LIFE.  Browning’s father was outwardly a business man, a clerk for fifty years in the Bank of England; inwardly he was an interesting combination of the scholar and the artist, with the best tastes of both.  His mother was a sensitive, musical woman, evidently very lovely in character, the daughter of a German shipowner and merchant who had settled in Scotland.  She was of Celtic descent, and Carlyle describes her as the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.  From his neck down, Browning was the typical Briton,—­short, stocky, large-chested, robust; but even in the lifeless portrait his face changes as we view it from different angles.  Now it is like an English business man, now like a German scientist, and now it has a curious suggestion of Uncle Remus,—­these being, no doubt, so many different reflections of his mixed and unremembered ancestors.

He was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, in 1812.  From his home and from his first school, at Peckham, he could see London; and the city lights by night and the smoky chimneys by day had the same powerful fascination for the child that the woods and fields and the beautiful country had for his friend Tennyson.  His schooling was short and desultory, his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who left the boy largely to follow his own inclination.  Like the young Milton, Browning was fond of music, and in many of his poems, especially in “Abt Vogler” and “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” he interprets the musical temperament better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature.  But unlike Milton, through whose poetry there runs a great melody, music seems to have had no consistent effect upon his verse, which is often so jarring that one must wonder how a musical ear could have endured it.

Like Tennyson, this boy found his work very early, and for fifty years hardly a week passed that he did not write poetry.  He began at six to produce verses, in imitation of Byron; but fortunately this early work has been lost.  Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first known work, Pauline (1833), must be considered as a tribute to Shelley and his poetry.  Tennyson’s earliest work, Poems by Two Brothers, had been published and well paid for, five years before; but Browning could find no publisher who would even consider Pauline, and the work was published by means of money furnished by an indulgent relative.  This poem received scant notice from the reviewers, who had pounced like hawks on a dovecote upon Tennyson’s first two modest volumes.  Two years later appeared Paracelsus, and then his tragedy Strafford was put upon the stage; but not till Sordello was published, in 1840, did he attract attention enough to be denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style.  Six years later, in 1846, he suddenly became famous, not because he finished in that year his Bells and Pomegranates (which is Browning’s symbolic