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.

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