is tears one feels always the kindly heart
as well as the skilful hand. It is for the former--for the deeply
human heart--even more than for the latter, that the world will
continue to love the memory of Charles Dickens.

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

[Illustration: Robert Browning.]

Robert Browning was born in 1812, at Camberwell, England. His father
was a clerk highly placed in the house of Rothschild, and there are
still living those who remember the excitement of the elder man and of
his friends in New Court, when the time came for the son's first play
to be produced at Covent Garden. He was a Dissenter, and for this
reason his son's education did not proceed on the ordinary English
lines. The training which Robert Browning received was more
individual, and his reading was wider and less accurate, than would
have been the case had he gone to Eton or Winchester. Thus, though to
the end he read Greek with the deepest interest, he never could be
called a Greek scholar. His poetic turn declared itself rather early,
and in 1835 he had a poem, "Pauline," ready for the press. But
publication costs money, and his business-like father did not see any
chance of returns from poetry. A kind aunt, however, came to the
rescue, and presented the young poet with the cost of printing the
little book, L30. It was published at the price of a few shillings,
and of course did not sell; but the author had the curious
satisfaction of seeing a copy of this original edition bring
twenty-five guineas under the hammer a few years ago. "Pauline" was
not reprinted till the issue of the six-volume edition of Mr.
Browning's works, in 1869. It was followed by the more ambitious
"Paracelsus," a striking attempt to fill a mediaeval outline with a
compact body of modern thought; but in spite of the lovely lyric,
"Over the sea our galleys went," and in spite of other beauties, the
public did not heed the book, and it had no success except with a very
small circle. It must be remembered that those days were days of
poetic exhaustion. Shelley, Byron, and Scott were dead; the year
before, Coleridge had followed them to the grave; Wordsworth was old,
and his muse no longer spoke with her accents of an earlier day. Amid
a mass of "keepsake" literature, affectations, and mediocrity, the
still, small voice of the "Poems by Two Brothers" was heard by few,
and that of "Paracelsus" was heard by fewer still.

Two years later the young poet came f