that there
really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes;
that he was dead.

Strange as it may seem, Browning declared once that the news of this
unknown singer's death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or
less earlier, the tidings of Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi. He
begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, a request not easily
complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local
booksellers had even heard of the poet's name. Ultimately, however, Mrs.
Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers' in
Vere Street, London.

She was very pleased with the result of her visit. The books, it is
true, seemed unattractive: but they would please Robert, no doubt. If
that packet had been lost we should not have had "Pauline": we might
have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley's writings,
all in their first edition, with the exception of "The Cenci": in
addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John
Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her
purchase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of
Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac
poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the
imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais." What
an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it
was a May night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of
gold," and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden,
two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment it is a
pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley
uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can
realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden
electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned
over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor" or
"Endymion," or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a Grecian
Urn.

More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first
pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life
he was fain, like his "wise thrush," to "recapture that first fine
careless rapture." It was an eventful eve.

"And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke
As from a dream."

Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and cont