She was very pleased with the result of her visit.  The books, it is true, seemed unattractive:  but they would please Robert, no doubt.  If that packet had been lost we should not have had “Pauline”:  we might have had a different Browning.  It contained most of Shelley’s writings, all in their first edition, with the exception of “The Cenci”:  in addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase on Mr. Ollier’s assurance that they were the poetic kindred of Shelley’s writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the imprint “Pisa” at the foot of the title-page, entitled “Adonais.”  What an evening for the young poet that must have been.  He told a friend it was a May night, and that in a laburnum, “heavy with its weight of gold,” and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour’s garden, two nightingales strove one against the other.  For a moment it is a pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome.  We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned over the pages of “Epipsychidion” or “Prometheus Unbound,” “Alastor” or “Endymion,” or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a Grecian Urn.

More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook.  Often in after life he was fain, like his “wise thrush,” to “recapture that first fine careless rapture.”  It was an eventful eve.

     “And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke
      As from a dream.”

Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous.  Shelley enthralled him most.  The fire and spirit of the great poet’s verse, wild and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion of delight.  Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm of Keats affected him also.  Indeed, a line from the Ode to a Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in “Epipsychidion,” haunted him above all others:  and again and again in his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those “remote isles” and “perilous seas”—­as, for example, in “the dim clustered isles of the blue sea” of “Pauline,” and the “some isle, with the sea’s silence on it—­some unsuspected isle in the far seas!” of “Pippa Passes.”

But of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry.  His education at Mr. Ready’s private academy seems to have been excellent so far as it went.  He remained there till he was fourteen.  Perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from his own reticence in self disclosure, he does not seem to have impressed any school-mate deeply.  We hear of no one who “knew Browning at school.”  His best education, after all, was at home.  His father and mother incidentally taught him as much as Mr. Ready:  his love of painting and music was fostered, indirectly:  and in the ‘dovecot’ bookshelf above the fireplace in his bedroom, were the precious volumes within whose sway and magic was his truest life.