But still I feel that his embrace

Slides down by thrills, through all things made, Through sight and sound of every place:

As if my tender mother laid

On my shut lids her kisses' pressure,

Half-waking me at night; and said

"Who kissed you through the dark, dear guesser?»

I

CHEERFULNESS TAUGHT BY REASON

THINK we are too ready with complaint

In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope

Of yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint

To muse upon eternity's constraint

Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope
Must widen early, is it well to droop

For a few days consumed in loss and taint?
O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,-

And like a cheerful traveler, take the road,
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints? At least it may be said,

"Because the way is short, I thank thee, God!"

ROBERT BROWNING

(1812-1889)

BY E. L. BURLINGAME

OBERT BROWNING was born at Camberwell on May 7th, 1812, the son and grandson of men who held clerkships in the Bank of England-the one for more than forty and the other for full fifty years. His surroundings were apparently typical of English moderate prosperity, and neither they, nor his good but undistinguished family traditions, furnish any basis for the theorizing of biographers, except indeed in a single point. His grand-.

mother was a West Indian Creole, and though only of the first generation to be born away from England, seems, from the restless and adventurous life led by her brother, to have belonged to a family of the opposite type from her husband's. Whether this crossing of the imaginative, Westward-Ho strain of the English blood with the home-keeping type has to do with the production of such intensely vitalized temperaments as Robert Browning's, is the only question suggested by his ancestry. It is noticeable that his father wished to go to a university, then to become an artist-both ambitions repressed by the grandfather; and that he took up his bank official's career unwillingly. He seems to have been anything but a man of routine; to have had keen and wide interests outside of his work; to have been a great reader and book collector, even an exceptional scholar in certain directions; and to have kept till old age a remarkable vivacity, with unbroken health-altogether a personality thoroughly sympathetic with that of his son, to whom this may well have been the final touch of a prosperity calculated to shake all traditional ideas of a poet's youth.

Browning's education was exceptional, for an English boy's. He left school at fourteen, and after that was taught by tutors at home, except that at eighteen he took a Greek course at the London University. His training seems to have been unusually thorough for these conditions, though largely self-directed; it may be supposed that his father kept a sympathetic and intelligent guidance, wisely not too obvious. But in the main it is clear that from a very early age, Browning had deliberately and distinctly in view the idea of making literature the pursuit of his life, and that he troubled himself seriously with nothing that did not help to that end; while into everything that did he seems to have thrown himself with precocious

intensity. Individual anecdotes of his precocity are told by his biographers; but they are flat beside the general fact of the depth and character of his studies, and superfluous of the man who had written 'Pauline' at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus' at twenty-two. At eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no opposition in his chosen career from his father, whose "kindness we must seek," as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, "not only in this first, almost inevitable assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career. 'Paracelsus,' 'Sordello,' and the whole of 'Bells and Pomegranates' were published at his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no return." An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier 'Pauline.'

From this time of his earliest published work (Pauline' was issued without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biographies, is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his different residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of personal anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament contributed material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse, like Tennyson; but while healthily social and a man of the world about him, he was not one of whom people tell "reminiscences" of consequence, and he was in no sense a public personality. Little of his correspondence has appeared in print; and it seems probable that he will be fortunate, to an even greater degree than Thackeray, in living in his works and escaping the "ripping up" of the personal chronicler.

He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and again in 1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning through a friend,- her cousin,—and through letters from Browning expressing admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been for some years an invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse; but in September 1846 they were married without the knowledge of her father, and almost immediately afterward (she leaving her sick room to join him) went to Paris and then to Italy, where they lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional absences was their home for fourteen years. Mrs. Browning died there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned there. He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany. About 1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which continued with rare exceptions to the end of his life. There in 1888