“I shall never, in the years remaining, Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, Make you music that should all-express me:  ... verse alone, one life allows me.”

He now gave way to the compulsive Byronic vogue, with an occasional relapse to the polished artificialism of his father’s idol among British poets.  There were several ballads written at this time:  if I remember aright, the poet specified the “Death of Harold” as the theme of one.  Long afterwards he read these boyish forerunners of “Over the sea our galleys went,” and “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies.  Mrs. Browning was very proud of these early blooms of song, and when her twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts to seduce a publisher from the wary ways of business, surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out and carefully stitched MSS., she lost no opportunity—­when Mr. Browning was absent—­to expatiate upon their merits.  Among the people to whom she showed them was a Miss Flower.  This lady took them home, perused them, discerned dormant genius lurking behind the boyish handwriting, read them to her sister (afterwards to become known as Sarah Flower Adams), copied them out before returning them, and persuaded the celebrated Rev. William Johnson Fox to read the transcripts.  Mr. Fox agreed with Miss Flower as to the promise, but not altogether as to the actual accomplishment, nor at all as to the advisability of publication.  The originals are supposed to have been destroyed by the poet during the eventful period when, owing to a fortunate gift, poetry became a new thing for him:  from a dream, vague, if seductive, as summer-lightning, transformed to a dominating reality.  Passing a bookstall one day, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as “Mr. Shelley’s Atheistical Poem:  very scarce.”  He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the “Daemon of the World,” and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto, constituted a literary piracy.  Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched him to a new emotion.  Pope became further removed than ever:  Byron, even, lost his magnetic supremacy.  From vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes; that he was dead.

Strange as it may seem, Browning declared once that the news of this unknown singer’s death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or less earlier, the tidings of Byron’s heroic end at Missolonghi.  He begged his mother to procure him Shelley’s works, a request not easily complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local booksellers had even heard of the poet’s name.  Ultimately, however, Mrs. Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers’ in Vere Street, London.