ittle boy wear
his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a fancy
costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk stockings;
he was homely of face, and looked "soft," as normal boys would say. But
his parents were determined to make an ideal dream-child of him, and, of
course, he had to submit. I had the contempt for him which a philistine
boy feels for a creature whom he knows he can lick with one hand tied
behind his back, and I had nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini
was not such a mollycoddle and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he
gave evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother
took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have
expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published
journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity;
there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark
eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has
dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning
was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and
that with wonderful impetus and suddenness; he was never still a moment,
and he talked with extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass
of wild hair on his head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very
different twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's
death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed
beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman
of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these
outsides with the poet within--that remarkable imagination, intellect,
and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the
century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this
earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy.
In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose
to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and
assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he
made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did
so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in
clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This statement was, to me,
unexpected, and it has a certain importance.

After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew