l influence that was so marked a trait
in her son. William Sharp pictures a late afternoon, when, playing softly
to herself in the twilight, she was startled to hear a sound in the room.
"Glancing around, she beheld a little white figure distinctly outlined
against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes
looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her
arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of
emotion subsided, whispering over and over,'Play! Play!'"

The elder Browning was an impassioned lover of medieval legend and story.
He was deeply familiar with Paracelsus, with Faust, and with many of the
Talmudic tales. His library was large and richly stored,--the house,
indeed, "crammed with books," in which the boy browsed about at his own
will. It was the best of all possible educations, this atmosphere of
books. And the wealth of old engravings and prints fascinated the child.
He would sit among these before a glowing fire, while from the adjoining
room floated strains "of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling
cadences." It is recorded as his mother's chief happiness,--"her hour of
darkness and solitude and music." Of such fabric are poetic impressions
woven. The atmosphere was what Emerson called the "immortal ichor." The
boy was companioned by the "liberating gods." Something mystic and
beautiful beckoned to him, and incantations, unheard by the outer sense,
thronged about him, pervading the air. The lad began to recast in English
verse the Odes of Horace. From his school, on holiday afternoons, he
sought a lonely spot, elm-shaded, where he could dimly discern London in
the distance, with the gleam of sunshine on the golden cross of St.
Paul's,--lying for hours on the grass whence, perchance, he

"Saw distant gates of Eden gleam
And did not dream it was a dream."

Meantime the boy read Junius, Voltaire, Walpole's Letters, the "Emblems"
of Quarles (a book that remained as a haunting influence all his life),
and Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees." The first book of his own purchase
was a copy of Ossian's poems, and his initial effort in literary creation
was in likeness of the picturesque imaginations that appealed with
peculiar fascination to his mind.

"The world of books is still the world," wrote Mrs. Browning in "Aurora
Leigh," and this was the world of Robert Browning's early life. The
genesis of many of his greatest poems can