Mrs Browning kept, until within a few years of her death, a missionary box for contributions to the London Missionary Society.  The conditions of membership implied the acceptance of “those views of doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called Calvinistic.”  Thus over the poet’s childhood and youth a religious influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy was in those early days, as he himself declared, “passionately religious.”  Their excellent pastor was an entirely “unimaginative preacher of the Georgian era,” who held fast by the approved method of “three heads and a conclusion.”  Browning’s indifference to the ministrations of Mr Clayton was not concealed, and on one occasion he received a rebuke in the presence of the congregation.  Yet the spirit of religion which surrounded and penetrated him was to remain with him, under all its modifications, to the end.  “His face,” wrote the Rev. Edward White, “is vividly present to my memory through the sixty years that have intervened.  It was the most wonderful face in the whole congregation—­pale, somewhat mysterious, and shaded with black, flowing hair, but a face whose expression you remember through a life-time.  Scarcely less memorable were the countenances of his father, mother and sister."[7]

Robert Browning, writes Mrs Orr, “was a handsome, vigorous, fearless child, and soon developed an unresting activity and a fiery temper.”  His energy of mind made him a swift learner.  After the elementary lessons in reading had been achieved, he was prepared for the neighbouring school of the Rev. Thomas Ready by Mr Ready’s sisters.  Having entered this school as a day-boarder, he remained under Mr Ready’s care until the year 1826.  To facile companionship with his school-fellows Browning was not prone, but he found among them one or two abiding friends.  As for the rest, though he was no winner of school prizes, he seems to have acquired a certain intellectual mastery over his comrades; some of them were formed into a dramatic troupe for the performance of his boyish plays.  Perhaps the better part of his education was that of his hours at home.  He read widely in his father’s excellent library.  The favourite books of his earliest years, Croxall’s Fables and Quarles’s Emblems, were succeeded by others which made a substantial contribution to his mind.  A list given by Mrs Orr includes Walpole’s Letters, Junius, Voltaire, and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.  The first book he ever bought with his own money was Macpherson’s Ossian, and the first composition he committed to paper, written years before his purchase of the volume, was an imitation of Ossian, “whom,” says Browning, “I had not read, but conceived, through two or three scraps in other books.”  His early feeling for art was nourished by visits to the Dulwich Gallery, to which he obtained an entrance when far under the age permitted by the rules; there he would sit for an hour before some chosen picture, and in later years he could recall the “wonderful Rembrandt of Jacob’s vision,” the Giorgione music-lesson, the “triumphant Murillo pictures,” “such a Watteau,” and “all the Poussins."[8]