” she said, “I don’t know what is the matter.” A tap came at the door, and a note was put in her hand. Burton was off on a journey to Salt Lake City, to investigate Mormonism. He would be gone nine months and then he was to come back, to see if she would marry him. He returned about Christmas, 1860. In the later part of January they were married, the details of the affair being appropriately unconventional, not to say exciting. The marriage was, practically, an elopement. Lady Burton’s description of the event, and of every event in their lives, ever after, discloses an idolatry of the man that was almost an insanity. She reveals herself as a help-mate, with no will but her husband’s, no thought that was not for, and of, him. She annihilated herself as an individual, and she has left in her own papers a set of “Rules For a Wife,” that will make many wives, who are regarded as models of devotion, smile contemptuously at her. She was utterly happy in complete submission to his will. She described how she served him almost like an Indian squaw. She packed his trunks, was his amanuensis, attended to the details of publishing his books, came, or went, as he bade, suffered long absence in silence, or accompanied him on long journeys of exploration, uncomplainingly, was proud when he hypnotized her for the amusement of his friends. One can but feel deeply sorry for her, for with all her servility, she was a woman of the finer order of mind. The pity of her worship grows, as the reader of his life, and hers, realizes how little return in demonstrative affection she received as the reward for her vast, and continuous lavishment of love. She strikes me, in this, as a strange blend of the comic and the tragic. The world neglected Burton. He almost deserved it; so great a sacrifice as his wife consecrated of her life to him would compensate for the loss of anything. You admire it; but you catch yourself suspecting that this consecration must have been, at times, an awful bore to him. He was unfaithful to her, it is said, with ethnological intent, in all the tribes of the earth. He had no morals to speak of. He had no religion, having studied all. He was a pagan beyond redemption, though his wife maintained that he was a Catholic. Unfortunately, for her, his masterpiece refutes her overwhelmingly. He wrote the most remarkable poem of the last forty years, one that is to be classed only with Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” and the “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam. By this poem, and, probably, by the revelation of the love he excited in one woman, he will live. This poem expresses himself, and his conclusion, after years spent in wandering, fighting, studying languages, customs and religions. To understand the man and his poem, we must understand what he did, and since the time of the Old Romance, no man surpassed him in “deeds of derring-do.” He was a modern, a very modern, Knight of the Round Table. He was the possessor of innumerable abstruse, and outlandish accomplishments. He was a scientist, a linguist, a poet, a geographer, a roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a polyhedric personality, that caught and gave, something from and to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890, at the age of sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for him that was almost worth dying for.