Her father, though born in Jamaica, was brought to England as a young
child, and he was the ward of Chief Baron Lord Abinger. He was sent to
Harrow, and afterwards to Cambridge, but he did not wait to finish his
university course, and married when young. One of his sisters was painted
by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and this portrait is now in the possession of
Octavius Moulton-Barrett, Esq., of the Isle of Wight.

Elizabeth's brother Edward was but two years her junior. It was he who was
drowned at Torquay, almost before her eyes, and who is commemorated in her
"De Profundis." Of the other brothers only three lived to manhood. When
Elizabeth was three years of age, the family removed to Hope End in
Herefordshire, a spacious and stately house with domes and minarets
embowered in a grove of ancient oaks. It was a place calculated to appeal
to the imagination of a child, and in later years she wrote of it:

"Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade,--
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms,
Running up from glade to glade."

Here all her girlhood was passed, and it was in the garden of Hope End
that she stood, holding up an apron filled with flowers, when that lovely
picture was painted representing her as a little girl of nine or ten years
of age. Much of rather apochryphal myth and error has grown up about Mrs.
Browning's early life. However gifted, she was in no wise abnormal, and
she galloped on Moses, her black pony, through the Herefordshire lanes,
and offered pagan sacrifices to some imaginary Athene, "with a bundle of
sticks from the kitchen fire and a match begged from an indulgent
housemaid." In a letter to Richard Hengist Home, under date of October 5,
1843, in reply to a request of his for data for a biographical sketch of
her for "The New Spirit of the Age," she wrote:

"... And then as to stories, mine amounts to the knife-grinder's, with
nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good
a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have
passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses--as I dare say many have done
who never wrote any poems--very early, at eight years of age, and
earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will,
and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a
distinct object with me,--an object to