n
artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting
verse-melodies, moved him most of all.

"I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me:
... verse alone, one life allows me."

He now gave way to the compulsive Byronic vogue, with an occasional
relapse to the polished artificialism of his father's idol among British
poets. There were several ballads written at this time: if I remember
aright, the poet specified the "Death of Harold" as the theme of one.
Long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of "Over the sea our
galleys went," and "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,"
and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies. Mrs. Browning
was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her
twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from
the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out
and carefully stitched MSS., she lost no opportunity--when Mr. Browning
was absent--to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she
showed them was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them,
discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read
them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams),
copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev.
William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts. Mr. Fox agreed with Miss
Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual
accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication. The
originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the
eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new
thing for him: from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning,
transformed to a dominating reality. Passing a bookstall one day, he
saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as "Mr.
Shelley's Atheistical Poem: very scarce." He had never heard of Shelley,
nor did he learn for a long time that the "Daemon of the World," and the
miscellaneous poems appended thereto, constituted a literary piracy.
Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched
him to a new emotion. Pope became further removed than ever: Byron,
even, lost his magnetic supremacy. From vague remarks in reply to his
inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned