A word about Lizzie Flower:  She was nine years older than Robert Browning; and she had a mind that was gracious and full of high aspiration.  She loved books, art, music, and all harmony made its appeal to her—­and not in vain.  She wrote verses and, very sensibly, kept them locked in her workbox; and then she painted in water-colors and worked in worsted.  A thoroughly good woman, she was far above the average in character, with a half-minor key in her voice and a tinge of the heartbroken in her composition, caused no one just knew how.  Probably a certain young curate at Saint Margaret’s could have thrown light on this point; but he married, took on a double chin, moved away to a fat living and never told.

No woman is ever wise or good until destiny has subdued her by grinding her fondest hopes into the dust.

Lizzie Flower was wise and good.

She gave singing lessons to the Browning children.  She taught Master
Robert Browning to draw.

She read to him some of her verses that were in the sewing-table drawer. 
And her sister, Sarah Flower, two years older, afterwards Sarah Flower
Adams, read aloud to them a hymn she had just written, called, “Nearer, My
God, to Thee.”

Then soon Master Robert showed the Flower girls some of the verses he had written.

Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate, and told his mother so.  A young woman never cares anything for an unlicked cub, nine years younger than herself, unless Fate has played pitch and toss with her heart’s true love.  And then, the tendrils of the affections being ruthlessly lacerated and uprooted, they cling to the first object that presents itself.

Lizzie Flower was a wallflower.  That is to say, she had early in life rid herself of the admiration of the many, by refusing to supply an unlimited amount of small talk.  In feature she was as plain as George Eliot.  A boy is plastic, and even a modest wallflower can woo him; but a man, for her, inspires awe—­with him she takes no liberties.  And the wallflower woos the youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using her influence the better to instruct him.

It is fortunate for a boy escaping adolescence to be educated and loved (the words are synonymous) by a good woman.  Indeed, the youngster who has not violently loved a woman old enough to be his mother has dropped something out of his life that he will have to go back and pick up in another incarnation.

I said Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate; and she declared that he was the brightest and most receptive pupil she had ever had.

He was seventeen—­she was twenty-six.  They read Shelley, Keats and Byron aloud, and together passed through the “Byronic Period.”  They became violently atheistic, and at the same time decidedly religious:  things that seem paradoxical, but are not.  They adopted a vegetable diet and for two years they eschewed meat.  They worshiped in the woods, feeling that the groves were God’s first temples; and sitting at the gnarled roots of some great oak, they would read aloud, by turn, from “Queen Mab.”