one of rare intelligence and full of changing expression.  He was not tall, but in early years he was slight, was graceful in his movements, and held his head high.  His dark brown hair hung in wavy masses upon his neck.  His voice had in early manhood a quality, afterwards lost, which Mr Sharp describes as “flute-like, clear, sweet and resonant.”  Slim, dark, and very handsome are the words chosen by Mrs Bridell-Fox to characterise the youthful Browning as he reappeared to her memory; “And—­may I hint it?”—­she adds, “just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite ’the glass of fashion and the mould of form.’  But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success.”  Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness—­“frenetic to be free.”  He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told—­but is this part of a Browning legend?—­with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other tents of spiritual Ishmael.

From Camberwell Browning’s father moved to a house at Hatcham, transporting thither his long rows of books, together with those many volumes which lay still unwritten in the “celle fantastyk” of his son.  “There is a vast view from our greatest hill,” wrote Browning; a vast view, though Wordsworth had scorned the Londoner’s hill—­“Hill? we call that, such as that, a rise.”  Here he read and wrote, enjoyed his rides on the good horse “York,” and cultivated friendship with a toad in the pleasant garden, for he had a peculiar interest, as his poems show, in creatures that live a shy, mysterious life apart from that of man, and the claim of beauty, as commonly understood, was not needed to win his regard.  Browning’s eye was an instrument made for exact and minute records of natural phenomena.  “I have heard him say,” Mr Sharp writes, “that at that time”—­speaking of his earlier years—­“his faculty of observation would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois.”  Such activity of the visual nerve differs widely from the wise passiveness or brooding power of the Wordsworthian mode of contemplation.  Browning’s life was never that of a recluse who finds in nature and communion with the anima mundi a counterpoise to the attractions of human society.  Society fatigued him, yet he would not abandon its excitements.  A mystic—­though why it should be so is hard to say—­does not ordinarily affect lemon-coloured kid gloves, as did the Browning of Mrs Bridell-Fox’s recollection.  The mysticism of Browning’s temper of mind came not by withdrawal from the throng of positive facts, but by pushing through these to the light beyond them, or by the perception of some spear-like shaft of light piercing the denseness, which was serviceable as the sheathe or foil.  And of course it was among men and women that he found suggestions for some of his most original studies.