be habitually a martyrdom. After all, we are only
dictated to by our bodies: we have not perforce to obey them. A bitter
wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be
found embodied in the gastric juice. He was not altogether a fool, this
man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he
wide of the mark.

As a very young child Browning was keenly susceptible to music. One
afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself. She was
startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round, she beheld a little
white figure distinct 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, with shy urgency, "Play! play!"

It is strange that among all his father's collection of drawings and
engravings nothing had such fascination for him as an engraving of a
picture of Andromeda and Perseus by Caravaggio. The story of the
innocent victim and the divine deliverer was one of which in his boyhood
he never tired of hearing: and as he grew older the charm of its
pictorial presentment had for him a deeper and more complex
significance. We have it on the authority of a friend that Browning had
this engraving always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. He
has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in "Pauline":--

"Andromeda!
And she is with me--years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not--so beautiful
With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair
Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze;
And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,
Resting upon her eyes and face and hair,
As she awaits the snake on the wet beach,
By the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking
At her feet; quite naked and alone,--a thing
You doubt not, nor fear for, secure that God
Will come in thunder from the stars to save her."

One of his own early recollections was that of sitting on his father's
knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the
Tale of Troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in
the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment--from
the neighbouring room where Mrs. Browning sat "in her chief happiness,