scattered passages, but always the same Browning, self-expressed, even when most dramatic, in his selection of characters and their action, one whose moral tests and spiritual hopes, hatreds, loves, and scorns are (even in his own despite, if that be so) ours to know. Most minds possess marked opposites of their strongest characteristics, and so Browning's professed austerity of attitude towards his readers. is at most the reaction from that great instinct of self-revealing which he shares with every other poet.

3. Parentage. Robert Browning was born May 7th, 1812. His father, also Robert, for nearly fifty years a clerk in the Bank of England, was the son of another Robert Browning, who held an important post in the same place for over the half century. The Brownings had been Dorsetshire people, but London and the West of England did not supply the only pre-natal streams that flowed into the blood of the poet. It is extremely interesting to know, as any observer of his sympathies and insights would reasonably expect, that he came of mixed nationalities. His grandmother on the paternal side was a Creole, owning a sugar plantation at St. Kitt's, where his father spent some time when a youth. His mother, Sarianna Wiedemann, born at her parents' home in Dundee, was the daughter of a mother who was pure Scots and a father of German extraction. There is no proof, though the question has been mooted, that

1 XIV. 31. At the "Mermaid." XV. 164. Epilogue to Dramatic Idyls. XVI. 89. Lyric to A Bean-Stripe, Ferishtah's Fancies.

this grandfather on the spindle side had any Jewish traces.

Thus there were in Browning mingled threads of nationality, worked upon a web of English middle class. In Browning's heredity were germinated his vast intellectual and emotional range and his susceptibility to race differences, but the genius which modulated these varying strains into undreamed-of harmony was his own. As we shall see, intelligence and cultivation were preparing in the Browning family before 1812, but though something of the perfected intelligence we call genius may be prepared by progenitors, much more seems directly inspired by the breath of a wind which bloweth where it listeth.1

Browning's grandfather was an expert man of business. His father was a genial, popular man, versatile and accomplished. Besides his clever caricatures of faces, well known in the Bank of England, he was learned in art history. He could improvise and illustrate stories in rhyme for the children. He " was a scholar and knew Greek,”2 and used to rock his little boy in his arms to the sound of Anacreon. In English poetry he adhered to Pope's secure couplets, in contradistinction to his wife, who liked more innovating fashions of verse. Both parents were Congregationalists. One of the poet's uncles, William Shergold Browning, wrote a highly regarded History

1 See, on this subject, XI. 202, 203.

2 Asolando. 123. Development.

of the Huguenots. An interesting note on Browning's father is his ingenuity in the dovetailing of detective evidence, and his intimacy with medieval legends, "he seemed to have known Paracelsus and even Talmudic personages personally," a noteworthy environment for the future author of The Ring and the Book, Pietro of Abano, Paracelsus, and Jochanan Hakkadosh. Doubtless Browning's inherited vigour and buoyancy of constitution helped to preserve his cheerful trust in unprovable spiritualities from the falterings and backslidings of other men. What of the poet's mother? She was a religious woman who loved music, and whom her son loved with never-forgetting emotion.

4. Childhood and Education.-Browning was born in Southampton Street, Peckham. That suburb and its neighbours, Camberwell and Herne Hill, were less absorbed then than now into the circle of fog and soot, and we may think of Browning's childhood as spent among old trees,' 'climbing plants,' and 'morning swallows.'1 His imagination was deeply impressed by distant London, murmurous, lighting the sky by night, and imaging that 'need of a world of men 2 so paramount in the after years. We hear of Avison's March, to the air of which the little boy would step,3 of an Italian engraving of Andromeda, of the tale of Troy as

4

1 I. 8. Pauline.

2 VI. 46. Parting at Morning.

3 XVI. 223. Parleyings. With Charles Avison.

4 I. 29. Pauline.

suggested by the outlines of the coals in the grate. Such trifles fed his fancy-hunger. Some of the poems of Browning's maturity drew their magic suggestion from isolated memories of childhood, and a habit of seeing human contours in coals and clouds may have originated such a memorable tableau of the sunset's Persian encounter as we find in Gerard de Lairesse in Parleyings.

Till he was fourteen, Browning was taught at private schools near home. Then he studied for a time with a tutor, who used to come to his father's house. When, in 1829, University College, London, was opened, Browning attended a few lectures there. The bald enumeration of such chartered means of education seems in Browning's case peculiarly vain. Browning's are the works of a great reader, a winner of universal knowledge, and he early began to assimilate his proper food. His brief inthralment to Byron, of which boyish verses were the natural acknowledgment, was annulled, in 1826, by a wondrous boon, for then Browning became possessed of the poems of Shelley and Keats. It was a memorable day to the coming poet when the inspiring beauty of those earlier twain was revealed to him.

5. Earlier Manhood. His son and daughter having the prospect of fair means, there was wisely no thought with Browning's father of tying Robert down to uncongenial occupation to make money withal. Browning was left free to follow his own bent, i.e. to make poetry his profession.

In 1832, Browning wrote Pauline, and in 1833 it was published. Soon after this, the poet went abroad for nearly a year. Travel was a valuable element in the shaping of Browning. He went to Russia, and Italy, first visited in 1838, was, in his own phrase, his 'University.' He delved into the history, famous and out-of-the-way, of the places he stayed in,1 and became familiar with the people. In the Italian journey of 1838, he made his first acquaintance with his perennial loves, Asolo 2 and Venice.3

In 1835, Paracelsus, Browning's first acknowledged work, was published, and about the same time several brilliant and spirited short poems came out in the Monthly Repository, which was edited by Browning's firm friend, Mr. W. Johnson Fox. Among these were the two, Johannes Agricola and Porphyria (called later Porphyria's Lover), which, in 1842, were combined under the title of Madhouse Cells. Many of Browning's earlier friendships, with the great men who belonged to the generation that was old when he himself was young, date from the appearance of Paracelsus.

At Macready's instance, Browning wrote a tragedy, and Strafford was produced at Covent Garden Theatre, May 1st, 1837. The drama, like much of Paracelsus, had been partly conceived during those midnight walks, dear to the imagination of Browning, in a wood near Dulwich. The play was not unsuccessful, but it was more than the most successful play could 2 I. 159. Sordello.

1 I. 285, 286. Sordello.

3 I. 161. Sordello.