inuous. Shelley
enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet's verse, wild
and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed
to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion
of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm
of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the Ode to a
Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in
"Epipsychidion," haunted him above all others: and again and again in
his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those "remote isles" and
"perilous seas"--as, for example, in "the dim clustered isles of the
blue sea" of "Pauline," and the "some isle, with the sea's silence on
it--some unsuspected isle in the far seas!" of "Pippa Passes."

But of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry.
His education at Mr. Ready's private academy seems to have been
excellent so far as it went. He remained there till he was fourteen.
Perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from his own
reticence in self disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any
school-mate deeply. We hear of no one who "knew Browning at school." His
best education, after all, was at home. His father and mother
incidentally taught him as much as Mr. Ready: his love of painting and
music was fostered, indirectly: and in the 'dovecot' bookshelf above the
fireplace in his bedroom, were the precious volumes within whose sway
and magic was his truest life.

His father, for some reason which has not been made public, but was
doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it, a
matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a
large public school, nor, later, to Oxford or Cambridge. A more
stimulative and wider training was awaiting him elsewhere.

For a time Robert's education was superintended by a tutor, who came to
the house in Camberwell for several hours daily. The afternoons were
mainly devoted to music, to exercise, and occasionally to various
experimental studies in technical science. In the evenings, after his
preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company
of his father, he read and assiduously wrote. After poetry, he cared
most for history: but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his
eager intellectual appetite. It was a period of growth, with, it may
be, a vague consciousness that his mind was expanding towards compulsive