“Andromeda! 
     And she is with me—­years roll, I shall change,
     But change can touch her not—­so beautiful
     With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair
     Lifted and spread by the salt-sweeping breeze;
     And one red beam, all the storm leaves in heaven,
     Resting upon her eyes and face and hair,
     As she awaits the snake on the wet beach,
     By the dark rock, and the white wave just breaking
     At her feet; quite naked and alone,—­a thing
     You doubt not, nor fear for, secure that God
     Will come in thunder from the stars to save her.”

One of his own early recollections was that of sitting on his father’s knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the Tale of Troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment—­from the neighbouring room where Mrs. Browning sat “in her chief happiness, her hour of darkness and solitude and music”—­of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences.  A story concerning his poetic precocity has been circulated, but is not worth repeating.  Most children love jingling rhymes, and one need not be a born genius to improvise a rhyming couplet on an occasion.

It is quite certain that in nothing in these early poemicules, in such at least as have been preserved without the poet’s knowledge and against his will, is there anything of genuine promise.  Hundreds of youngsters have written as good, or better, Odes to the Moon, Stanzas on a Favourite Canary, Lines on a Butterfly.  What is much more to the point is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take delight in Pope’s translation of Homer.  He used to go about declaiming certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to those who overheard him.

About this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace.  One of these (viii.  Bk.  II.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme of his “Instans Tyrannus.”  It has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany.  He was scarce more than a child when, one Guy Fawkes’ day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose burden was, “Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!” This refrain haunted him often in the after years.  That beautiful fantastic romance, “The Flight of the Duchess,” was born out of an insistent memory of this woman’s snatch of song, heard in childhood.  He was ten when, after several passions malheureuses, this precocious Lothario plunged into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness.  A trifle of fifteen years’ seniority and a husband complicated matters, but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a Horatian ode upon an unclassical mistress that