g lived in this stimulating atmosphere. He warmed his hands at the
divine fire; and the fact that all this richness of resource stimulated
rather than stifled him is greatly to the credit of his real power.
Favorable surroundings and circumstances did not serve him as a cushion on
which to go to sleep, but rather as the pedestal on which he might climb
to loftier altitudes. It was no lotus-eating experience into which the lad
was lulled, but the vital activity of the life of creative thought. The
Heavenly Powers are not invariably, even if frequently, sought in sorrow
only, and in the mournful midnight hours. There are natures that grow by
affluence as well as by privation, and that develop their best powers in
sunshine.

"Even in a palace life can be well lived," said Marcus Aurelius. The
spirit formed to dwell in the starry spaces is not allured to the mere
enjoyment of the senses, even when material comfort and intellectual
luxuries may abound. Not that the modest abundance of the elder Browning's
books and pictures could take rank as intellectual luxury. It was
stimulus, not satiety, that these suggested.

Pictures and painters had their part, too, in the unconscious culture that
surrounded the future poet. London in that day afforded little of what
would be called art; the National Gallery was not opened until Browning
was in his young manhood; the Tate and other modern galleries were then
undreamed of. But, to the appropriating temperament, one picture may do
more than a city full of galleries might for another, and to the small
collection of some three or four hundred paintings in the Dulwich Gallery,
Browning was indebted for great enjoyment, and for the art that fostered
his sympathetic appreciation. In after years he referred to his gratitude
for being allowed its privileges when under the age (fourteen) at which
these were supposed to be granted. Small as was the collection, it was
representative of the Italian and Spanish, the French and the Dutch
schools, as well as of the English, and the boy would fix on some one
picture and sit before it for an hour, lost in its suggestion. It was the
more imaginative art that enchained him. In later years, speaking of these
experiences in a letter to Miss Barrett, he wrote of his ecstatic
contemplation of "those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt's 'Jacob's
Vision,' such a Watteau...." An old engraving from Correggio, in his
father's home, was one of the sources of ins