y spent a winter without a
suffocating cold and cough; within the last five, asthmatic symptoms
established themselves; and when he sank under what was perhaps his
first real attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very
severe, but because the heart was exhausted. The circumstances of his
death recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy
still farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong
pulse which always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake.
It is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding
vitality of his younger body and mind. Any symptom of organic disease
could scarcely, in his case, have been overlooked. But so much is
certain: he was conscious of what he called a nervousness of nature
which neither father nor grandfather could have bequeathed to him. He
imputed to this, or, in other words, to an undue physical sensitiveness
to mental causes of irritation, his proneness to deranged liver, and
the asthmatic conditions which he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be
produced by it. He was perhaps mistaken in some of his inferences, but
he was not mistaken in the fact. He had the pleasures as well as the
pains of this nervous temperament; its quick response to every congenial
stimulus of physical atmosphere, and human contact. It heightened the
enjoyment, perhaps exaggerated the consciousness of his physical powers.
It also certainly in his later years led him to overdraw them. Many
persons have believed that he could not live without society; a
prolonged seclusion from it would, for obvious reasons, have been
unsuited to him. But the excited gaiety which to the last he carried
into every social gathering was often primarily the result of a moral
and physical effort which his temperament prompted, but his strength
could not always justify. Nature avenged herself in recurrent periods of
exhaustion, long before the closing stage had set in.

I shall subsequently have occasion to trace this nervous impressibility
through various aspects and relations of his life; all I now seek to
show is that this healthiest of poets and most real of men was not
compounded of elements of pure health, and perhaps never could have been
so. It might sound grotesque to say that only a delicate woman could
have been the mother of Robert Browning. The fact remains that of such
a one, and no other, he was born; and we may imagine, without being
fanciful, th