sing a
bookstall one day spied in a box of second-hand volumes, a shabby little
edition of Shelley advertised "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poems: very
scarce." It seems almost incredible to us now that the name was an
absolutely new one to him, and that only by questioning the bookseller
did he learn that Shelley had written a number of volumes of poetry and
that he was now dead. This accident was sufficient to inspire the
incipient poet's curiosity, and he never rested until he was the owner
of Shelley's works. They were hard to get hold of in those early days
but the persistent searching of his mother finally unearthed them at
Olliers' in Vere Street, London. She brought him also three volumes of
Keats, who became a treasure second only to Shelley.

[Illustration: Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever."]

The question of Shelley's influence on Browning's art has been one often
discussed. There are many traces of Shelleyan music and idea in his
early poems "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Sordello," but no marked nor
lasting impression was made upon Browning's development as a poet by
Shelley. Upon Browning's personal development Shelley exerted a
short-lived though somewhat intense influence. We see the young
enthusiast professing the atheism of his idol as the liberal views of
Shelley were then interpreted, and even becoming a vegetarian. As time
went on the discipleship vanished, and in its place came the recognition
on Browning's part of a poetic spirit akin yet different from his own.
The last trace of the disciple appears in "Sordello" when the poet
addresses Shelley among the audience of dead great ones he has mustered
to listen to the story of Sordello:

--"Stay--thou, spirit, come not near
Now--not this time desert thy cloudy place
To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!
I need not fear this audience, I make free
With them, but then this is no place for thee!
The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown
Up out of memories of Marathon,
Would echo like his own sword's grinding screech
Braying a Persian shield,--the silver speech
Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin,
Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in
The Knights to tilt,--wert thou to hear!"

Shelley appears in the work of Browning once more in the prose essay on
Shelley which was written to a volume of spurious letters of that poet
published in 1851. In this is summed up