piration of Browning's
boyhood. The story fascinated him; he never tired of asking his father to
repeat it, and something of its truth so penetrated into his consciousness
that in later years he had the old print hung in his room that it might be
before him as he wrote. It became to him, perhaps, one of

"the unshaped images that lie
Within my mind's cave."

The profound significance of the picture evidently haunted him, as is made
evident by a passage in "Pauline" that opens:

"But I must never grieve whom wing can waft
Far from such thoughts--as now. Andromeda!
And she is with me; years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not--so beautiful
With her fixed eyes...."

Is there gained another glimpse of Browning's boyhood in those lines in
"Pauline"?:

"I am made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers."

The various and complex impressions, influences, and shaping factors of
destiny that any biographer discerns in the formative years of his subject
are as indecipherable as a palimpsest, and as little to be classified as
the contents of Pandora's box; nor is it on record that the man himself
can look into his own history and rightly appraise the relative values of
these. Nothing, certainly, could be more remote from the truth than the
reading of autobiographic significance into any stray line a poet may
write; for imagination is frequently more real than reality. Yet many of
the creations of after life may trace their germination to some incident
or impression. William Sharp offers a beautiful and interesting instance
of one of these when he ascribes the entrancing fantasy of "The Flight of
the Duchess" to a suggestion made on the poet's mind as a child on a Guy
Fawkes day, when he followed across the fields a woman singing a strange
song, whose refrain was: "Following the Queen of the Gypsies, O!" The
haunting line took root in his memory and found its inflorescence in that
memorable poem.

It was not conducive to poetic fancy when the lad was placed in the school
of a Mr. Ready, at Peckham, where he solaced himself for the rules and
regulations which he abhorred by writing little plays, and persuading his
school-fellows to act in them with him.

Browning's first excursion into Shelley's poems, brought home to him one
night as a gift from his mother, was