(Pauline.)

Another great writer of our time was born in the same parish:  and those who would know Herne Hill and the neighbourhood as it was in Browning’s youth will find an enthusiastic guide in the author of Praeterita.

Browning’s childhood was a happy one.  Indeed, if the poet had been able to teach in song only what he had learnt in suffering, the larger part of his verse would be singularly barren of interest.  From first to last everything went well with him, with the exception of a single profound grief.  This must be borne in mind by those who would estimate aright the genius of Robert Browning.  It would be affectation or folly to deny that his splendid physique—­a paternal inheritance, for his father died at the age of eighty-four, without having ever endured a day’s illness—­and the exceptionally fortunate circumstances which were his throughout life, had something to do with that superb faith of his which finds concentrated expression in the lines in Pippa’s song—­“God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world!”

It is difficult for a happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist.  He is always inclined to give Nature the benefit of the doubt.  His favourite term for this mental complaisance is “catholicity of faith,” or, it may be, “a divine hope.”  The less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically out of order.  An eminent author with a weak digestion wrote to me recently animadverting on what he calls Browning’s insanity of optimism:  it required no personal acquaintanceship to discern the dyspeptic well-spring of this utterance.  All this may be admitted lightly without carrying the physiological argument to extremes.  A man may have a liberal hope for himself and for humanity, although his dinner be habitually a martyrdom.  After all, we are only dictated to by our bodies:  we have not perforce to obey them.  A bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered, would be found embodied in the gastric juice.  He was not altogether a fool, this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram; yet was he wide of the mark.

As a very young child Browning was keenly susceptible to music.  One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself.  She was startled to hear a sound behind her.  Glancing round, she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her.  The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over, with shy urgency, “Play! play!”

It is strange that among all his father’s collection of drawings and engravings nothing had such fascination for him as an engraving of a picture of Andromeda and Perseus by Caravaggio.  The story of the innocent victim and the divine deliverer was one of which in his boyhood he never tired of hearing:  and as he grew older the charm of its pictorial presentment had for him a deeper and more complex significance.  We have it on the authority of a friend that Browning had this engraving always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems.  He has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in “Pauline":—­