His father, for some reason which has not been made public, but was doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it, a matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son neither to a large public school, nor, later, to Oxford or Cambridge.  A more stimulative and wider training was awaiting him elsewhere.

For a time Robert’s education was superintended by a tutor, who came to the house in Camberwell for several hours daily.  The afternoons were mainly devoted to music, to exercise, and occasionally to various experimental studies in technical science.  In the evenings, after his preparatory tasks were over, when he was not in the entertaining company of his father, he read and assiduously wrote.  After poetry, he cared most for history:  but as a matter of fact, little came amiss to his eager intellectual appetite.  It was a period of growth, with, it may be, a vague consciousness that his mind was expanding towards compulsive expression.

     “So as I grew, I rudely shaped my life
      To my immediate wants, yet strong beneath
      Was a vague sense of powers folded up—­
      A sense that though those shadowy times were past,
      Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule.”

When Mr. Browning was satisfied that the tutor had fulfilled his duty he sent his son to attend a few lectures at University College, in Gower Street, then just founded.  Robert Browning’s name is on the registrar’s books for the opening session, 1829-30.  “I attended with him the Greek class of Professor Long” (wrote a friend, in the Times, Dec. 14:’89), “and I well recollect the esteem and regard in which he was held by his fellow-students.  He was then a bright, handsome youth, with long black hair falling over his shoulders.”  So short was his period of attendance, however, and so unimportant the instruction he there derived, that to all intents it may be said Browning had no University training.

Notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Browning but slightly appreciated his son’s poetic idols and already found himself in an opposite literary camp, he had a profound sympathy with the boy’s ideals and no little confidence in his powers.  When the test came he acted wisely as well as with affectionate complaisance.  In a word, he practically left the decision as to his course of life to Robert himself.  The latter was helped thereto by the knowledge that his sister would be provided for, and that, if need be, there was sufficient for himself also.  There was of course but one way open to him.  He would not have been a true poet, an artist, if he had hesitated.  With a strange misconception of the artistic spirit, some one has awarded the poet great credit for his choice, because he had “the singular courage to decline to be rich.”  Browning himself had nothing of this bourgeois spirit:  he was the last man to speak of an inevitable artistic decision as “singular courage.”  There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having published “Orion” at a farthing:  “Perhaps he is going to shoot the Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania.”