Browning’s education was exceptional, for an English boy’s.  He left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London University.  His training seems to have been unusually thorough for these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely not too obvious.  But in the main it is clear that from a very early age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled himself seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious intensity.  Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had written ‘Pauline’ at twenty-one and ‘Paracelsus’ at twenty-two.  At eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition in his chosen career from his father, whose “kindness we must seek,” as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, “not only in this first, almost inevitable assent to his son’s becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career.  ‘Paracelsus,’ ‘Sordello,’ and the whole of ‘Bells and Pomegranates’ were published at his father’s expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no return.”  An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier ‘Pauline.’

From this time of his earliest published work (’Pauline’ was issued without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biographies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament contributed material.  He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse, like Tennyson; but while healthily social and a man of the world about him, he was not one of whom people tell “reminiscences” of consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality.  Little of his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in living in his works and escaping the “ripping up” of the personal chronicler.

He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and again in 1844 visited Italy.  In that year, or early in 1845, he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning through a friend,—­her cousin,—­and through letters from Browning expressing admiration for her poems.  Miss Barrett had then been for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse; but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her sick room to join him) went to Paris