If there ever lived a poet to whom the best minds pour out libations, it is Robert Browning.  We think of him as dwelling on high Olympus; we read his lines by the light of dim candles; we quote him in sonorous monotone at twilight when soft-sounding organ-chants come to us mellow and sweet.  Browning’s poems form a lover’s litany to that elect few who hold that the true mating of a man and a woman is the marriage of the mind.  And thrice blest was Browning, in that Fate allowed him to live his philosophy—­to work his poetry up into life, and then again to transmute life and love into art.  Fate was kind:  success came his way so slowly that he was never subjected to the fierce, dazzling searchlight of publicity; his recognition in youth was limited to a few obscure friends and neighbors.  And when distance divided him from these, they forgot him; so there seems a hiatus in his history, when for a score of years literary England dimly remembered some one by the name of Browning, but could not just place him.

About the year Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight the author of “Sordello” was induced to appear at an evening of “Uncut Leaves” at the house of a nobleman at the West End, London.  James Russell Lowell was present and was congratulated by a lady, sitting next to him, on the fact that Browning was an American.

“But only by adoption!” answered the gracious Lowell.

“Yes,” said the lady; “I believe his father was an Englishman, so you Americans can not have all the credit; but surely he shows the Negro or Indian blood of his mother.  Very clever, isn’t he?—­so very clever!”

Browning’s swarthy complexion, and the fine poise of the man—­the entire absence of “nerves,” as often shown in the savage—­seemed to carry out the idea that his was a peculiar pedigree.  In his youth, when his hair was as black as the raven’s wing and coarse as a horse-tail, and his complexion mahogany, the report that he was a Creole found ready credence.  And so did this gossip of mixed parentage follow him that Mrs. Sutherland Orr, in her biography, takes an entire chapter to prove that in Robert Browning’s veins there flowed neither Indian nor Negro blood.

Doctor Furnivall, however, explains that Browning’s grandmother on his father’s side came from the West Indies, that nothing is known of her family history, and that she was a Creole.

And beyond this, the fact is stated that Robert Browning was quite pleased when he used to be taken for a Jew—­a conclusion made plausible by his complexion, hair and features.

In its dead-serious, hero-worshiping attitude, the life of Robert Browning by Mrs. Orr deserves to rank with Weems’ “Life of Washington.”  It is the brief of an attorney for the defense.  “Little-Willie” anecdotes appear on every page.

And thus do we behold the tendency to make Browning something more than a man—­and, therefore, something less.

Possibly women are given to this sort of thing more than men—­I am not sure.  But this I know, every young woman regards her lover as a distinct and peculiar personage, different from all others—­as if this were a virtue—­the only one of his kind.  Later, if Fate is kind, she learns that her own experience is not unique.  We all easily fit into a type, and each is but a representative of his class.