Among modern poets Byron at first with him held the chief place.  Boyish verses, written under the Byronic influence, were gathered into a group when the writer was but twelve years old; a title—­Incondita—­was found, and Browning’s parents had serious intentions of publishing the manuscript.  Happily the manuscript, declined by publishers, was in the end destroyed, and editors have been saved from the necessity of printing or reprinting these crudities of a great poet’s childhood.  Their only merit, he assured Mr Gosse, lay in “their mellifluous smoothness.”  It was an event of capital importance in the history of Browning’s mind when—­probably in his thirteenth year—­he lighted, in exploring a book-stall, upon a copy of one of the pirated editions of Shelley’s Queen Mab and other poems.  Through the zeal of his good mother on the boy’s behalf the authorised editions were at a later time obtained; and she added to her gift the works, as far as they were then in print, of Keats.[9] If ever there was a period of Sturm und Drang in Browning’s life, it was during the years in which he caught from Shelley the spirit of the higher revolt.  A new faith and unfaith came to him, radiant with colour, luminous with the brightness of dawn, and uttered with a new, keen, penetrating melody.  The outward conduct of his life was obedient in all essentials to the good laws of use and wont.  He pursued his various studies—­literature, languages, music—­with energy.  He was diligent—­during a brief attendance—­in Professor Long’s Greek class at University College—­“a bright, handsome youth,” as a classfellow has described him, “with long black hair falling over his shoulders.”  He sang, he danced, he rode, he boxed, he fenced.  But below all these activities a restless inward current ran.  For a time he became, as Mrs Orr has put it, “a professing atheist and a practising vegetarian;” and together with the growing-pains of intellectual independence there was present a certain aggressive egoism.  He loved his home, yet he chafed against some of its social limitations.  Of friendships outside his home we read of that with Alfred Domett, the ‘Waring’ of his poems, afterwards the poet and the statesman of New Zealand; with Joseph Arnould, afterwards the Indian judge; and with his cousin James Silverthorne, the ‘Charles’ of Browning’s pathetic poem May and Death.  We hear also of a tender boyish sentiment, settling into friendship, for Miss Eliza Flower, his senior by nine years, for whose musical compositions he had an ardent admiration:  “I put it apart from all other English music I know,” he wrote as late as 1845, “and fully believe in it as the music we all waited for.”  With her sister Sarah, two years younger than Eliza, best known by her married name Sarah Flower Adams and remembered by her hymn, written in 1840, “Nearer my God to Thee,” he discussed as a boy his religious difficulties, and in proposing his own doubts drew forth her latent scepticism as to the orthodox beliefs.  “It was in answering Robert Browning;” she wrote, “that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy.”  Something of this period of Browning’s Sturm und Drang can be divined through the ideas and imagery of Pauline.[10]