The home in Camberwell into which the boy Robert was born reflected the serene, harmonious, self-contented character of his parents.  Friends rarely disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the roar of London.  Books, business, and religion provided a framework of decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved with entire content.  Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps contained few homes so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual life of the capital and the larger movements of the time.  Nothing in Browning’s boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of citizenship and nationality which the imperial pageants and ceremonies of Frankfurt so early kindled in the child Goethe.  But within the limits imposed by this quiet home young Robert soon began to display a vigour and enterprise which tried all its resources.  “He clamoured for occupation from the moment he could speak,” and “something to do” meant above all some living thing to be caught for him to play with.  The gift of an animal was found a valuable aid to negotiations with the young despot; when medicine was to be taken, he would name “a speckled frog” as the price of his compliance, and presently his mother would be seen hovering hither and thither among the strawberry-beds.  A quaint menagerie was gradually assembled:  owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes.  Boy-collectors are often cruel; but Robert showed from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care for life:  we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be nursed, of ladybirds picked up in the depths of winter and preserved with wondering delight at their survival.  Even in stories the death of animals moved him to bitter tears.  He was equally quick at books, and soon outdistanced his companions at the elementary schools which he attended up to his fourteenth year.  Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich Gallery,—­“a green half-hour’s walk across the fields,”—­a beloved haunt of his childhood, to which he never ceased to be grateful.[3] But his father’s overflowing library and portfolios played the chief part in his early development.  He read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control.  The letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole were familiar to him “in boyhood,” we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs Orr; as well as “all the works of Voltaire.”  Most to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy English and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century Fantastic Quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in the great master of the Fantastic school, and of all who care for close-knit intellect in poetry, John Donne.

[Footnote 3:  To E.B.B., March 3, 1846.]