is influence upon our life is positive and
tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his
invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after
reading him. And perhaps the best thing he can say of Browning is that his
thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well-educated men and
women.

LIFE. Browning's father was outwardly a business man, a clerk for fifty
years in the Bank of England; inwardly he was an interesting combination of
the scholar and the artist, with the best tastes of both. His mother was a
sensitive, musical woman, evidently very lovely in character, the daughter
of a German shipowner and merchant who had settled in Scotland. She was of
Celtic descent, and Carlyle describes her as the true type of a Scottish
gentlewoman. From his neck down, Browning was the typical Briton,--short,
stocky, large-chested, robust; but even in the lifeless portrait his face
changes as we view it from different angles. Now it is like an English
business man, now like a German scientist, and now it has a curious
suggestion of Uncle Remus,--these being, no doubt, so many different
reflections of his mixed and unremembered ancestors.

He was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, in 1812. From his
home and from his first school, at Peckham, he could see London; and the
city lights by night and the smoky chimneys by day had the same powerful
fascination for the child that the woods and fields and the beautiful
country had for his friend Tennyson. His schooling was short and desultory,
his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who
left the boy largely to follow his own inclination. Like the young Milton,
Browning was fond of music, and in many of his poems, especially in "Abt
Vogler" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," he interprets the musical temperament
better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature. But unlike
Milton, through whose poetry there runs a great melody, music seems to have
had no consistent effect upon his verse, which is often so jarring that one
must wonder how a musical ear could have endured it.

Like Tennyson, this boy found his work very early, and for fifty years
hardly a week passed that he did not write poetry. He began at six to
produce verses, in imitation of Byron; but fortunately this early work has
been lost. Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first known
work, _Pauline_ (1833), must b