I remain, dear sir,
Your obedient servant,

R. Browning.
Bank: March 11, 1843.

==
The letter was accompanied by a sheet of verses which have been

sold and resold, doubtless in perfect good faith, as being those
to which the writer alludes. But Miss Browning has recognized them

as her father's own impromptu epigrams, well remembered in the family,
together with the occasion on which they were written.

The substitution may, from the first, have been accidental.
We cannot think of all these vanished first-fruits of Mr. Browning's genius

without a sense of loss, all the greater perhaps that there can have been
little in them to prefigure its later forms. Their faults seem to have lain

in the direction of too great splendour of language and too little
wealth of thought; and Mr. Fox, who had read `Incondita'

and been struck by its promise, confessed afterwards to Mr. Browning
that he had feared these tendencies as his future snare.

But the imitative first note of a young poet's voice
may hold a rapture of inspiration which his most original later utterances

will never convey. It is the child Sordello, singing against the lark.
Not even the poet's sister ever saw `Incondita'. It was the only one

of his finished productions which Miss Browning did not read,
or even help him to write out. She was then too young

to be taken into his confidence. Its writing, however,
had one important result. It procured for the boy-poet

a preliminaryintroduction to the valuableliterarypatron and friend
Mr. Fox was subsequently to be. It also supplies the first substantial record

of an acquaintance which made a considerableimpression on his personal life.
The Miss Flower, of whom mention has been made, was one of two sisters,

both sufficiently noted for their artistic gifts to have found a place
in the new Dictionary of National Biography. The elder, Eliza or Lizzie,

was a musicalcomposer; the younger, best known as Sarah Flower Adams,
a writer of sacred verse. Her songs and hymns, including the well-known

`Nearer, my God, to Thee', were often set to music by her sister.*
They sang, I am told, delightfully together, and often without accompaniment,

their voices perfectly harmonizing with each other. Both were,
in their different ways, very attractive; both interesting,

not only from their talents, but from their attachment to each other,
and the delicacy which shortened their lives. They died of consumption,

the elder in 1846, at the age of forty-three; the younger a year later.
They became acquainted with Mrs. Browning through a common friend,

Miss Sturtevant; and the young Robert conceived a warm admiration
for Miss Flower's talents, and a boyish love for herself.

She was nine years his senior; her own affections became probably engaged,
and, as time advanced, his feeling seems to have subsided

into one of warm and very loyal friendship. We hear, indeed,
of his falling in love, as he was emerging from his teens,

with a handsome girl who was on a visit at his father's house.
But the fancy died out `for want of root.' The admiration, even tenderness,

for Miss Flower had so deep a `root' that he never in latest life
mentioned her name with indifference. In a letter to Mr. Dykes Campbell,

in 1881, he spoke of her as `a very remarkable person.'
If, in spite of his denials, any woman inspired `Pauline',

it can have been no other than she. He began writing to her
at twelve or thirteen, probably on the occasion of her expressed sympathy

with his first distinct effort at authorship; and what he afterwards called
`the few utterly significant" target="_blank" title="a.无意义的；无价值的">insignificant scraps of letters and verse'

which formed his part of the correspondence were preserved by her
as long as she lived. But he recovered and destroyed them

after his return to England, with all the other reminiscences
of those early years. Some notes, however, are extant, dated respectively,

1841, 1842, and 1845, and will be given in their due place.
--

* She also wrote a dramatic poem in five acts, entitled `Vivia Perpetua',
referred to by Mrs. Jameson in her `Sacred and Legendary Art',

and by Leigh Hunt, when he spoke of her in `Blue-Stocking Revels',
as `Mrs. Adams, rare mistress of thought and of tears.'

--
Mr. Fox was a friend of Miss Flower's father (Benjamin Flower,

known as editor of the `Cambridge Intelligencer'), and, at his death, in 1829,
became co-executor to his will, and a kind of guardian to his daughters,

then both unmarried, and motherless from their infancy.
Eliza's principal work was a collection of hymns and anthems,

originally composed for Mr. Fox's chapel, where she had assumed
the entire management of the choral part of the service.

Her abilities were not confined to music; she possessed, I am told,
an instinctive taste and judgment in literary matters

which caused her opinion to be much valued by literary men.
But Mr. Browning's genuineappreciation of her musicalgenius

was probably the strongest permanent bond between them.
We shall hear of this in his own words.

Chapter 4
1826-1833

First Impressions of Keats and Shelley -- Prolonged Influence of Shelley --
Details of Home Education -- Its Effects -- Youthful Restlessness --

Counteracting Love of Home -- Early Friendships: Alfred Domett,
Joseph Arnould, the Silverthornes -- Choice of Poetry as a Profession --

Alternative Suggestions; mistaken Rumours concerning them --
Interest in Art -- Love of good Theatrical Performances --

Talent for Acting -- Final Preparation for Literary Life.
At the period at which we have arrived, which is that of his leaving school

and completing his fourteenth year, another and a significant influence
was dawning on Robert Browning's life -- the influence of the poet Shelley.

Mr. Sharp writes,* and I could only state the facts in similar words,
`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."'
. . . `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.'

. . . `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.'
--

* `Life of Browning', pp. 30, 31. [(Chapter 2) Now available online.]
--

Mrs. Browning went to Messrs. Ollier, and brought back
`most of Shelley's writings, all in their first edition,

with the exception of "The Cenci".' She brought also
three volumes of the still less known John Keats, on being assured

that one who liked Shelley's works would like these also.
Keats and Shelley must always remain connected in this epoch

of Mr. Browning's poetic growth. They indeed came to him
as the two nightingales which, he told some friends,

sang together in the May-night which closed this eventful day:
one in the laburnum in his father's garden, the other in a copper beech

which stood on adjoining ground -- with the difference indeed,
that he must often have listened to the feathered singers before,

while the two new human voices sounded from what were to him,
as to so many later hearers, unknown heights and depths

of the imaginative world. Their utterance was, to such a spirit as his,
the last, as in a certain sense the first, word of what poetry can say;

and no one who has ever heard him read the `Ode to a Nightingale',
and repeat in the same subdued tones, as if continuing his own thoughts,

some line from `Epipsychidion', can doubt that they retained a lasting
and almost equal place in his poet's heart. But the two cannot be regarded

as equals in their relation to his life, and it would be a great mistake
to impute to either any important influence upon his genius.

We may catch some fleeting echoes of Keats's melody in `Pippa Passes';
it is almost a commonplace that some measure of Shelleyan fancy

is recognizable in `Pauline'. But the poeticindividuality of Robert Browning
was stronger than any circumstance through which it could be fed.

It would have found nourishment in desert air. With his first accepted work
he threw off what was foreign to his poetic nature, to be thenceforward

his own never-to-be-subdued and never-to-be-mistaken self. If Shelley became,
and long remained for him, the greatest poet of his age -- of almost any age