Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, “Married two wives this morning.”  The insane ingenuity of the biographer would be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in Fifine at the Fair.  A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her also he passed his last days.  From his earliest babyhood he seems to have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made his father’s classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid.  Browning began to live in the life of his own age.

As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual circles outside that of his own family.  But the forces that were moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary area.  About the time of Browning’s boyhood a very subtle and profound change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as that of the Brownings.  In studying the careers of great men we tend constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their characters practically formed in a period long previous to their appearance in history.  We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the full summer of the Elizabethan drama.  We realise Garibaldi as a sudden and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father’s dinner-table that Napoleon was the master of Europe.  Similarly, we think of Browning as the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on Mr. Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed “Mr. Shelley’s Atheistic Poem,” and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was.  Browning was, in short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.

The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing.  It may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive.  The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden.  No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest.  And