ned till he was fourteen. But already he knew the dominion
of dreams. His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an
unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of
incoherent human music borne thither-ward by the west winds across the
wastes of London. Here he loved to lie and dream. Alas, those elms, that
high remote coign, have long since passed to the "hidden way" whither
the snows of yester year have vanished. He would lie for hours looking
upon distant London--a golden city of the west literally enough,
oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind
the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul's.
The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains,
the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the
vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the
drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils
constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some
sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the
dross and debris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own--all
this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an
extraordinary fascination. One of the memorable nights of his boyhood
was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit
because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms. There, for
the first time, he beheld London by night. It seemed to him then more
wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars. There was something
ominous in that heavy pulsating breath: visible, in a waning and waxing
of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of
masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across
the crests of Norwood. It was then and there that the tragic
significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning
spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a
corresponding chord.

CHAPTER II.

It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare
reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse stirring
within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree. He remembered his
mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's
drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters
whom he had heard called "the Norwich men," and he wished to be a