The love of Robert Browning for Elizabeth Barrett was a revival and a renewal, in many ways, of the condition of tenderness and sympathy that existed between Browning and his mother.  There certainly was a strange and marked resemblance in the characters of Elizabeth Barrett and the mother of Robert Browning; and to many this fully accounts for the instant affection that Browning felt toward the occupant of the “darkened room,” when first they met.

The book-collector took much pride in his boy, and used to take him on book-hunting excursions, and sometimes to the Bank, on which occasions he would tell the Beef-Eaters how this was Robert Browning, the Third, and that all three of the R.B.’s were loyal servants of the Bank.  And the Beef-Eaters would rest their staves on the stone floor, and smile Fifteenth-Century grimaces at the boy from under their cocked hats.

Robert the Third was a healthy, rollicking lad, with power plus, and a deal of destructiveness in his nature.  But destructiveness in a youngster is only energy not yet properly directed, just as dirt is useful matter in the wrong place.

To keep the boy out of mischief, he was sent to a sort of kindergarten, kept by a spinster around the corner.  The spinster devoted rather more attention to the Browning boy than to her other pupils—­she had to, to keep him out of mischief—­and soon the boy was quite the head scholar.

And they tell us that he was so much more clever than any of the other scholars that, to appease the rising jealousy of the parents of the other pupils, the diplomatic spinster requested that the boy be removed from her school—­all this according to the earnest biographer.  The facts are that the boy had so much energy and restless ambition; was so full of brimming curiosity, mischief and imagination—­introducing turtles, bats and mice on various occasions—­that he led the whole school a merry chase and wore the nerves of the ancient maiden to a frazzle.

He had to go.

After this he studied at home with his mother.  His father laid out a schedule, and it was lived up to, for about a week.

Then a private tutor was tried, but soon this plan was abandoned, and a system of reading, best described as “natural selection,” was followed.

The boy was fourteen, and his sister was twelve, past.  These are the ages when children often experience a change of heart, as all “revivalists” know.  Robert Browning was swinging off towards atheism.  He grew melancholy, irritable and wrote stanzas of sentimental verse.  He showed this verse, high-sounding, stilted, bold and bilious, to his mother and then to his father, and finally to Lizzie Flower.