de the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?--At least it may be said,
"Because the way is _short_, I thank thee, God!"

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

BY E.L. BURLINGAME

Robert Browning was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812, the son and
grandson of men who held clerkships in the Bank of England--the one for
more than forty and the other for full fifty years. His surroundings
were apparently typical of English moderate prosperity, and neither
they, nor his good but undistinguished family traditions, furnish any
basis for the theorizing of biographers, except indeed in a single
point. His grandmother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the
first generation to be born away from England, seems, from the restless
and adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family of
the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of the
imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the
home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely
vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only question
suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished to go
to a university, then to become an artist--- both ambitions repressed by
the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's career
unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of routine; to
have had keen and wide interests outside of his work; to have been a
great reader and book collector, even an exceptional scholar in certain
directions; and to have kept till old age a remarkable vivacity, with
unbroken health--altogether a personality thoroughly sympathetic with
that of his son, to whom this may well have been the final touch of a
prosperity calculated to shake all traditional ideas of a poet's youth.

Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He left
school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at home, except
that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London University. His
training seems to have been unusually thorough for these conditions,
though largely self-directed; it may be supposed that his father kept a
sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely not too obvious. But in the
main it is clear that from a very early age, Browning had deliberately
and distinctly in view the idea of making literature the pursuit of his
life, and that he troubled himself seriously with not