he gave up hope.  The outcome of this was what the elder Browning regarded as a startling effusion of much Byronic verse.  The young Robert yearned for wastes of ocean and illimitable sands, for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that nothing could quench but the silent grave, and, in particular, for hollow mocking laughter.  His father looked about for a suitable school, and decided to entrust the boy’s further education to Mr. Ready, of Peckham.

Here he remained till he was fourteen.  But already he knew the dominion of dreams.  His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of incoherent human music borne thither-ward by the west winds across the wastes of London.  Here he loved to lie and dream.  Alas, those elms, that high remote coign, have long since passed to the “hidden way” whither the snows of yester year have vanished.  He would lie for hours looking upon distant London—­a golden city of the west literally enough, oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul’s.  The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains, the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the dross and debris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own—­all this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an extraordinary fascination.  One of the memorable nights of his boyhood was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms.  There, for the first time, he beheld London by night.  It seemed to him then more wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars.  There was something ominous in that heavy pulsating breath:  visible, in a waning and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of Norwood.  It was then and there that the tragic significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit:  that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a corresponding chord.

CHAPTER II.

It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse stirring within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree.  He remembered his mother’s music, and hoped to be a musician:  he recollected his father’s drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters whom he had heard called “the Norwich men,” and he wished to be an artist:  then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting verse-melodies, moved him most of all.